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Jed Clampett, Ph. D.
Skeptic X Heehaws on the Rez Reconstruction
J. P. Holding
It's become a habit of late; despite having started wars on a dozen fronts, Skeptic X is trying to work his way through my 1300+ and growing articles, returning to the old ones as little as possible, in a manner reminiscent of Sisyphus. This time he tackles our item on harmonizing the rez narratives, though he made it easy on himself by not bothering with all the foundational material -- pages and pages and pages of it -- that underlies it. Oops. Well, just like X to put the cart before the horse and end up playing the horse's rear end.
So what's up this time. Dealing with X has become as boring as watching paint dry; so we'll try to make this as interesting as possible for all but the X zombies.
Looking for his meds and a nice nit to pick, X mutters of my article, "The title of his article that I will be replying to here is a bit confusing. On the webpage itself, he entitled it 'Can't We All Get Along?' but on his index page, he called it 'Dan Barker's Easter Challenge Eviscerated.' The former title makes no sense within the context of his article, so I assume that in cranking out his hackwork, [Holding] put the wrong title on the webpage where he undertook to 'eviscerate' Barker's Easter Challenge." Well, no, the "Get Along" title was what I intended. Makes no sense, he says? Let's try to explain it to the culturally challenged in the world. It is an allusion to Rodney King's famous stutter during the LA riots, asking for harmony in LA; thus -- get it? Harmony? Didn't think so. But the "eviscerated" comment is not on my "index page"; it is the article's title, behind the HTML. Really, I don't know where X gets his technical vocabulary from, but he needs to wash his mouth out with soap. Beyond that, there is a reason for the difference. "Get along" was for entertainment purposes; the other -- well, we'll let the technologically-challenged in X just worry about that one.
Naturally X thinks I "eviscerated nothing" (thus he says, even as his own abdominals spool out on this site like a victim of Hannibal Lechter!), and says I "simply cut and pasted unsupported assertions from books written in support of the resurrection claim" (translation: I used the works of scholars and people in the know, whose points X can only call "unsupported" for lack of ability to provide negating evidence by getting off his duff and doing his own work), "tacked on his own unsupported assertions," (translation: I drew conclusions from the valid research of the experts) "accomplished nothing but to arouse deep suspicions that he knows that the challenge cannot be met" (translation: X is in such tremor over the response that he feels the need to insert psychological commentary. Of course if we said that X had "accomplished nothing in his response but to arouse deep suspicions that he knows that the challenge has been destroyed," I'm sure his fans would just fall over and die in response.)
Immediately X shows what a good idea it would have been to read ALL of our background material, as he wastes no time embarrassing himself by bringing up an objection that I had answered years ago in that material. Noting my comment about issues no more "problematic or unresolvable than those found in four bios of Abraham Lincoln done by professional historians," but not paying attention to the honking link with it, X blutters:
Professional historians, who wrote biographies of Abraham Lincoln, would not have been
inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent "Holy Spirit" whom Jesus had sent to
"guide them into all truth" (John 16:13); hence, differences,
inconsistencies, and contradictions in their biographies would not be at
all unusual.
Oops! I do beg pardon, but I addressed this rather silly point at the end of the Lincoln series: Inspiration or not, the point is that NONE of these "problems" in the Lincoln bios are actually errors at all -- and that's why X needs to read the whole thing before buttering his toast. If there is a reason it "wasn't hard at all to answer" as X thinks, it is because he only did .01% of the assignment. Try to get through school with that kind of laziness.
X whines a bit that he wants a "coherent narrative" drawn up rather than my article. None is needed. I addressed each issue in turn; if X needs a narrative, let him read my article and make one using the principles laid out. We are not his body servant. As usual, X also thinks that you're so stupid that you will be convinced a skeptic is in error if I say he "snorted" or "mumbled" something (and says you are stupid anyway for believing all the Bible's stories). If you are indeed this stupid, one wonders why X thinks giving you links to his material will serve any purpose.
As we noted recently, X responded to our material on the ancient lack of paper with material that was sadly outdated and had already been answered. X is now aware of this after 65 years, and tells his fans to "notice just how much [Holding] skipped." Good idea. It so happens that this was one of those rare occassions when I decided, for demonstration purposes, to NOT edit out all of X's blurps, flumps, and bleenders, and ended up reporting 95% of what he said (including what X claims I skipped on what the Bible says about inspiration) as I interspersed commentary. Oops again. Now that he's found it, maybe he needs to read it.
To our point that not every Gospel writer necessarily had access to the same information, X erupts with this irrelevancy, beyond the usual grist about inspiration of necessity being mechanical dictation, refuted in the link above: "The Bible is filled with claims of events and information that the writers couldn't possibly have known from firsthand experiences," he yelps. Oh? Which ones? "How, for example, did 'Moses' know what had happened on the six days of creation?" Well, that one of course he had to be told; but there was no other way with that one, so this proves zip. "How did he know about all of the exploits of the patriarchs in the book of Genesis?" Duuuh....X, can you say, "it was all passed down by oral tradition"? Sorry, but outside the fundy framework of the Church of Christ, no one thinks that it was all suddenly revealed to Moses in a flash of light. That's not scholarship or modern inerrancy doctrine; it's idiocy. "How did 'Moses' know what was said in the conversions between Balaam and Balak, which took place when Moses wasn't present?" Oopsie -- try this: Balaam's oracles were publicly recorded; we have archaeological examples. But when it gets down to it, it is doubtful that the report of the conversations is anything more than stylized anyway, based on events known to have happened, much as secular historians of the day, not knowing what exactly was said in a speech, did their best to be faithful to what WAS said based on what information they could gather. Is this too hard for X to grasp? Probably; it was never taught at Bam Bam Bible College.
X also hoists in the example of Paul saying that the gospel he preached "was not after man," for he had neither received it from man nor was taught it by man but had received it "through revelation of Jesus Christ" (Gal. 1:11-12). Tch, such naivete. We told off Robert Price on this years ago. Yes, it really would help X if he actually read some of our material. Note that this is not a matter of "can God inspire this way" but "is that what God did" and "is that what God is required to do"? Even 1 Cor. 12:7-8, which X cites, does not imply mechanical dictation; nor is God required to kiss our rear ends (as we pointed out in the linked article in the next entry) or those of Skeptics who refuse to take time to do a little discipleship -- or want to use trivia as a reason to disbelieve.
X refers to an article on his which we rebutted ages ago here, though this too he has not yet noticed. Be sure and check the TWeb link where X was embarrassed by two seminary students, particularly on his example of Ezekiel, which he continues to use as though nothing has happened and he were not indeed thoroughly embarrassed by the seminary student.
Striding his hobby horse, X bellows against variations in oral tradition, "An error is an
error, and it doesn't matter how long the 'oral tradition' was passed along until it was written down or how much the oralist may have thought what he was saying was right, if he said something that was incorrect or inconsistent, he transmitted an error." This is nought but typical X bigotry; and no matter is involved as his example of a reversal of the number of sons and daughters a king had, what X calls a "rank" error; he is confused as to what sort of issue the "oral tradition" solution is applied to (what he calls "rank" error has other answers). Oral tradition involves a semantic contract between listener and hearer; it involves a weighing of choices, between reporting what happened, and making it short and/or memorable enough so that no one forgets that it happened. In such contexts, the sort of differences we do see -- in one or two angels (where it is never said, "only one" or "exactly two") -- are what emerge, and are not, under an oral semantic contract, to be called errors. X's further diatribe that such an idea is contrary to "inspiration" itself begs the question that inspiration will only produce works of Western technical precision, or would need to. (X alludes further to a work in progress of his on inerrancy, as of this typing in only part 1 of 3, which we are waiting on to be completed. On his ancient appeal to 2 Peter 1:20-1, see our response to that, made a long time ago, here. It remains a begged question of what "inspiration" will of necessity require, and it remains a bigoted statement that "[a]ll the talk in the world about 'nuances' and 'idioms' in Semitic languages or customs in ancient Near Eastern cultures cannot make it not be an inconsistency." It most certainly can, and does, if the data shows that it does. (The latter being most likely an allusion to X's continued pathological literalism re Jer. 7:22, not an issue of the rez narratives. No one has spoken of nuances and idioms with reference to those at all.)
Simple naivete is behind X's demand that we produce an article in which it is shown that inspiration was not mechanical dictation, or that details could be left out for lack of office supplies. These facts are known from the background and the culture; they do not become true or sacrosanct only by being in the canon. The lack of supplies is a fact that all writers of the time dealt with. "Inspiration," despite X's presumption and that of "experts" in ancient history and thought he cites like Jerry Falwell (!), did not mean dictation and was not exclusive of the Bible's eventually canonized documents. As we noted in our article on the canon: Were books included or excluded because of their inspirational quality? It may come as a surprise to some - Christians and skeptics alike! - that the Church Fathers "did not seem to have regarded inspiration as the ground of the Bible's uniqueness."[Metzg.NT, 255] Rather , inspiration was just one of many aspects of the life of the church, and one could regularly speak and write under inspiration, as Jerome did. As MacDonald [MacD.FormCB, 240] puts it: "There is no question that the early church believed that its scriptures were inspired by God, but...the canonical scriptures were not the only ancient literature that was believed to be inspired by God." And Gamble adds [Gamb.NTC, 72]: "...we nowhere find an instance of inspiration being used as a criteria of discrimination." So it is that Justin, for example, believed that "inspiration and the Holy Spirit's power were the possessions of the whole church." [MacD.FormCB, 242]Inspiration was not a criterion of canonicity, but a corollary of it: something that was inspired COULD be canonical, but something NOT inspired could NEVER be canonical. One will note no sense here that "inspiration" meant dictation. X's pathological Western fundamentalism ("if it ain't in the Bible, it ain't true") remains a non-criteria for judging what the text should or should not have.
X dons his white sheet some more and asks, if the ancients did not consider these things errors, what does this prove but that they "had no clear concepts of logic?" Well enough does such imperialistic arrogance and impertinence earn us the title of gai-jin in Japan! Even in the West, we have gradated levels of precision permitted; as we have said elsewhere: If we ask how many gallons of fuel a rocket contains, we expect a detailed answer like "4,942,827.78 gallons" from a NASA engineer, if he is involved in a technical discussion with other engineers. If he's talking to the press, and he is savvy, he'll say "4.9 million gallons" rather than bewilder the scientifically inert with more detail. Your average hobbyist (or even a reporter) will say "5 million gallons". Are any of them incorrect? No, because there is a semantic contract that correlates the level of precision with the level of expertise. It's nothing but bigotry and an attempt to sway the gullible to frame it in terms of, "an error is an error." That is absolute nonsense; it is the mantra of the anally retentive with an axe to grind. Note that this is NOT, as X thinks it is, a matter of that the ancients "thought that the earth was flat" and their belief in this made it true (or about pagan gods existing). What we are talking about, rather, is a case where (to make the analogy work, though it is ridiculous) everyone KNEW the earth was round, but agreed to keep calling it flat anyway, for whatever reason. No such reason could emerge in this instance, or in the example of the number of sons and daughters X speaks of; this is his analogical impairment at work. Where it does come into play is in compression of historical narratives; in reportage of only specific details; in arrangement of material to aid in comprehension. Despite X's denial, he DOES have a burden to show that ancient commentators thought these were problems; appeal to the "laws of logic" is not relevant in context and is like asking to apply the "laws of logic" to the Mona Lisa or to Michaelangelo's David. The Biblical texts were art as much as report; "laws of logic" is fine for treatises of science, but not for compositions where creativity and constraints of the natural order apply. Repeatedly chanting that the Bible is said to be the "inspired word of an omniscient, omnipotent deity" does not make inspiration, omniscience, and omnipotence subservient to modern Western fundamentalist values that have been held over history by only .02% of the human population.
X replies to my quote from oral tradition expert Albert Lord by saying that this is an example of my "favorite logical fallacy". We remind the reader again that X is merely blowing smoke; as we have noted from nikzor.org, a website well-regarded for its list of logical fallacies, the appeal to authority is fallacious only when the person in question is not an expert. Lord IS an expert in his field; X is not, and this sham appeal to "fallacy" is simply X's way of trying to fool his gullible minions into failing to notice that he has not the wherewithal nor the expertise to counter what Lord reports -- which is particularly galling in that X immediately and wrongly calls him Alfred Lord instead of Albert! If X has authors who can disagree with Lord's position, and are equitable experts, let him bring them in rather than just pontificating that he "could quote all day" from authors who say he opposite. The fact is that he knows no such authors, and could not spend even 1 second quoting them.
After repeating his straw man about inspiration being mechanical dictation for the 178,765th time (and it will be repeated 657,876 more times, and will not be addressed again here), X tries to foist examples of what he thinks are exemplary of contradictions in the Bible.:
"[L]et's suppose that we had four ancient documents that claimed that a man named Yabel changed a goat into a camel. All of them clearly claim that Yabel performed this remarkable deed, but one of them said that he performed the miracle in Beersheba, another said that he did it in Jericho, another one said that he did it in Jerusalem, and the fourth one said that Joppa was where the miracle was performed." X does not tell us what Biblical example this is meant to parallel; perhaps he means the matter we spoke of here, and if he does, them we have a perfect example of how Greek historiography of the time offered a "semantic contract" in which it was known that the miracle was done in Beersheba, but writers put it in Jericho or Jerusalem or Joppa (X will not find an example of FOUR discordant places in the Bible's accounts) to hearken back to another event -- perhaps one in which a man named Goobel turned a camel into an ape when in Joppa -- in order to make a point that Yabel was reenacting Goobel's tricks. Like it or not, that's the way it goes; calling it "craziness" or "error" or "inconsistency" is to entirely miss the point. Nor is it any aid to beg the question of naturalism, which has nothing to do with literary construction techniques.
X whines that I offer nothing to support my contention that John was a sort of supplement to Mark. That's another reason X needs to get more familiar with this site before running off at the mouth about "unsupported assertion". He can find it here, where he will also find the real reason John is so different than the other Gospels. X issues a sound bite in support of Marcan priority; let him deal with the substance here then rather than hiding behind "mainstream biblical scholarship" which he wouldn't have any ability to actually use critically.
X asks as well why John should need to fill in Mark's "gaps" when it was a "narrative that was inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent deity?" We have already answered the question about inspiration, but it is a wonder that X thinks omniscience and omnipotence is to be spent for his sake on providing enough scribal materials to fill a van, to every person who wanted a life of Jesus to read. X also alludes to a reply he offered on our article on the end of Mark, which should be amusing, since many of the scholars I use there had no interest at all, despite X, in finding "unity in the Bible."
Next hayseed spray: X wants to dispute that 1 Cor. 15 includes a creedal statement. Even Robert Price accepted this as true (see link above), so there is little need to respond to X's asinine request for documentation of this. If he wants to refute it, let him show what a creedal statement was and why the relevant portions of 1 Cor. 15 do not fit. (It evades X that in context, I am not referring to ALL of 1 Cor. 15 but just the parts relevant to the Resurrection. This idea was apparently too hard to grasp.) In any event, the point was not that being a creedal statement made it "false" in any Western sense, but that it was not something designed to be concurrently read with the Gospel narratives.
At last X gets into some meat, where we deal in the actual rez accounts and the differences between them and how they are explained. The first is the old standby, the time the women went. I gave two answers for this: It would be read either as "subjective readings that are fully capable of describing the pre-dawn twilight just before the sun peeks over the horizon" or a case of Rihbany's ma besay-il. X whinges an idea that that won't work with Matthew, where it says "In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week." Yes, and -- what? What's the problem here? X apparently thinks this means Matthew is saying that, just the very second the sabbath ended, the women were out the door like a shot, and Matthew even as much as self-contradicts because the sabbath ended at sundown, and they can't leave at both sundown and dawn. The word here, however, opse, can mean "late in the day" but by extension can mean after the close of the day, so that Matthew is saying, "after the sabbath was over" -- which pretty much ends X's attempt to find problems within Matthew. For the rest, however, X concedes that he finds no problem, other than that he wonders how Mary went to the tomb when the sun was rising (Mark) but it was still dark (John), but does not explain why this is a problem other than an anachronistic anecdote about driving a tractor before sunrise without headlights. Presumably this is meaningful to X, but it is hard to see why anyone else should care. In such cases, was there or was there not darkness? If there was, how well X saw with or without headlights is not relevant. Otherwise X can do no more than whine that the Holy Spirit should have served as a personal timepiece for each Gospel, giving them exact time, and we presume, the temperature, humidity, and an invitation to the Junior Achievement Bowlathon as well. Once again, be reminded that inspiration did not require God to kiss the rear ends of detail-obsessed modern Westerners looking for excuses.
The next issue is the names of the women who went; this one, X also concedes is not a discrepancy. However, he does make the false claim that Paul "went all out in 1 Corinthians 15 to name witnesses to the resurrected Jesus in hopes of convincing skeptical Corinthians that this event had happened." That contains two patent falsehoods: 1) Paul was not "going all out" to name witnesses; the creed was meant to show that the leaders of the church, and the church at large, had witnessed the resurrected Jesus; 2) Paul was NOT trying to convince "skeptical Corinthians" that Jesus had been resurrected; they believed that already. Rather, he was trying to correct their false ideas about what sort of body a rez body would be, and using the apostolic witness to the "real" body of Jesus as an example. So much for X's "the more, the merrier" response in this context.
X does also ask the decontextualized question, "According to Mark and Luke, the women came to the tomb in order to anoint the body of Jesus with spices, but why would they have done that? According to Luke 23:55, the women followed Joseph of Arimathaea and saw both the tomb and how the body was laid." I guess X is a cheapskate who won't bring flowers to your funeral if he thinks someone else is already bringing a bunch of their own. But as an aside, the spices brought by Nic and Joseph were the sort that came in blocks, and were laid beside the body -- they were not the sort of spices one "anointed" with.
X is also rather too uni-dimensional to grasp what I mean when I say "(e)ach writer chose women representative of the party." Hundreds of people have read that article, and so far, X is the only one with comprehension problems, so like the hillbilly bellowing at Einstein, he thinks it is just something that was chalked up to sound "impressive". Rather than engage X's futile efforts at comprehension, we will solicit readers to let us know if they have any problems understanding what I meant. If I get no responses, or only a tiny number, we will assume the problem is with X. Which it is.
Displaying the usual lack of broad knowledge, X asks why Mary Mag was so prominent that she had to be mentioned, while others were not. I'll give X a hint: He's part right for Luke 8:3. If he wants to know why this makes Mary Mag more important than Salome, I suggest he read my article on The Da Vinci Code. He might actually learn something. But then what about Joanna? Here's another hint: John 19 didn't hurt either. Something else that might evade X's attention: In his comparison to reporting himself and not several others as witnesses to an alien landing, he neglects two points: 1) The Gospels were NOT kerygmatic documents; they were for people who were ALREADY believers, had already heard from the witnesses, and did not need a list of names to convince them of what they had seen; 2) such witnesses WOULD be listed, as required, during oral kerygmatic preaching. If X wants to make the analogy straight, he needs to make it so that he's reporting the events 20 years after the aliens have been hobnobbing with Earthers and any suspicion of their non-existence would have been removed.
X naively asks why Mark and Luke make no reference to the "stolen body" issue. It may not occur to X that this was a claim made solely in regions where Matthew served. If people in Rome are not buying it or even hearing it, why does Mark need to mention it and waste space on it? Is this too hard for X to grasp? Yes, it is. I have already answered his quibbles about paper though he has ignored it. Yes, even ONE OR TWO words (as X notes more than once as an argument) can make all the difference, and it does not take reading Matthew's mind to know this; it is practical sense. Moreover, if we added one or two words each time X demanded it, we'd end up with dozens of added words that collectively add far more to the length than his isolated examples. If X thinks this is not an issue, let's charge him by the word and see what he thinks. I'll bet that would put an end to the policy of 90% fluff and repetition, but fast.
X alludes to his article on Mary Mag, which he apparently does not know I answered here, but covers himself with the usual and unsubstantiated crybaby accusation of selective quoting. Those who think I ran from this issue should note that it is not I who left TheologyWeb, and not I who embarrassed himself before two seminary students there. Indeed, though he claimed victory over the NT student, he did so by asking professors of Greek the wrong questions.
Next up: Why did they go? On this one X somehow manages to drag in paper scarcity as a reason I gave for Matthew's difference; I said no such thing about it. I said it was a polemic; X just whines back that "everyone should realize that" and then goes on some skein about paper that doesn't have a thing to do with what I said. He does get back to the main point eventually, and somehow does not see that saying they came to do burial work "is to allow an inroad for the charge of a stolen body." It's not because I say so; it's because, when you have such polemic floating around, it follows to say, "Ah, the women must have stolen it, see?" X may need to get out more and get some experience with conspiracy theorists like Acharya S, and Freke and Gandy. Maybe then he'd have a more realistic view of what Matthew was responding to (and Mark and Luke were NOT) and not make "duh" remarks about how such ideas make no sense to him.
X also spits some hayseed about the "high context" reference (which he completely embarrassed himself on here, leaving little wonder why he has never responded further, even as he repeats the same fluff he posted before, and which I already replied to), but wonders why if this is so, Matt solved anything by his own polemic. Well, gee, X -- how does one "solve" anything when you are accused of theft, and you reply, "I didn't do it?" Does X really live on this planet?
The expert sociologist in X, who embarrassed himself as well on guilt in the ancient world, now wants to claim that no, it could not be that, because look at this example of David (!) not "getting" the parable Nathan told him. Thus X makes the idiotic assertion that Israel was not really a high-context culture (as the experts say!), because if it was, there would NEVER be any cases of anyone not getting the point of what someone else was saying! I think such patent, childish absurdities, used as pointers against what experts say of the culture, hardly needs a reply. High context does not resolve when a person is distracted (as David was); mainly, it does not mean that people absorb things they could not possibly know; it means that within a group, persons will recognize knowledge common to a group. Jewish burial practices, to use the example I gave from Matthew, were well known to all Jews and had been for years when Matthew was written. Nathan's story to David was not "high context to high context" because David had never heard the story before and also had no idea Nathan knew of his affair with Bathsheba. X is patently embarrassing himself, yet again, with these broken analogies abused as an attempt to refute serious scholarship. (On the matter of the resurrection, we addressed this here and are still waiting for X to respond to our latest.)
Next up, Matt's dischronologized section about the angel; X thinks we "just asserted" this without proving it, though what this means in X-Land is, you can't use background information and you can't use just plain common sense, such as realizing, "gee, there had to be some time, practically speaking, between this verse and that". No, in X-Land you're just to assume the writer was stupid. The fact remains that dischronologizing, WITHOUT the modern aspect of what X bigotedly says "competent writers" will add to make the text more low-context, was a known practice in the OT, NT, and in Egyptian and Assyrian literature, and X's "suggestions" as to how Matthew could have written like a modern college student in a Western, precision-crazed setting is nothing but guff; his demand that God do so, for his sake, mere gai-jin arrogance.
After this X hauls in something he calls "the idou (behold) factor." What in the word he thinks this proves is hard to say. He notes Arndt & Gingrich (but as yet, not Danker?) who said that it was used to introduce something new, "which calls for special attention." Yes, and? "If we examine texts in which Matthew used this particle, we will see that he did not use it as a device to introduce 'dischronologized' information but to introduce new information or events in chronological sequence." Well, excuse the heck out of me, but there is no logical connection at all between the use of idou and whether or not what follows it is dischronologized. It means no more and no less that attention was to be brought to what followed, period. This is like saying that we will prove that "he will bear his cross" must refer to an animal called a bear because in other sentence in the narrative, it clearly does. X is performing the usual X-gyration of solving a shortfall in his budget by washing his socks. Idou is not relevant to, and proves nothing about, chronological narrative sequences. X simply made up this criteria for lack of any better answer.
X pulls his usual shebang about how "amazing" things ought to have been mentioned. We addressed that quibble here. X says he plans to reply to this article later, while presumably ignoring the replies to the 150 other articles of his we have on site, and which he keeps dropping like hot potatoes. It is telling enough that X replies to our "so what" in the article not with a reason to care, but with yet more golly-gosh gee-whiz I-sure-would-have-been-dazzled goofiness.
X also wastes time asking yet more questions about John supplementing Mark that would have had answers had he bothered to read more than 2% of this website.
Next, one angel or two. X whinges that we "quoted Gleason Archer's if-there-were-two-then-there-was-one quibble," apparently missing that we did so as a quote of one of his OWN articles. I noted in that article, correctly, that X has "neither the qualifications nor the right to determine what constitutes 'too much freedom' for a writer" who was removed from him by over 2000 years, and if X wants to know how that makes he and I different, the answer is simple: It is because whereas I have done the research to get into the heads and lives of these people, using sources like Malina and Rohrbaugh against whom X can only embarrass himself, all X has done is sit in his La Z Boy and spit hayseed based on reading in English and announcing his opinion as a Western fundaliteralist. That's what separates the men from the boys, X.
Of amusing note is X's attempt to explain why Matt had two demoniacs rather than one; he thinks it is a "matter of two are better than one, so at times Matthew used this principle to spruce up the accounts of Jesus's miracles." How doing a miracle to two rather than one is a "spruce up" is hard to figure; if Matthew depicts Jesus as this powerful, this is like saying it is a "spruce up" to see X taking two eggs out of the fridge rather than one. It is also contradicted by the point that though he had two here, Matthew also left out a different story of a cured demoniac that is found in Mark (by the Marcan priority hypothesis). So what was that, a spruce down? (On Jairus' daughter, see here.
On it runs, with X repeating again and again his usual pinata' that "inspiration must mean they all report all the same details and fill in all the gaps, and if they can't, God should have given them paper." X also says I "shot myself in the foot" with Mary Magdalene, apparently still oblivious to the reply to gave him on that issue (linked above), which is a shame because he wasted so much time rehashing and reexplaining it.
That the women of the tomb split apart and went their ways is a given in most harmonizations of these narratives. It is, as I pointed out, plausible and sensible, much more so than seeing them remaining gaggled together in a knot in a situation where quick action was needed. X will have none of this; common sense historicism is waved off as "pure conjecture," which would also be a handy way to wave off David Ulansey's critically-acclaimed thesis on the origins of Mithraism, if you were a hayseed with an axe to grind. Imagine X saying, "Ulansey and his Mithraist cohorts posit quibbles like this because they know that there is a maze of inconsistencies in the data about Mithraism." I can imagine they'd appreciate X's expertise.
X also hauls in Luke 24, in a way that we answered ages ago here, and he even reprints most of the original article of his we answered. X did not have the gumption, at the time, to say that Luke contradicted himself in Acts by indicating a 40 day period. This time, he does get that much nerve up, but his only reply to those who would say Luke was obviously telescoping is that this "attempts to prove biblical inerrancy by assuming biblical inerrancy, because there is no reason at all to assume that the same writer could not have contradicted himself in two different works." As an example of why this is so X appeals to the stupidity of his own students in the past, though whether they erred on a point of something as large as a space of 40 days is not explained. Nor is there a match for places where he points to where I have expressed different views; Luke did not write 1500+ articles over a period of 8 years. In any event no one needs to assume biblical inerrancy here -- all one needs is knowledge of ancient literary techniques, and some common sense. Inerrancy or not the answer remains the same, and X obviously has no answer other than calling everyone else stupid.
X nitpicks over my statement, "It is able to be reckoned anytime within the 40 days between Passover and Pentecost" by asking if I know there are 50 days. Maybe X just needs to learn to read. The "40 days" refers not to the time between the two holidays but to the 40 day block Luke refers to. Hello?
X wants to know what "linguistic features" in Matt. 28:11-15 show it to be "stylized" and not intended for chronological sequence. It is a pity to have to explain this to a former teacher of English (not literature) who thinks that repeating the word "and" over and over indicates chronology, but for the sake of the educated, we will try.
11 Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into the city, and showed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.
Really rather simple. After what they saw, with angels, rocks rolling, and a quake, is this a description that matches the sort of heart-pounding excitement we'd expect? No, it's like they're walking down to the A and P for some artichokes. Obviously, stylized and compressed.
12 And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers,
Gee. Like it just happened, poof? No. This is like what X admitted was a narrative device in 1 Samuel; obviously all of the king's men didn't recite the same line like some demented Greek tragedy chorus. "Taken counsel" would obviously have to cover some significant quality meetings to come to a resolution.
13 Saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.
14 And if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and secure you.
Yeah sure. Like the elders all stood up like Pop Tarts and said in Unison, "Say ye, 'His disciples came by night...'" Is X insensate to think this is not stylized?
15 So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day. 16 Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them.
Here is where my point about narrative sequence comes in; the "then" here is introducing new material, not as though to say, "then, a second after the elders said this to the guards...", hence I noted what Matt reports in 16-20 could have happened any time in Luke's 40 days. Now that wasn't too hard, was it? X flubbers by nitpicking that nothing can happen without time passing; the point, available to all but the fundalitealist, is that "then" does not mean it happened an insignificant time later, though whether X in fact thinks there was much time between Matt. 28:15 and 16 is not clear; he misses my point on this completely, only agreeing it was "after" while saying it is "pure conjecture" to say it was days later. (It is? Not if you do what secular historians do even when they resolve accounts of difference -- see the quotes at the top where historians explain, in a way that will try X's patience, how inference and conjecture are a necessary part of a historian's work.) He is mainly obsessed with trying to claim Luke was profoundly stupid and said "same day" in his Gospel but "40 days" in Acts. It isn't a linguistic reason there; nor does it have to do with inerrancy (since scholars with no rub for inerrancy have agreed) -- it's a common sense reason, one that would never be denied to a secular writer and that X only denies to Luke because of hyper-bigotry against the religious content.
X decides to pick the nit that "Luke said that Peter stooped down and beheld the linen cloths, whereas John said that Peter entered the tomb when he arrived." If X had any knowledge of ancient tombs of this period he would know that Peter's "stooped" repose means he was bending over the bench, inside the tomb. That's why historians say we need to make inferences from the data.
X pomps himself as a "retired writing instructor" who says that "good writers will plan in advance and then write accordingly, but I also taught enough students to know that most writers don't bother to plan." We can shut X down right there since he is talking about students with reams of paper at less than a cent a sheet, lighted classrooms and desks, and lots of leisure time. Let's see him give advice based on what conditions the ancients had to write in. Oh, they did lots of planning, much more even than X's students, as it happens -- but they had constraints, period. X's bigoted comment that in places "the Bible is almost incredibly disorganized" reflects only his own lack of appreciation for ancient literature; his comment that "many of the writers just started writing and let the words fall wherever they did", is laughable in the extreme and represents no known ancient practice of composition.
X wants to insult Mauck's case for Luke as produced for a Roman judge. If he has the nerve to address it in detail, he needs to get this book, read it, and refute it -- not just cry in the corner that we didn't repeat the whole case here for his convenience. But if X can't grasp why this would make a difference, the answer is simple: Luke is writing a defense brief for Paul; he needs evidence that will be most impressive, which does mean a few more witnesses than John offers in his "two meetings" scenario. Even X can recognize the "more the merrier" principle, can he not? 
X closes the latest diatribe with a repeat of his old "inspiration means we can't treat the Bible the same as other documents" screed, which only in his fundy-atheist fantasies makes for a Bible that kisses our rear ends and hands us the remote. It is only the fundamentally uneducated, the stubborn, and those who want to remain that way who call the pursuit of scholarship in this area "ludicrous" and respond with the sort of hayseed snapbacks X has provided.
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