God Help Us, He Wrote Another One

Helms' recycles some of his nonsense from prior works Gospel Fictions and Who Wrote the New Testament?, but never fear, he has a good amount of new nonsense in here as well. His core contention is that elements of the Bible contradict because they were written by parties who opposed each other, and Helms offers ten chapters of examples, one in each, on which we will comment:

1. Ruth versus the racists -- Unfortunately, aside from the usual begged questions of the date of Ruth (and later, other documents), this whole chapter fails on account of a simple consideration Helms knows nothing about. Helms also calls people like Nehemiah "racists" for opposing marriages to pagan women; socially, however, what was objected to was religion, not race; but ethnic identifiers are used because in the ancient world, nationality (not race) and religion was intertwined. (Eg, as it may be said, "Because I am Japanese, I am Shinto.")
2. Chronicles vs. Deuteronomy -- This chapter is one where Helms has a point, but not for the reason he thinks he does; see here, on the death of Josiah (atop), for why. That is not to say Helms is otherwise on the mark. He makes issue of stories of King David being said to be in the books of "Samuel the seer" [20] even though David was king after Samuel died; he sees this as the Chronicler exploiting reader ignorance, but it never occurs to him that the title "books of Samuel the seer" was applied posthumously to a collective work in which Samuel was the main character, even though it covered some events after his death.
3. Ezekiel vs. migraines -- Helms defines things as loosely as possible to turn Ezekiel into a migraine victim who had hallucinations. In this respect, though much of what Ezekiel describes matches things known from ancient iconography, Helms prefers to strain to make it all fit descriptions of migraines; thus Ezekiel laying on his sides for 400+ days becomes "transient motor weakness." [39]
4. Wisdom vs. wisdom -- By virtue of their different way of looking at things, Helms argues that books like Sirach were written against books like Ecclesiastes. Of course that such literature is proverbial and has certain genre rules that rule out claims of contradiction such as his, never occurs to him.
5. Daniel vs. reality -- the same stuff as in his prior works; the same stuff we answer here and in the review of Who Wrote the New Testament?
6. OT vs. NT -- rehash of the same stuff as in Gospel Fictions. Helms also makes the amazing claim that "early Christians would have wanted to know what happened to Jesus' clothes" [93] after he was crucified, and that is why Ps. 21:17 was "misused," for an answer. Yes, I'm sure that was a pressing concern for ancient Christians.
7. Jesus vs. Jesus -- the usual nonsense about Q, plus a claim that Jesus is answering Sirach at times, which may be true, but why ought we to care?
8. James vs. Paul -- yes, the usual, plus the usual errors about the date of Galatians.
9. James vs. Paul II -- Eisenman bought wholesale.
10. Revelation vs. reality -- the usual about unfulfilled prophecy....ho hum....preterism, anyone?

And that's it. It might have been fun years ago to dissect this a page at a time as we did with his first book, but as many times as these canards have been had by now -- it's just not necessary. Once again, Helms has proven that he is NOT a Biblical scholar, but a mechanic by comparison to a real one.