Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Evangelicals who Lie to Promote the Truth or at Least their Truth By Bart Ehrman I was looking through the archives of posts from many years ago and I came across one that struck me as rather hilarious.
[00:00:15] Why did devout Christians sometimes tell flat out lies to support their truth claims? Here's what I said in the post.
[00:00:24] Sometimes it's enough to make my blood boil.
[00:00:27] Maybe someone can explain it to me. If you were to interview the billions of occupants of this planet, you would find no group of people who declare themselves more committed to truth than evangelical Christians.
[00:00:40] Evangelical Christianity historically is about nothing other than truth. Jesus himself said, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except by me. He said that in John 14:6 and you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. That's John 8:32 the Christian faith for these people is all about finding the truth that leads to eternal life.
[00:01:07] So why do so many of their spokesperson simply tell lies or at least propagate willful ignorance?
[00:01:15] Those are the two choices. Either they know what they're saying is absolutely false, or they don't go to the bother of finding out when the information is readily available to anyone who wants to take 38 seconds to look for it.
[00:01:28] I say I don't get it, but I do. My books on forgery argue that in antiquity, Christians did this because they thought that in some circumstances it was appropriate to disseminate false information in order to convert or to convince people to propagate a lie in order to promote the truth.
[00:01:46] Possibly some modern spokespersons for the evangelical cause feel the same way.
[00:01:51] In this post I'll be talking about just one instance. I know of many others I've been following the rather brilliant posts about the exposure of the culprit behind the nonsense of an alleged first century copy of the Gospel of Mark.
[00:02:03] Posts produced by our fellow blog member and occasional guest poster Brent Nonbree on his own blog.
[00:02:10] One of the posts has drawn my ire not against Brent, but against the subject of one of his posts.
[00:02:16] It concerns the original director of the Green Collection. This is a private collection of ancient biblical antiquities, especially manuscripts, many of them on display now in the Bible Museum Museum in Washington. This is Scott Carroll, who touts himself as a great expert on ancient manuscripts, even though it's not clear what his actual qualifications are, other than the fact that he has been employed by very, very wealthy persons to buy manuscripts. Now that's not the same as being able to analyze them, a very technical skill that takes many years of training.
[00:02:47] I say it's not clear what his qualifications are because I can't find a CV for him anywhere.
[00:02:53] Nowhere that he actually indicates his training other than that he's bought a lot of manuscripts for very rich people.
[00:02:59] Carroll is evidently the person who purchased the alleged blockbuster first century copy of Mark, which actually we now know with his publication dates to the end of the second century or the beginning of the third, and it's simply a tiny scrap with parts of a few verses on it. And he purchased this for the Green Collection, financed by the Green family that runs the retail outlet Hobby Lobby.
[00:03:22] Carroll is a hardcore evangelical who travels the world declaring that his manuscript purchases validate the truth of evangelical claims about the Bible and hence by implication about their understanding of the Christian faith.
[00:03:36] Two days ago I read one of Brent Nonbree's blogs in which he provided an actual transcript of one of Scott Carroll's talks where he maligns me personally by name as a crazy liberal who has now been categorically disproved in his claims by the discoveries of ancient manuscripts.
[00:03:54] But what he says about my claims are absolutely, demonstrably, incontrovertibly false. Grotesquely false. He either knows it and he's lying through his teeth to convince his evangelical audiences, who evidently express their enthusiastic approval when he makes his comment, or he has wilfully remained ignorant by simply not checking to see if what he thinks I think, I say I write and I teach is in fact what I have thought, said, written and taught.
[00:04:22] So here's the transcript of the talk taken from Brent's post revisiting some of Scott Carroll's comments in light of the first century Mark purchase agreement.
[00:04:32] And I need to point out that Brent has recordings of Carol saying all of this in public talks going back to 2012.
[00:04:39] Brent's words there's an interesting comment in Carol's 2016 talk to the Koinonia Institute at about the 40 minute mark.
[00:04:48] And once again, thanks to the resourceful David Bradnick for digging up this video.
[00:04:53] Let me add one more text then from the Gospels I don't have a picture of that should be published sometime this year and you'll hear about it. And when you do, you'll remember. Oh yes, Scott Carroll mentioned it. There's actually a fragment of the Gospel of Mark that's been discovered. This has been tentatively dated to somewhere between 70 AD and like 110 AD.
[00:05:14] So gospel of Mark may be dating as early as 70 AD.
[00:05:17] This sounds outstanding because the more liberal scholars like Bart Arman from the University of North Carolina has said that the Gospel of Mark was the last gospel written, and that was probably around 200. So this will completely cause him to have to rework his chronologies. That's what these liberal scholars do. They'll take these things that are early and date them late and take things that are late and date them early and try to turn topsy turvy the understanding of things.
[00:05:44] And so he's already crying foul that he's not had time to see the manuscript at all. But it's fortunately in the hands of conservative scholars who usually don't get an opportunity to work with these things, who are in the process of preparing them for publication.
[00:05:56] So that's something to look for. That'll be major. While these other things may not be international news, that'll be major international news when it's published. And so you heard it here first and you heard it well in advance of its publication.
[00:06:11] What can I say?
[00:06:12] I have never ever thought, said or written any such drivel. I've always thought that Mark was the first gospel written and that it was produced somewhere around the year 70 CE. I used to think it was probably written slightly before the Jewish war, maybe 68 to 70 CE. I now think it was written slightly later, maybe 70 to 72 CE. And that is the extent of my change.
[00:06:35] It will be very, very easy to see. This is what I've always said. It's in every book I've ever written about the Gospels and or Jesus, among other things. It's in my textbook on the New Testament that first appeared in 1997 and has been in wide circulation ever since.
[00:06:50] That would be 19 years before Carol claims I said something completely and crazily different.
[00:06:58] So why is he either lying or spreading willful ignorance?
[00:07:01] Because it serves his purposes.
[00:07:03] His evangelical audience will relish the idea that now the truth will show why these liberal biblical critics are flat out wrong, why these opponents of truth will be shown up for what they really are.
[00:07:15] That's an important goal for people like Scott Carroll. They are enthusiastic to spread slander and false information in support of their cause, willing to propagate easily discredited misinformation or to flat out lie in service of their truth.
[00:07:31] The irony, of course, is that it's absolutely false that this papyrus dates to between 70 and 100 CE or that it has any effect at all on our understanding of Mark or the date of its production.
[00:07:44] Why are people like this so afraid of simply being honest and fair and having reasonable disagreements?
