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We're always on the prowl here and committing acts of espionage against unwitting Skeptics; a recent trip bore fruit as we discovered that Skeptic X had posted on his errancy list ("Join others as honked off and unable to deal with it as you!") a "reply" to an item we had here on the subject of the woman at the tomb. The article Skeptic X references has actually been superseded by the item here, but quite honestly, it makes no essential difference, and given Skeptic X's pace we probably should not expect him to keep track of things so closely. Finding his socks in the morning is no doubt laborious enough. As an aside this is now finally posted on the TSR website, apparently with no real difference in content. Want a link? Skeptic X thinks I'm not giving them, but you can go here to the main page and figure it out.

The main subject previously, at any rate, was that lists of women at the tomb of Jesus differed, and here actually Skeptic X partially agreed with what I wrote. He allows that "the omission of names in a narrative would not constitute error" (I do hope word gets out to the Skeptical community at large on this) though he would call it "careless reporting" (it would be, if it really mattered, but it doesn't -- see below). Where he decides to take the walrus to the bathtub is on the subject: "If, however, the question entails whether the narratives are consistent in what they say about the women who went to the tomb, my answer is that the narratives are contradictory." And he decides to focus here: "I will show that this depiction of Mary Magdalene on resurrection morning is irreconcilably inconsistent with the way that Matthew's narrative depicted her. She was presented in the two narratives so inconsistently that for all intents and purposes the Mary Magdalene of John's gospel was not the Mary Magdalene of Matthew's gospel."

By now you may well ask (as you should) how Skeptic X can wrestle an "inconsistent" portrait when Mary Mag was mentioned but ONCE in Matthew's rez narrative (28:1). The answer is that Skeptic X takes the usual route of anachronism. Here's core premise #1, regarding again the identity crisis:

This raises the question of whether the Holy Spirit was careless in guiding these "inspired" ones in what to write about an extraordinary event that begged for evidence to confirm it. After all, these narratives were going to become the primary documents in establishing that a man died, was stone-cold dead for two days, and then returned to life. I would think that "the more the merrier" would apply here and that the omniscient, omnipotent one should have realized that if at least five women, as required by Luke's narrative, went to the tomb, the credibility of their claim that a dead man had returned to life--if it is at all possible for such a claim to have credibility--would have been better served if all of the narratives had named all of these "witnesses."

Careless, my big toe. Once again it's no more than a matter of Skeptic X setting a standard based on his own miseducation and preferences and asking why God didn't descend to kiss his patoot dutifully for his own satisfaction. As noted in the link above, what Skeptic X calls "careless", the Easterners call ma besay-il -- it doesn't matter. And it doesn't. For Skeptic X's provincialist information, these narratives that he thinks "were going to become the primary documents in establishing that a man died," etc. were no such thing. The Gospels were written as biographies of Jesus and were not (despite their [mis]use today as such) evangelistic documents, other than to some extent the Gospel of John. (If Skeptic X cares to enlighten himself about the practice of ancient bioi he can rip on over here.) But even if they WERE such documents as Skeptic X suggests, he's still wrong. As we explained in some detail here, documents simply were not the be-all and end-all of the ancient world -- oral transmission served that purpose. Skeptic X offers the same bias that Tony Lentz commented upon in his book Orality and Literacy in Hellenic Greece [2]:

Western academic measurement of success by literary and printed research colored the expectation of classical scholars as they considered writing in ancient culture. Writing was so important to their world that they assumed it was the key to the growth of ancient culture.

So likewise Skeptic X assumes that the written Gospels were the key to the growth of ancient Christianity. They were not. How could they be? 90-95% of the population was illiterate. The credibility of the resurrection for those reading the Gospels had already been established -- not on the strength of any one or more written narratives, but the collective and unwritten apostolic witness -- not just to the empty tomb, but to the resurrected Jesus -- which offers the only worthwhile explanation for the existence and growth of the Christian movement. (And if Skeptic X wants to argue with THAT, he can put this in his cabana for a future project.)

That said, Skeptic X restates his agreement on the identities issue; then we get to a point where I noted:

John first -- critics think John says Mary went alone, but read John 10:2 - So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!" So John's account could include other people as well.

Skeptic X says he agrees with me here, oddly enough, but just in case the dogs have not had their steak he pedantically asks why my own use of the first-person plural (as is my affectation, which annoys him clearly to no end) doesn't mean I have other people with me. The "duh" answer to this is the same sort Skeptic X always resists -- we know Mary Mag was not alone because other data we have indicates she was not. For Skeptic X of course that has to be taken as error in other circumstances, as it does with Jer. 7:22 where the historical assessment of the Pentateuch is not enough to render Jerry's "not" ironic, and we must take the much simpler (ergh) solution of, i.e., otherwise unknown priestly parties of conspirators, this in spite of clear Eastern linguistic parallels. Skeptic X adds a spike from fellow errantist John "I Think Paper was Free" Kesler (who asks the Stoopid Skeptic Question, "What if they were written in the computer age?" but never quite explains, as least as far as I have seen, why he thinks my points about the scarcity of office supplies in the ancient world is in error -- I wonder if he would spend $160-200 for a few sheets of paper...but see now here on that) that Nicodemus in John 3 (he mis-cites it as John 1) used a "we" in spite of being alone. Skeptic X though actually admits that he agrees that "Nicodemus was simply saying that he and others he knew understood that Jesus was a teacher come from God," and adds, "that would not in any way prove that Nicodemus had others with him at the time." I agree too. And I don't think Mary Mag's companions needed to follow her in to where Peter and Co. were. It would have been hard enough to run around by herself and commit the questionable social act of being alone with these men who were not her husband; how much worse for 2-3 or however many of them to do the same? Think how well that would be received in Islamic society -- rather stricter, yes, but the moral principles were much the same. The point was that Mary Mag did not go to the tomb alone, or return alone, as Skeptics are wont to claim John says, and Skeptic X apparently has no problem with this. (By the same token he wants to know who the "we" is Jesus refers to in John 3:11. Skeptic X one-dimensionally claims that it couldn't be the disciples, "because the selection of the disciples had just begun in chapter 1 (35ff), so not much 'testifying' could have occurred by this time." Gee, Skeptic X, just how much "testifying" needed to be done before this could be said then, and how many disciples or persons needed to be testifying? John names several disciples in Ch. 1 -- if we stop there, was there a 10-person rule or something before you were allowed to use a "we" to testify? By the same token how could Nic know Jesus was such a bonzer teacher if there was not a significant enough time between Chs. 2 and 3? Skeptic X here seems actually unenlightened enough to think that all the time that was between Chs. 1 and 3 was as long as it took for him to read the chapters. John writes of any believing on Jesus over the Passover (2:23), so there is some decent teaching time indicated, which would also suggest gathering of disciples; and to throw back something Skeptic X recently said in his own face, does he assume that only the disciples John names were the only ones Jesus had?!? What planet has he been on?)

Skeptic X though is still gassing up his motorcycle; he comments on my (now outdated) point that Matthew has dropped Salome because of scribal error. My answer has since changed based on cultural study of the sort Skeptic X thinks we just make up on the spot, and if Skeptic X wants to play with that response he knows where to go. As it is Skeptic X's main response is that inspiration can only be mechanical dictation, a ridiculous idea he dragged from his CoC days and which was not held by the ancients and is not maintained by modern statements on inerrancy. Skeptic X offers some as well about how he doesn't "get" how oral tradition would drop names. He can check the material at the new item for some enlightenment if he finds what is common (high context) to me to be too vague (low context) for him.

Working further on, the "inspiration must be mechanical dictation" argument, coupled with the "gosh, but these documents were important" argument, are repeated yet again, yet again, and after spelling another few hundred lines about how he didn't get what he wanted for Xmas, Skeptic X pulls an apple out of the orange hat, yet again:

Yes, as long as Matthew didn't say that Salome was never there, no error exists, but that is not to say that a lot of stupidity didn't exist on the part of the writer and the omniscient one who inspired him to leave out the names of some who were on the scene. This would be as idiotic as a man accused of murder knowing that he was miles away from the scene of the crime at the time in the presence of several people, but he gave the police only one or two names of those who were with him.

El problemo, Kemosabe: Your man accused of murder, to parallel, would also have on his side the testimony of numerous other witnesses (500 to the rezzed Jesus, under the present paradigm) and would also have to live in a culture where orality was valued over literacy. As always Skeptic X is the village "idiot" who thinks what he sees is idiotic because he doesn't know any better, having assumed that everyone thinks and lives just like he does. Keep in mind this is the guy who made the serious mistake of trying to read guilt into Biblical passages. To do otherwise of course would have been idiotic as saying a man today could not possibly feel guilty about a crime he committed. Of course.

So it comes down to this. We're still waiting for Skeptic X to engage "harmonizing" principles -- as we showed them here and as Miller did here. (Skeptic X should like that one, as his name is mentioned in vain a few times, and like me, Miller says: "I will reserve my comments about Mr. [X]'s apparently superior understanding of how an omniscient and omnipotent deity would inspire human authors" the way Skeptic X thinks He should.) Meanwhile he thinks that the "Mary Magdalene problem" which he says "has sent many would-be apologists scurrying for cover with announcements that they have so many obligations and responsibilities that they must regrettably leave the forum" is the lion's roar of Skeptical apologies. I suspect rather that Skeptic X's deodorant ran out at the time, but after his usual shebang of selective quotation accusation (we are still waiting for one that actually passes the test of having mattered) we get to where Skeptic X describes his problem:

Mary M was presented in the synoptic gospels as having seen an angel or angels at the tomb, and heard him or them announce the resurrection of Jesus, after which she actually encountered Jesus and worshiped him as she was running from the tomb to tell the disciples what had happened. In John's gospel, however, Mary Magdalene is presented as having found the tomb empty, after which she ran to Peter and the disciple "whom Jesus loved" and told them that the body had been stolen. So the problem is why Mary would have told the disciples that the body had been stolen if she had seen and heard everything that the synoptic gospels claim that she saw and heard.

Oh. Oh. So Skeptic X thinks this is a real problem. I know now why people ran: They thought he was nuts and feared it was contagious. The deal is twofold: 1) Skeptic X assumes that when Matthew names ONLY Mary Mag and Mary II, he is giving a comprehensive list of who was present; 2) by that token, Mary Mag must be someone who departed and ran into the rezzed Jesus (28:9-11) since the two Mary-belles are the only known antecedent for "the women" in vss. 9-10. Well, honky dory. Skeptic X wastes some space rebutting the most common explanation he has heard -- some unnecessary drivel about two tomb visits by Mary Mag which we won't waste time on, but sorry, no dice. Skeptic X's English-grammar lesson about how "'THE WOMEN' in verse 5 to whom the angel said that Jesus had risen must have necessarily included Mary Magdalene" is pure hokum in context; his spar that "otherwise, Matthew's text is incoherent" a load from a Western literalist from a fundamentalist denomination; his complaint that it thereby "would not have conveyed an accurate picture of what had happened to early Christians who may have lived and died having had access only to this one gospel account" a load of bull-dusted, panic-button polemic (that once again, assumes that the written account is all that they had or were concerned with, whether Mark and the others were around or not). We'll say it one more time for the provincial in Skeptic X: ma besay-il. It doesn't matter. Each writer chose women representative of the party, based perhaps on their own knowledge or on that of their audience, and that Skeptic X can't see what difference this would make is his own one-dimensional problem. Matthew had points to establish to make his story -- women went to the tomb; they saw the Risen Jesus; the message was given to skeedaddle to Galilee (thus setting up his "Great Commission" picture -- and the fact that the same message is partially given twice, by the angel and by Jesus, should clue Skeptic X in) -- and he had only a few lines to do it. The rez appearance recorded in 28:9-10 is short, stereotyped, and contrived, and it is meant to be; it is ridiculous to assert a "mechanical inspiration" perspective rooted in "it had to be written the way Skeptic X would have written it". Skeptic X's gafunga statement that, "the picture [readers] formed in their minds after reading Matthew's gospel could not have included anything that was written in gospels that came after Matthew's" comes from the wrong side of the tracks of fundaliteralism, in non-knowledge of the interaction and purposes of orality and literacy in the ancient world, and after years of using the Gospels as evangelistic documents they were never intended to be. Skeptic X can therefore take his non-relevant English-grammatical argument, and all the panic buttons he presses, and make pizza pie out of them. Whether Matthew did know of other women, and did not name them; whether he really did write in such a way as to imply that Mary Mag was one of the women in 28:9-10 -- the answer is the same: ma besay-il. To the people who read and wrote this, it didn't matter. They could see as well as we can that 28:9-10 is a contrivance; just as it easy to see that Matthew's five blocks of Jesus' teachings are a structured contrivance. Skeptic X can cool his jets and wash his socks: We prefer to read the text as the people who wrote it understood it -- not as a fundaliterist preacher with a case of pathological literalism does.

And now an update. If you have peeked here you know by now that first Stevie Carr, and then Skeptic X, popped in on a forum to try and make some hash of this item, but ended up being diced corned beef themselves. You can get some entertainment out of Skeptic X claiming to know better than two people just short of their doctorates in Biblical study areas, but our highlight here is a comment letter on Skeptic X's sore-site from one Charles Salvia. Since he wrote this letter (it is now 7/03) he and I have signed a truce and are having friendly debate on TWeb, so we have laid aside the polemics, but at this time, most of the letter he wrote was personal issues, and about how he finds my material hard to read, but the main point is what I said about, "The Gospels were written as biographies of Jesus and were not (despite their [mis]use today as such) evangelistic documents, other than to some extent the Gospel of John." It is replied:

Hmm...well, this comment is so absurd I really don't know where to begin. Since Christianity was always a "missionary" religion, (at least since Paul got involved), how could it possibly be said that the gospels, were NOT evangelistic documents!? The very word gospel means "good news." If the gospels were only a biography of Jesus, they did a poor job. We seem to only know what Jesus did when he was an infant, one thing he did as a child, and what he did during his three year ministry. In fact, we only know he was a carpenter because of some offhand reference in Mark! We're only told about events that have some doctrinal or religious importance.

Ah. One at a time now. First, what's the logic of the first few lines?

• Christianity was a missionary religion. (It was before Paul as well; I suppose the sending of the 70 was out to get pizza?)
• Christianity produced the Gospels.
• Therefore the Gospels must have been evangelistic documents.

Well, the hidden premise is that because Christianity was missionary, ANY document it produced must have been missionary. Paul may have been surprised to hear his grocery list was good for evangelism, but who knows, maybe our man attended EE at some other location. But that of course leads to the issue, What are the Gospels? and Salvia thinks they can't be bios because they lack the details of modern bio. But that's dialing the wrong number from the Literary Yellow Pages. Here we noted how ancient biography (bioi) was different than modern biography, in that the details Salvia asks for -- accounts of Jesus as a child -- weren't part of a normal ancient biographical composition. Ancient bioi conventions were not the same as modern ones. Childhood was not important, for there was little conception of personal development during childhood. The cameos of Matthew and Luke offer no more and no less than we would expect from a normal ancient bioi. Salvia, regrettably, automatically assumed people acted, thought, and wrote exactly as the guy next door.

Salvia then hints at the Q source -- see here for that literary design -- and asks, "If the Gospels are not evangelistic documents, what the h*ll does [Holding] consider evangelistic? In fact, the writers of the gospels are always called 'evangelists.' The synoptics even end with the command to 'spread the word.'" Salvia apparently missed the point that if the Synoptics end that way, who in the world are they directed to? Skeptics? Pagans? No, to Christians. People who already believed and didn't need no evangelism. Not that this rips them out of the realm of bioi to begin with, and if Salvia wants to dispute that, he'll need quite a bit more classical literary data than he now offers.

Salvia closes with an admission that, well, maybe I am right that "Ancient Near Easterners probably weren't as concerned with exact detail and exact chronology as we are today," but thinks this is a "so what? Unless the meaning of 'contradiction' has changed over the last two millennia, it doesn't really matter." It didn't matter even before that, actually. Here's a hint for these folks: semantic contract. If you join that annual contest to tell the biggest lie, is it actually lying when you tell your story? No, because everyone knows by your participation that you're not telling the truth. By the same token the contextual delimitations of the ANE offer a "contract" in which such divergence is understood and accepted. No one would call it "contradiction" because no one would think it was meant to be the whole story to begin with -- not until pedantic literalists like the Skeptic X crowd showed up, at any rate. It's beside the point to say, "Matthew could have easily written a stereotyped and contrived account that was in harmony with John's gospel. But he didn't. So what else is there to say?" There is to say: Why should Matthew have kissed modern skeptic's rear ends just to make them happy?