Joe Heschmeyer responds to Alex O’Connor’s claims about Biblical inconsistency in his debate with Dinesh D’Souza.

Transcription:

Joe Heschmeyer:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So I finally got around to watching the debate between Alex O’Connor and Dinesh D’Souza. And let me tell you, as a Christian, it was somehow even worse than I thought it was going to be. For a guy who spends a lot of time complaining about genocides and massacre in the Bible, Alex O’Connor had no problem publicly murdering Dinesh dea. Now that might sound un charitable, that might sound unfair. So lemme tell you this. Number one, I normally do not do the, here’s what I would’ve said, kind of videos because it debate’s a funny thing. When you’re under pressure, there’s a time limit. You’ve got all that stress and pressure and people watching. You have no idea what you would say.

But in this case, I want to make an exception, not to say, here’s what I would say, but rather here answers to the arguments that Alex O’Connor was making for two hours that Dinesh Desa never responded to except to kind of shrug them off or sear at them. Here’s the thing, as Christians, if you look at one Peter chapter three, 15 to 16, it’s the foundational text for the idea of apologetics. Even the word apologetics comes from the Greek alogia or defense. It’s coming from right here, and which we’re told number one, to always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope in you. And number two, to do it in a way that’s gentle and reverent. So in other words, number one, be prepared. And number two, don’t be a jerk. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about Dinesh’s performance because there’s not a lot I can say constructively, but lemme just give you a sense of why everyone that I read, every commenter, every comment in the comments below everyone, Christian, atheist, whatever, who saw this agreed that Dineh lost this debate.

So here’s how he begins with this is literally his opening argument and we can judge it on the twofold test of are you prepared and are you being a jerk?

CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza

I’m standing up because I want to kind of neutralize Alex’s accent advantage. I mentioned this because it seems to me no accident that so many of the prominent so-called new atheists have British accents.

Joe Heschmeyer:

So that’s not a great opener. Your opponent spends 10 minutes laying on a pretty logical but answerable case against the reliability of the Bible, and you begin by sort of waving it all away and suggesting it’s just because he has a posh British accent and he actually goes on for a little bit of time explaining this really bizarre at hominin attack. If that’s not bad enough, the next thing he says is that he’s not really qualified to be debating in this area because he’s not a theologian, he’s not a Bible expert. This isn’t his normal area, but maybe the most telling interaction, the debate is the Bible true. Just watch this interaction and you can decide for yourself if he seemed like he came prepared for this conversation

CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza

And now imagine that the gospel writers had written what you just said. Imagine in the actual text, one of them said he was 33 when he died because of the number three in its significance, correct? And another said that he was 34 because of the number four. In its significance, that would be a contradiction. And in that instance, not just a historical contradiction, but a spiritual and theological one too. No, it actually wouldn’t. I’ll see it. Come on. It wouldn’t tell you why. You don’t think that’s a contradiction. No, it’s not a contradiction. All because the gospel writers are constantly contradicting each other, no drawing, not contradicting each other. If they were constantly contradicting each other, you wouldn’t have spent half an hour on a single event that frankly I haven’t even heard of. In fact, no one’s ever heard of. I’ve never ever heard anyone discuss this in any context.

Fish out which event this prophecy about Hosea, I’ll go back and look at all this, but what I’m trying to get at is if you had a plethora of contradictions, you wouldn’t be spending the entire debate on one that I’m sure no one in the audience has sort off either on, but oh, well, okay, you’ve heard of it probably because you’ve been listening to his YouTube channel. You don’t think that this, don’t think this is a highly discussed point of contention in the gospels, the flight to Egypt and its contradiction with the flight to Egypt local, the flight to Egypt is an important event. The gospel, I’m going to say finish also. So

Joe Heschmeyer:

I’m going to go ahead and say that on the twofold test of be prepared and don’t be a jerk. There’s room for improvement on both of those. Now, Alex O’Connor, if you’re watching this, I want to say number one, I thought you did a very good job being heroically patient in a debate that would be very frustrating for an ordinary person. And number two, I think you are raising perfectly reasonable questions and objections, and so I want to do you hopefully the service of number one telling you some areas where I think you’re right on the money getting things right, and number two, responding to some of the criticisms and contradictions that you point to or alleged contradictions that you point to. And I want to be really clear at the outset. I’m not going to try to do an entire recap of the whole two hours, rather, I want to draw out just the alleged contradictions and focus on those. But before we get there, let’s talk about three things that you get and that I think it’s really important for Christians and non-Christians to recognize because they’re things that we can kind of screw up. Number one, the Bible isn’t a book. Now that’s kind of counterintuitive, right? Because the word Bible literally comes from the word for book, but the Bible is, as you say, a library.

CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza

The Bible is not a book, it’s a library. And unlike any good library, it contains an amalgamation of different genres. And so asking if the Bible is true, you might as well ask if the corpus of Shakespeare is true. It’s sort of betrays a misunderstanding of how people interact with the text. So I thought, will Dinesh argue that the Bible is literally true historically true allegorically, true morally true, theologically true, metaphorically

Joe Heschmeyer:

True? That’s brilliantly put. The Bible is a library of different books and those books are written in different genres. Sometimes within one book you have different modes of speech. So take the story of the Exodus. Most of the story of the exodus is written in a fairly straightforward, apparently literal account, but then you have interspersed what are obviously not meant to be literal expressions. For instance, in Exodus 19 verse four, God says, you’ve seen what I did to the Egyptians at I bore you on Eagle’s wings and brought you to myself. To my knowledge, no one in history has ever taken that verse literally, even though it’s in a book about history. So when we’re trying to analyze is the Bible true, it helps to know what is it trying to say and how is it trying to say it? Is this something where it’s trying to be literal historical?

Is it trying to be allegorical or so for instance, if you took the question, are Jesus’s parables true? That’s a different question than did Jesus’s parables historically happen? You see what I mean there, that it’s not just as many modern people. We imagine that true and historical mean the same or true and testable in a lab mean the same thing. So this raises the second thing that I want to laud you for, which is highlighting that things can be true in different ways. Historical truth is one form of truth, but some people hearing that are going to imagine, well, that’s just this kind of postmodern sort of idea. What does that even mean? Well, this is what’s sometimes called the correspondence theory of truth. So I want to highlight the kind of what is truth. There’s a famous passage in the 19th chapter of the gospel of John where Jesus is before Pilate, and he declares that he’s come into the world to bear witness to the truth, and Pilate responds What is truth?

And for thousands of years we’ve struggled to give a good answer to that question. It seems really easy to define and describe. It’s a little trickier than that. So in a pretty famous 1944 article, Alfred Ky lays out different ways of trying to define what we mean by true. I want to just highlight three. The first one he gets from Aristotle to say of what is that it is not or of what is not that it is is false while to say of what is that it is or what is not that it is not is true, a little cumbersome, but you get the gist. If something exists and you claim it doesn’t exist, that’s not true. And if it exists and you say it exists, that is true. Okay? We kind of have a sense of what that means. The second definition or the second proposed definition tars gives us is that the truth of a sentence consists in its agreement with or correspondence to reality.

Tars Ski doesn’t love that one. That’s actually my favorite one, that when we say something is true, we mean that it is real. We mean it corresponds to reality. Now things can correspond to reality in different ways. So the parable of the prodigal son is true. It is describing reality, but it’s not describing reality in a historical sense. It’s describing reality in this kind of masistic sense in a parable. The third definition that he gives is maybe the dorkiest. He says a sentence is true if it designates an existing state of affairs. Now, Tosky acknowledges there are potential problems with all three of those definitions of truth. So to modify one of the examples he gives, what about the statement snow is white? Is that true even during the summer when there’s no snow or because there’s no current existing state of affairs, do we have to say snow would be white?

Those kind of questions. Philosophers spend a lot of time debating the semantics of this, but it actually matters because a lot of modern people hear things like, well, Jesus speaks in parables and some of the parts of the Old Testament aren’t literal and they hear, okay, therefore they’re not true because they’ve conflated literal and true, and that’s not what is true. The reality is truth is a correspondence to reality. Now there are other models of truth. Coherence is the major kind of counter. I’m not going to get into all that because that’s way too nerdy, way too much in the rabbit hole. But it’s only to say the coherence theory of truth is wrong. The correspondence one I displayed out is the true one. I’m not going to defend it, I’m just going to assert it and move on. The third thing that I want to praise you for getting right, Alex is recognizing that trivial differences, even trivial discrepancies or minor contradictions in the Bible are consistent with saying the Bible is true and consistent with the Christian self-understanding of divine revelation in scripture. Well, first I’m going to give a brief kind of back and forth where I think this becomes clear in the way you and Danesh Jesusa talk about the issue, and then I want to talk about what that reveals.

CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza

Lemme ask you this very straightforwardly then. Okay, Luke says that after the birth of Jesus, the family fled to Egypt. Matthew says that they went to the Jerusalem temple. Are they both correct or is one of them wrong? Who the heck cares? Look, I do. The people who listening to the debate about, well, lemme say why. Let me say why. What you care about is not only trivial, but indicates a kind of unwillingness to try to get what the text is trying to convey. I’ll tell you why I don’t think it’s trivial.

Joe Heschmeyer:

So I’m going to get back to that alleged contradiction. Also, the passage he’s describing is from Matthew and not from Luke. The flight into Egypt is only found in the gospel of Matthew. But what I don’t want to do is simply wave it away and say, oh, if there’s a contradiction, who cares? Because that obviously undermines the premise that the Bible is true. If you say it’s true, and I don’t care if it contradicts all over the place, you got to do a lot more work than just kind of hotly shrugging your shoulders. But what notice the actual debate is on is whether any alleged discrepancies are trivial. Now, I’m going to argue that there’s not even a discrepancy there, but they are right to recognize that a discrepancy that’s trivial is not something that matters. So for instance, Matthew, mark, and Luke, even though they’re called the synoptics, they’re telling basically the same events in the same order.

They have disparities in the order. This is immediately observable to anyone who compares them. They may tell the same events, but they put them in different orders. They have different details that they include and exclude, and there are times when the details don’t seem to match up. Okay, what do we make of that? Right? That’s an important question and a good standard I want to suggest is the one the Second Vatican Council lays out that everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit. Not everything mentioned but asserted. What are the things they’re trying to get across as opposed to things that are, we would say in the field of law, dicta, just things that you mention along the way and we need to believe as Christians that God has faithfully and without error revealed his truth in the sacred writings, everything that he wanted put in there for the sake of salvation.

Now that means that there’s plenty of unimportant incidental details that can go wrong. For instance, many times when you see the rendering of Nonis Israelite names, they’re kind of butchered this way that English speakers originally called Beijing PE King. That doesn’t matter. That’s not God making a mistake. That’s God working through human authors who are going to get some incidental details kind of screwy and certain modes of inspiration wouldn’t allow that. If you imagine that divine inspiration works by God dictating word for word what needs to go in the scriptures, then yeah, that would disprove it. Even getting a misspelled name, or for instance in one Corinthians, when St. Paul begins to list all of the people that he did or didn’t baptize, he originally says he didn’t baptize anyone and then he corrects himself in the next verse and says, oh, right, well did the Holy Spirit dictate a mistake that he just, no rather, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is such that as the Second Vatican Council puts it, God speaks in sacred scripture through men in human fashion.

Therefore, the interpreter of sacred scripture, in order to clearly see what God wanted to communicate to us should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended and what God wanted manifest by means of their word. So what are they trying to say rather than what are some things that they’re not trying to say that you could just grab onto? So for instance, if you said there was a huge fight on my lawn at sunrise, it’s clear what you’re asserting there. Someone could say, oh, you said sunrise. You think that the earth or the sun goes around the earth and that’s why it’s rising ridiculous, you fool. But of course that’s not what you’re trying to assert. You’re not trying to make a point about centrism or helio centrism, you’re trying to assert something about a fight that happened on your lawn. Sounds crazy. I’m really sorry for you.

But that’s the difference between mentioning and asserting and assertions are related to those things that are necessary for salvation. So those are the two things we should be looking for. Is this something the author is asserting as opposed to mentioning? And does this seem to have kind of salvific implications in some sense? And if it doesn’t, it’s just a detail that’s getting mentioned in the story that’s way less important. Now people hearing that might think, oh, that sounds so modernist, that sounds so like 21st century. You’ve just now that scientists have come along and disprove so much of the Bible, now you got to move the goalposts. Not at all. In fact, when you read how the earliest Christians understood scripture, you’ll find things like this. So to give just one example, Papus is a historian from very early on like first century. He’s born in about the year 60.

He dies in about the year one 30. His writings are now lost to accept through the fourth century historian UUs Pap. I called him a historian, chronicler may be a better word. In any case, he recounts a presbyter by the name of John who’s talking about the gospel of Mark, and he says, mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately though not in order whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. Notice that so his details are correct, they’re accurate, but they may not be chronologically accurate because that just wasn’t considered important by Mark or John the Presbyter or Papus or other early Christians. Getting the details of the order aren’t super important and Papus even explains why he neither heard the Lord nor followed him. He was not an eyewitness, but came afterwards following Peter who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving them a connected account of the Lord’s discourses.

So you’ve got this, you’ve got the Apostle Peter preaching, but he’s preaching on particular subjects to particular audiences. He’s not just giving an A to Z, here’s everything Jesus did in chronological order. Of course he’s not. Mark is trying to build something like that from these various pieces that he’s hearing. And so we’re told Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them, right? So he’s writing down the events that he’s hearing and putting them in a coherent order that may or may not be the order they actually happened in. And Papus says for he was careful of one thing not to omit any of the things that she had heard and not to state any of them falsely. So you have even in the first and early second century, this clear distinction between are you telling me the truth and are you worried about the details?

And so we want to make that distinction ourselves as we’re evaluating claims like, well, is the Bible true? We’re not asking can you find minor details? At one point Dinesh D’Souza made that I think was a good one is that you have four gospel writers, and so almost by definition you’re going to get different versions of the event, otherwise you would just presumably have one. Now, maybe that doesn’t logically follow, but it certainly seems consistent. Alright, so with that said, I agree with everything Alex is saying there except I don’t think the contradiction he cites is actually a contradiction. So let’s talk about those. Does the Bible contradict itself? So Alex, if you’re watching, I want to focus on some of your bigger points. If you think I’ve missed some really important ones, I’m happy to do a follow up video on this because I am aware I’m not covering every argument made in those two hours, but I want to focus number one on this claim that you made three times in the debate that never got a good response. This idea that Matthew or one point you said Luke, but Matthew creates a sort of set of prophecies. He invents the flight into Egypt and then he invents a whole passage about Jesus being called a Nazarene.

CLIP: Alex O’Connor vs. Dinesh D’Souza

Then we have for example, the flight to Egypt, which is only recorded in Luke, which is difficult to reconcile with Matthew’s account that they went to the temple in Jerusalem instead. But more importantly, Matthew then says that the family traveled to Nazareth and he says, so was fulfilled what was said through the prophets that he shall be called in Nazarene quoting the prophets. Now you’ll notice if you read an online Bible that where the Old Testament prophets are quoted, there’s a little footnote telling you what the prophet of what the prophecy is. In this case, you won’t find one because the prophecy simply doesn’t exist. It’s not there. There’s no such thing. So there are two options here. Either Matthew made up this prophecy or got it wrong, in which case the New Testament is mistaken or the prophecy does exist, but for some reason fell out of our scriptural tradition and now no longer exists, which makes the accuracy and at least the completeness of the Old Testament suspect. So again, I’d like to ask directly which it is,

Joe Heschmeyer:

Let’s talk about the first of those two claims. First, the idea that it’s very difficult to harmonize the presentation in the temple and the flight into Egypt. I don’t think that’s true in the gospel of Luke, we’re told the purification of the temple happens when the time for purification came under the law of Moses, which under the law in Leviticus is at 40 days. In contrast, the Magi are on this journey from the east. We don’t know where they originally go to Jerusalem. They then go and are told to search diligently in Bethlehem to try to find the child. By the time Herod hears that they’ve, once he realizes they’ve tricked him, he sends out the order to have any boys to and under in the area killed. Now if Jesus is a newborn, that presumably wouldn’t happen. So we don’t know exactly how old Jesus is, but he’s old enough that he could look like he’s two.

So it seems pretty clear the way you harmonize that is that the events of them going into the temple for the purification happened before the events of the flight into Egypt. It is not particularly strong as like a look at this contradiction. No, there’s no contradiction between saying I went here 40 days after I was born. I went there maybe a year after. But the second thing is this passage in Matthew two, it says he went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth. This is after they’ve returned from the flight into Egypt that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled. He shall be called a Nazarene. And so the argument here is it looks like he’s just completely invented an Old Testament prophecy and he’s done. So he basically, it shows either a total scrupulosity on Matthew’s part, right? He’s willing to just make up evidence or it shows we don’t have the right Old Testament, or at least it would seem to show a certain level of sloppiness.

And I want to suggest it’s none of those three things and we’ve had an answer for a very long time to this question, but it turns on an area scholars are a little unsure of which is the etymology of the word Nazareth. But one popular theory seemingly then and now is that the word Nazareth came from the word for branch not sir. And this makes sense that if the word Nazareth does come from the word for branch, the... Read more on Catholic.com