XFiles Friday: “I was a 98-pound weakling…”
October 31, 2008 — Deacon Duncan(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 11.)
We’re ready to start on Geisler and Turek’s top ten excuses reasons for believing that the New Testament writers were telling the truth. Chapter 11 opens with the following epigraph:
“Why would the apostles lie?…If they lied, what was their motive, what did they get out of it? What they got out of it was misunderstanding, rejection, persecution, torture, and martyrdom. Hardly a list of perks!”
—PETER KREEFT
Kreeft builds an argument out of an implied false dichotomy (either the apostles were deliberately lying or they were telling the truth), a selective list (carefully omitting any mention of what they received from their followers), and a distorted rendition of the actual history of the early Christian church. But the fully-developed version doesn’t appear until later on in Geisler and Turek’s list, so this week we’ll content ourselves with the first item on the list: “The New Testament writers included embarrassing details about themselves.”