Category Archives: News

Peter Williams lectures on the historical reliability of the gospels

This is a lecture I found from British historian Dr. Peter J. Williams.

Here’s the main lecture: (54 minutes)

And here’s the Q&A: (9 minutes)

About Peter Williams:

Peter J. Williams is the Warden (CEO) of Tyndale House and a member of the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. He received his MA, MPhil and PhD, in the study of ancient languages related to the Bible from Cambridge University. After his PhD, he was on staff in the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University (1997–1998), and thereafter taught Hebrew and Old Testament there as Affiliated Lecturer in Hebrew and Aramaic and as Research Fellow in Old Testament at Tyndale House, Cambridge (1998–2003). From 2003 to 2007 he was on the faculty of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he became a Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Deputy Head of the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy. In July 2007 he became the youngest Warden in the history of Tyndale House. He also retains his position as an honorary Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

Summary of the lecture:

  • What if the stories about Jesus are legendary?
  • were the gospels transmitted accurately?
  • were the gospels written in the same place as where the events happened?
  • do the gospel authors know the customs and locations where the events happened?
  • do the gospels use the right names for the time and place where the events took place?
  • do the gospels disambiguate people’s names depending on how common those names were?
  • how do the New Testament gospels compare to the later gnostic gospels?
  • how do the gospels refer to the main character? How non-Biblical sources refer to Jesus?
  • how does Jesus refer to himself in the gospels? do the later Christians refer to him that way?
  • how does Jesus teach? do later Christians teach the same way?
  • why didn’t Jesus say anything about early conflicts in the church (the Gentiles, church services)?
  • did the writers of the gospels know the places where the events took place?
  • how many places are named in the gospels? how about in the later gnostic gospels?
  • are the botanical details mentioned in the gospels accurate? how about the later gnostic gospels?

And here are the questions from the audience:

  • how what about the discrepancies in the resurrection narratives that Bart Ehrman is obsessed with?
  • what do you think of the new 2011 NIV translation (Peter is on the ESV translation committee)?
  • how did untrained, ordinary men produce complex, sophisticated documents like the gospels?
  • is oral tradition a strong enough bridge between the events and the writers who interviewed the eyewitnesses?
  • what does the name John mean?
  • why did the gospel writers wait so long before writing their gospels?
  • do you think that Matthew and Luke used a hypothetical source which historians call “Q”?
  • which gospel do critical historians trust the least and why?

I really enjoyed watching this lecture. He’s getting some of this material from Richard Bauckham’s awesome book “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”, so if you aren’t familiar with it, you can get an idea of what’s in it. Peter Williams is a lot of fun to listen to – an excellent speaker.

And you can listen to the Peter Williams vs Bart Ehrman debate. That link contains a link to the audio of the debate as well as my snarky summary. It’s very snarky.

If Republicans take the House and Senate, could they impeach Joe Biden?

According to RealClearPolitics, polling for the mid-term Senate races is projecting 47 Republicans, 46 Democrats, and 7 toss-up seats. The House projections are showing 219 Republicans, 182 Democrats and 34 toss-ups. So it’s possible that Republicans win the Senate and the House. If they did, would they launch an impeachment of Joe Biden? On what grounds?

Here is a wonderful article by David Harsanyi, writing for The Federalist, which talks about possible grounds for impeaching Joe Biden:

  • Illegal student loan bailout
  • Going after parents with law enforcement
  • Hunter Biden corruption
  • 13 Americans dead from Afghanistan retreat
  • Using FBI as secret police to silence political enemies

Illegal student loan bailout:

Biden again knowingly subverted the will of Congress when he transferred loan payments for millions of affluent students to taxpayers in hopes of affecting the 2022 midterms. The president does not possess the statutory power to “forgive” or “cancel” loans. Just ask congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi, who correctly noted that “[p]eople think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness — he does not.” He did it anyway. Unilaterally. The president used the emergency powers found in the HEROES Act, passed after 9/11 to help U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, to justify his decree.

Going after parents with law enforcement:

In October 2021 the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the Biden administration requesting the FBI investigate school board protests, offering a handful of alleged acts of criminality as justification to treat millions of parents as potential “domestic terrorism” threats. The letter uses this phrase (twice) to provide the administration with the justification to trigger a PATRIOT Act investigation. Then again, all of it was coordinated. We learned later, through a FOIA request, that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona had likely solicited and helped with the verbiage of the letter. Garland, who regularly ignores violence and threats directed at conservatives, acquiesced and directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys’ offices to investigate parents.

Hunter Biden corruption:

[The GOP should] scrutinize whether the president benefited financially from his brother’s and son Hunter’s leveraging of the family name and the United States government to extract millions from Chinese and Ukrainian energy concerns—for which there is plenty of circumstantial evidence. We already know Biden lied about the extent of his knowledge regarding Hunter’s “work.” And, in a functioning democracy, it is imperative we know everything about the president’s finances.

13 Americans dead from Afghanistan retreat:

While they’re at it, it would also be nice if we could learn more about the chaotic and inept Afghanistan pullout that left 13 service members dead and thousands of Americans stranded in theocratistan. Did Biden dismiss intelligence reports warning about a swift collapse of our Afghan allies for political considerations? Why did the administration mislead the public about the number of citizens and green-card holders who were stranded? We have yet to hear a coherent explanation for why the administration handed a list of allied names to the Taliban. Nor do we know the story behind that face-saving drone strike that ended up killing 10 innocent Afghans, seven of them children. Let’s find out.

Using FBI as secret police to silence political enemies:

Maybe they could also get to the bottom of the FBI’s role in limiting speech on social media platforms during the 2020 election. The White House, after all, has proven to be quite comfortable attempting to dictate speech. In July 2021, the White House admitted it was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” The White House not-so-subtly threatened social media platforms to suppress certain political opinions and stories. Under what constitutional power does the president get to dictate what should be considered mis- or dis-information? And under what power does Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas get to create an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board?” How pervasive is the law enforcement agency’s contact with media companies?

What people didn’t like about Trump was that he reminded them of the hot bad boys they were attracted to who treated them badly. That’s bad, but it’s not impeachment-level bad. On the other hand, Biden and his corrupt regime are impeachment-level bad. I’d like to see the Republicans spend the next two years getting to the bottom of all of these stories. So I hope everyone votes Republican in the House and Senate races next month.

Medical organizations write to Biden DOJ and Big Tech to demand censorship of conservatives

I think everyone remembers how the Biden administration Department of Education joined forces with the National School Boards Association to demand that parents who disagree with anti-white racism, pedophilia and transgender indoctrination be investigated for “domestic terrorism”. The Christian Post reported on that story, if you need a refresher:

Newly released emails reveal that a controversial letter likening parents to domestic terrorists for raising concerns about the material their children were exposed to in public schools was crafted at the request of U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

A chain of emails released by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education on Tuesday documented a conversation between two National School Boards Association members, Marnie Maldonado and Kristi Swett.

[…]The Sept. 29 letter sought to label parents as “angry mobs” for speaking out against masking their children at schools and raising concerns about materials promoting trans activism, pedophilia, and critical race theory. Parents’ disagreements with school board members at meetings were to be classified by federal agencies as “heinous actions [that] could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

Well, now major medical organizations are demanding that anyone who shares public materials, such as marketing videos and public web pages, that children’s hospitals put out about the gender-bending services they offer also be punished by the DOJ.

Here’s the story from the Daily Caller:

The American Medical Association (AMA) sent Attorney General Merrick Garland a letter Monday calling on him to “investigate the organizations, individuals, and entities coordinating, provoking, and carrying out bomb threats and threats of personal violence against children’s hospitals and physicians across the U.S.”

It’s not just the DOJ they want to punish conservatives who just share public materials online. They also want Big Tech to censor them:

Our organizations have called on technology companies to do more to prevent this practice on digital platforms, and we now urge your office to take swift action to investigate and prosecute all organizations, individuals, and entities responsible.”

The first thing I thought when I read this story is “Did the Biden administration cause these organizations to write this letter to the Biden administration?” because that’s what they did with the NSBA letter.

One thing for sure. We have to be very careful with handing our children off to public schools and hospitals. They are not working for parents any more. They would rather mutilate a child, than address the underlying psychological problems that children are facing.

Want to know what children’s hospitals really think about parents?

Just read this article from The Post Millennial:

A father in New York state is fighting for his child to be allowed to grow up. The child’s mother, the medical industry, and the court are pressing for the 11-year-old to be permitted to take drugs that would disrupt puberty, potentially stunting her development and leading to sterility.

The father to the middle-schooler, whose is not named in order to protect his family, has been instructed by the court to call his child by the new, chosen name, new preferred pronouns, and to refer to the child as being of the new, chosen gender. Neither parent is allowed, under court order, to talk to the child about “anything gender related,” he said.

That order came down in April, and the mother demanded full custody. This would give her the right to medically transition the child without the father’s consent. That request, along with the mother’s request for a court of protection against , and sole use of the family’s home, were both rejected by the court. The parents are seeking divorce, and this issue is the primary disagreement between them.

This story reminds me of the previous story I wrote about, concerning the senior software engineer at Apple. His Blackrock  executive feminist wife divorced him and decided to trans their kid. He presented a lot of evidence to the judges, but they disregarded his evidence, and stripped him of custody. You really have to be careful about marrying a feminist these days. They will divorce you, trans your kids, and cut off all your parental rights. It’s happening all the time now.