Bill Pratt | June 14, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt If there is one thing I have heard dozens of times from skeptics, it is that eyewitness testimony cannot be trusted. Skeptics constantly point this out to me. Why? Because this is the the best way, in their estimation, to discredit the eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life recorded in the New [...]
Bill Pratt | March 29, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt If it could be conclusively shown that the gospel accounts of Jesus were literally cribbed from pre-existing pagan sources, it would be quite damaging to the credibility of the gospels. As I was re-reading Geisler and Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist the other day, I was [...]
Bill Pratt | March 22, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt Perhaps you’ve read or heard that the New Testament (NT) books were produced at the same time as other Christian writings, and that these other writings were unfairly and unceremoniously kicked out of the NT canon. Is this true? New Testament professor Michael J. Kruger says no. In his blog post, [...]
Bill Pratt | June 4, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Bart Ehrman, the agnostic New Testament scholar, who is no friend to Christianity, is back again with a new book called Did Jesus Exist? I have not read the book yet, but I came across an article written by Ehrman a couple months ago in the Huffington Post that is worth [...]
Bill Pratt | December 27, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Although the author did not record his name within the text itself (a common practice in the ancient world), the first book found in the New Testament (NT) has historically been attributed to the writing of Matthew, a tax collector and one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. Although some NT [...]
Bill Pratt | November 15, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Some of the atheists that have commented on the blog have expressed skepticism at the existence of Jesus, claiming that there is very little or even no good evidence for him being a real historical figure. My response has been to point out that Jesus is the most well attested historical [...]
Bill Pratt | April 8, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman wrote in his book, Misquoting Jesus, that his Christian beliefs began to fall apart when he realized that there was a mistake, an error, in the Gospel of Mark. Now, I think that the alleged mistake is not a mistake, but let’s assume for a [...]
Bill Pratt | January 6, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, we discussed Simon Greenleaf’s conclusion that the Gospel writers’ testimony about Jesus Christ should be considered true, based on the canons of legal evidence, an area in which he was an undisputed expert. Some skeptics, however, have argued that the standards for judging the credibility [...]
Bill Pratt | January 4, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt I recently read a short book entitled The Testimony of the Evangelists by Simon Greenleaf. Greenleaf was one of the most respected American jurists of the nineteenth century. He taught law at Harvard University and wrote a judicial classic, Treatise on the Law of Evidence. This work was used as a [...]
Bill Pratt | December 12, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt For the last several years, a lot of hay has been made concerning the Gospel of Thomas, an alleged fifth Gospel only discovered in 1945. A few New Testament scholars have tried to make the case that the views espoused in Thomas represent a competing strain of Christianity that was suppressed [...]
