There is a largely overlooked internal debate among Christian apologists about approach. The gist of which is how much Christians should allow fudging, omitting, spinning, and overreach (though the pro side would never describe what it’s doing that way, which is part of the problem). A paradigmatic example is with the authorship of the Gospels: the usual Christian tack is to spin a lot of dubious arguments from distorted facts taken out of context. This is most egregiously represented by the channel Inspiring Philosophy in a video I break down in a recent episode of Modern Atheism.

By contrast, an egregiously honest approach is taken by a friend and colleague of mine, American Anglican apologist Jonathan Sheffield, such as in Was the Long Ending of Mark Original? I’ve engaged with Sheffield many times, and his approach always reflects this tack, which I would describe as “naive historicism” (kind of like naive realism), the attitude of taking extant records at face value, and simply arguing honestly from what they say. No fudging or distortion (see, for example, Shouldn’t the Romans Have Refuted the Resurrection of Jesus? and Debating the Authenticity of Daniel). He is such an outlier that it keeps me from issuing a blanket judgment on Christian apologists. And that’s remarkable enough to write about. So here I shall write about it.

Why This Matters

The obvious defect of the honest approach is that it doesn’t play well to contemporary experts, who have learned to be more distrusting of extant sources. Of course, the ultimate culmination of that approach can go all the way into a complete distrust of every ancient Christian source (for example, Markus Vinzent or Nina Livesey). And they have a case. I don’t go quite that far myself. But I do go farther into this painfully learned distrust than the “mainstream consensus” (for example, see How To Fabricate History and Stephen Carlson’s Definitive New Study of Papias). Which is mostly a Christian-driven consensus. Even if non-Christian scholars endorse or join it, it nevertheless rests on a kind of methodological gullibility that arises from confusing distrust of ancient authors with disrespecting modern Christian colleagues, an “argument from prestige” that constantly hoses or slows progress in this field (as I document, for example, in Did ‘Docetism’ Really Even Exist? and Things Fall Apart Only When You Check). An example of a “mainstreamer” who is too skeptical for Christian apologetics to work on him, but too gullible to abandon all the things Christians want the mainstream to endorse, is James Tabor (see James Tabor and the Mainstream Paul).

Believers, to stay believers, need to be more gullible than that (see all the instances of extreme gullibility I catch in Inspiring Philosophy’s case for Gospel authorship). Which is why most actual Christian apologetics is not designed, really, to persuade non-Christians to become Christians, but to keep existing Christians from leaving. It depends on a high level of audience gullibility and emotional attachment that can override their critical reason (which is why all religions fail The Outsider Test for Faith). Nonbelievers simply don’t have both of these; most don’t even have the first of them, and even less the second. And this is why most Christian apologetics (especially lately) is so bad (see Addressing the New Christian Apologetics and Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism?) and relies so much on ad hominem and bravado and other devices aimed at discouraging believers from reading or thinking about what critics actually said.

Personally, I can see two responses to this reality.

The first, the Sheffield approach, is to try and valiantly take the problem head on and simply admit the evidence is as it actually is, and then defend by some brute logic that it nevertheless still leads to Christian truth as a conclusion. This requires the audacity of pushing against a skeptic’s resistance to gullibility (a tall order), rather than trying to conceal the skeptic’s point through song-and-dance—a tactic that literally can never work on a skeptic, but can only be of any use forestalling apostasy in those who are already emotionally attached to the religion.

The other, the “mainstream” approach, is to mock, thump tables, pump chests, and distort or omit information, spin fallacies, and deploy emotionally appealing rhetoric. Which involves following the method of a Donald Trump: simply declare something true with absolute sneering confidence, and ride on its emotional impact. Don’t tell the whole truth. Sometimes maybe not even really tell the truth at all. Just make it seem like you are, or lie with enough plausible deniability that you can produce different excuses to different audiences however needed. You can distort by leaving out context or contrary data, by fudging facts, by playing word games, by replacing sound arguments with fallacies dressed up to look or sound like good arguments, and many other devices. William Lane Craig embodies the Platonic Ideal of this approach; so does Habermas, Keener, Inspiring Philosophy, Capturing Christianity, and so on. Sometimes it’s honest Christians doing all this to lie to themselves. But many (if not most) I am pretty sure know they are lying.

Objectively, only the Sheffield approach can ever really work—if it has any chance of working at all. The only reason I would say it won’t work is that Christianity is false. Were it true, this would be obviously the correct way to show it were: an honest admission of the facts with no distortion or omission, and a sincere argument by some logic from those premises to the desired conclusion. And indeed this is where the debate should be at right now. Christian apologists usually flood the field with easily debunkable tricks and rhetoric. But if they were absolutely honest and accurate about the facts, and just made an appeal from them by as robust a logic as available, then we’d be having an honest debate about what we really should be debating: how trustworthy were ancient Christians (and why should we conclude that: what evidence backs that conclusion over others), and which plausible models actually best explain the data (and, again, why should we conclude that: what evidence backs any conclusion on this).

Just an honest, complete, and accurate acknowledgement of the evidence, and an earnest appeal to your conclusion from that. Not wild conspiracy theories that even Jordan Peterson struggles to make plausible. What follows will thus be an eristic analysis of the debate itself; I will mention counter-arguments, but only in the pursuit of illustrating the choices made in how to argue a point. So, rather than arguing the point, my interest is in explicating different ways of arguing the point, and what that tells us.

Comparing the Two Approaches

After Sheffield, Michael Licona is one of the most honest Christian apologists I know (others include, e.g., Randal Rauser and Joel McDurmon; and maybe Justin Brierley). So Licona is a good test case for this question, as we can rule out rampant misrepresentation or deception (a thing we can’t do with the likes of Craig or Habermas), and just focus on the differences that remain. I’ll thus run a controlled experiment by comparing their two debates with Bart Ehrman on the same subject: the authorship of the Gospels. You can watch them yourself: Who Wrote the Gospels? Bart Ehrman vs Jonathan Sheffield and Who Wrote the Gospels? Michael Licona vs. Bart Ehrman. I won’t thoroughly fisk either debate. What I will do is highlight aspects of structure and approach that differ between them, along the lines I just developed above. (If you want a completely fisked debate entirely focusing on teaching the skills and science of debate instead, see my recent Wondering Sapiens episode, where you’ll learn why Hitchens was a master at this.)

Their sincerity places both Sheffield and Licona in the reasonable (rather than buffoon) camp of Christian apologetics. So, for example, Licona and Sheffield concede the mainstream conclusion that the Gospels were originally published anonymously, and that the names now attached to them were attached later (and for why this is correct see Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts). And both concede that the case for the traditional authors and their backstories is “not a slam dunk” (as Licona puts it). But both of them think “a good case” can at least be made. Licona structures his argument into two converging brackets of evidence: external and internal. And the external evidence consists of the universal agreement of church authors on this; the statements of Papias, Justin, and Irenaeus; and the anonymous Muratorian Canon. All of which Licona tries to argue should be taken at their word. As we’ll see, this is more similar to Sheffield’s approach, but not as well argued.

But then, for Licona, the internal evidence consists of (what I have to call) some strange assertions about the Gospels’ contents, which look more like attempts to convince himself that bad arguments are good:

• Licona says Mark talks most about Peter (this isn’t true: Matthew has more Peter material; and Luke-Acts, together, even more; and Matthew has more positive and less critical material, and is more in line with Peter’s sect, while Mark is more in line with Paul’s) and so (Licona claims) Mark “sounds like” Peter’s secretary taking dictation as Papias claimed (it doesn’t, but this was his argument); and Mark’s insertion of Aramaic is also more explicable on that theory (it’s not, each example more plausibly comes from targums, not reports of Jesus, and Matthew should be closer to the Aramaic than Mark by this reasoning; but again, this was his argument).
  • Perhaps Mark includes more words of Peter before Jesus died (Luke-Acts includes more words altogether). But that could have originated the legend that he was dictating from Peter. So this isn’t a very logical argument, especially considering all the counter-evidence. It seems a tad shady. It’s not taking the facts as they are but fudging them to get a result, and hiding the fallacy in using them this way. This smells of apologetics, an illegitimate mode of argument.
• Licona says Matthew was (reputedly) written by a tax collector, and thus “as expected” mentions more types of coins (though only barely), has more discussion of taxes (actually Luke-Acts is more concerned with money and taxes than even Matthew), and is “more Jewish” (but Peter was also Jewish, so it’s unclear how Matthew could be “more” Jewish or how that would establish authorship: Matthew’s text is more Jewish precisely in the way Peter was, while Mark’s text is more Gentile in concurrence with the mission of Paul, so his argument is pretty backwards).
  • Again, a perception of Matthew mentioning “more coins and taxes” could have originated the legend that he was the renamed tax collector (along with the name switch: in Matthew the tax collector called to the mission is renamed from Mark’s “Levi” to Matthew, though probably not for this reason, as Mark names his father, Alphaeus, while Matthew deletes this as now incongruous with renaming Levi to be the apostle Matthew; it is also the case that Matthew means “gift of god,” referring to the portion of a man’s income after taxation, and thus a more mythically suitable name for a tax collector joining the Christian mission).
  • So Licona isn’t making a very logical argument here, especially considering all the counter-evidence (e.g. Luke-Acts is more about money and taxes; Matthew never identifies the disciple as writing it; Matthew copies Mark verbatim which is not the behavior of a witness; etc.). Licona is again twisting rather than accepting the evidence, and inventing implications rather than finding them, and passing them off as sound with the projecting of emotional confidence rather than proof. This all turns away doubters because it’s shady; it only sounds persuasive to believers. Which signals who this argument is really for.
• Luke’s “we” passages in Acts imply its author was there for that section of the text (not really, but that’s his argument), especially as those are “among the most detailed scenes in Acts” (the qualifier “among” sort of kills his own argument there, by admitting to counter-examples disproving the reliability of the inference); plus all the “accurate geography” (which actually any fabricator would also have access to and so is not in fact telling of anything). This skips over all the complex reality of the scholarship casting this argument into doubt and thus shouldn’t even be used as an argument. So why use it?
  • Licona also slips into a fallacy of appeal to authority here by citing the biased (and infamously gullible) Christian apologist Craig Keener claiming a “majority” of scholars agree the author of Luke was a companion of Paul as legend had it (yet any survey of contemporary experts on Acts specifically seems to signal the opposite: only gullible apologists believe this, not objective specialists). This is again dubious methodologically. So why do it?
• John “sounds like” a Jewish insider with eyewitness information (a circular argument that presumes the conclusion of authenticity as its premise), and “the beloved” is probably the author (a fact actually denied by the authors of the text, who claim he wrote something else that they claim to have used as a source), and “John son of Zebedee” is the most plausible of the ones named (but the author deliberately unnamed himself, ruling that out; and the only “beloved” in the text, and the deliberately intended source-author, is actually Lazarus: see OHJ, §10.7).
  • This plays so fast and loose with evidence and logic it’s honestly hard to explain why Licona thinks it worth his while. Matthew is the Jewish Gospel, not John; John is actually more anti-Jewish. And one didn’t have to be Jewish to know about Judaism and have debated with Jews; nor did one have to be alive in the 30s AD to be Jewish in the 100s. And the Beloved is demonstrably Lazarus, not anyone named John; and the authors wanted you to know that, because they avoided anything connecting him to John while dropping boulders linking him to Lazarus (a fictional person). And if that weren’t enough, the text actually says a team of authors wrote John (“we”) by using a lost (and possibly imaginary) text they claimed to have from the Beloved, thus conclusively ruling him out as the actual author of our text now called the Gospel of John.
  • Licona is thus constructing a mere facade of an argument here, concealing from his audience everything wrong with it, like North Korea putting fake vegetables in a window to fool journalists into thinking grocery stores exist. Why do that? It can never work on unbelievers. So Licona can’t be making these statements to persuade unbelievers. He must have some other objective in mind.

To the external argument Ehrman correctly replied that those later authors (writing a hundred years after-the-fact) are just all repeating the same legend, and not actually in-the-know. He means there is no independent evidence that this multiply repeated legend is true. Because it’s actually just one source, a single unsourced hearsay. So counting up how many people repeated it is not epistemically relevant. Likewise there being no other legend can’t signify anything because we have no reason to expect there to be another one. Papias, for example, is just repeating the same spurious legends as everyone else (or originating them!). Papias identifies no source for any of these claims, much less verifies their reliability, or even thinks to ask his source (whoever that was) how they knew any of it—i.e. recording their source(s), and their source(s) sources, and so on down to some confirmed eyewitness account (the primary source), the actual account we need but don’t have. One cannot circularly presume this was not a spurious legend to argue it was not a spurious legend. “Lots of people heard the same legend” is not evidence it’s true.

Licona’s case thus, for all its honesty, remains a bit dodgy: it tries to slide under the rug all the problems with it, its fallacies, and even avoidance of addressing (much less meeting) its obvious refutations. It looks a bit too much like a song and dance, and too little like a serious scholarly argument. Licona is struggling to convince himself as much as the audience. He is omitting information and making unjustified leaps of reasoning and hoping no one notices (not even himself). Sheffield does not omit that information, but owns it, and instead explicitly defends his inferences from the facts, as problematic as they are, rather than merely declaring those inferences with an overconfidence that is hoped will alone persuade.

The Licona approach looks like a rational argument, but is actually an emotional appeal, not a rational one. Projecting confidence, omitting data, skipping over flaws in reasoning, are methods that count on emotional resonance winning the argument, rather than critical evidence-based reasoning. This is rationalization, not reasoning. By contrast, Sheffield sticks to rational appeals, however resultingly weak we may still find them to be. Sheffield actually believes his case is strong and can’t be threatened by putting back in evidence he left out; while Licona seems to know he needs more juice than truth—that if he does not stretch the truth, his case cannot survive; so stretch it he does. Sheffield does not stretch any fact or inference; he only stretches his confidence in them. He thinks his weak case is stronger than it is; Licona doesn’t, so he has to cover it up so no one notices. For all their overlap, these are two different approaches to apologetics.

The Sheffield Approach

Sheffield’s case abandons all the dubious internal arguments and leans entirely on a thoroughly constructed external argument, going beyond just repeating that “everyone agreed” with these named authors being the correct ones. Sheffield instead presents Augustine’s case against the charge of Faustus challenging Gospel authorship, by arguing that we can make the same arguments for authenticity here as can be made for the authentic works of, say, Plato or Hippocrates (over against forgeries in their name, for example). That isn’t exactly true. We don’t have their names attached to the original editions, they do not describe themselves as the authors nor even present these texts as authored by witnesses at all, we cannot establish they were written when those authors were still alive, and we have no authentic material from them to compare as to style. But Sheffield grants all that. He latches onto only one line of argument instead: that ex hypothesi these books were personally known to everyone as by these authors, especially in their own churches where they composed and first deposited and published them. Sheffield then adduces all the claims made that these churches had indeed handed this tradition down unbroken since then. And therefore it is simply improbable that new names could be attached to them without everyone (or at least someone) crying foul.

This is an oral lore argument, and is internally valid. “If” that oral tradition existed, and “if” it began with the authors and their personal congregations, and “if” it was maintained and defended widely and consistently all that time, and “if” objections to the introduction of new names would be preserved for us to hear of them (whether directly, or indirectly through rebuttals to them), then it is the case that these names are more likely than not authentic—and likewise the core of their backstories. That is, it need not be true that everything said about these authors was true, but it would have to be in some core respect true, e.g. Mark really would have to have been something like Peter’s secretary, and Matthew an apostle, and Luke a companion of Paul, and the authors of John companions of the Beloved (and not just alleging themselves to have found a mysterious lost book written by him that they purportedly used as a source). The problem with Sheffield’s argument is not in its formula, but in its naivety: it simply takes as given that every “if” here is true. Of course, that is what every skeptic doubts. But he’s not hiding that from them. He’s making the argument openly even on that challenge. Because, really, that’s the only honest argument to make: you simply just have to believe ancient Christians a lot more than skeptics normally would, and thus openly try to persuade skeptics to be less skeptical of what they said.

The skeptic (as in, the mainstream historian) is coming at this from a different hypothesis: that when the Gospels were written, no one claimed to be their author, and no one knew anything about the later-assigned names or their legendary backstories; they were, like all Jewish novels and scriptures deliberately anonymous (like also many Greco-Roman novels and myths). No one really knew who wrote Exodus or 1 & 2 Kings, for example (or Tobit or Joseph and Asenath or the Biblical Antiquities) because no one claimed to. Later names were sometimes assigned them (e.g. Moses for Exodus, Jeremiah for Kings) but not credibly, and in any case, their authors chose not to be identified—which makes it unlikely they were identified at the time; likewise, assigned identities came long after the alleged authors were dead, and anyone who knew them—and so, long after anyone could gainsay this attribution (and precisely when they would be most vulnerable to the woozle effect and other illusory truth effects, by assuming that whoever published the attributions “must” have a reliable knowledge of it that can’t be challenged, and having no evidence with which to challenge it).

In the mainstream hypothesis the Gospels were not yet known to be by any specific person even by the time Marcion compiled the first New Testament. The vague belief that “apostles” wrote them had by then arisen, but not who. And accordingly, Marcion had by that point no idea that Luke’s Gospel was attributed to someone named “Luke” (not even such as he would be compelled to argue for or against) or anyone at all. There is no knowledge of their having names until after Marcion. In fact the names appear to have all been assigned by the editor of the anti-Marcionite New Testament. Who likely also faked the prefaces claiming made-up backstories for them, spinning or originating the legends later orthodoxists then repeated.

The place of Papias in all this is hard to nail down, but that’s then the kind of thing one would debate “in a debate” about this. Ehrman, for example, correctly shows why Papias might not even be talking about our Gospels, and in any case is merely repeating speculations or urban legends anyway (Papias does not cite or name any authority at all), so here we might be seeing the origination of those naming myths germinating right before our eyes. But one can just as easily argue that Papias is repeating myths begun by the anti-Marcionite editors (possibly, as I point out in Hitler Homer Bible Christ, from a commentary on that Fourfold Gospel by Aristion). But either is possible.

My point here is not to defend this position but to explain it: if the mainstream hypothesis is true, then all the “ifs” of Sheffield’s argument are false (as recently explained by C.J. Cornthwaite), and it is no longer the case that “these names are more likely than not authentic—and likewise the core of their backstories.” So that’s really what Sheffield wants to debate: whether we should just believe what Christians said. He thus endeavors to argue that the skeptic should accept these ifs. And he doesn’t try to trick them into believing them with distorted accounts of the evidence or handwavy inferences; he literally just says you should believe them, because, why not? How, for example, could the inventors of these traditions get everyone to fall in line and not doubt or disagree with it unless it were true? He’s forcing you to present a better theory than his. And that’s how a debate like this should go. (To see this approach played out, watch Sheffield-Ehrman or read Sheffield-Carrier.)

This may seem to you a gullible and hopeless approach. Which is true. But it is, in fact, the only truly honest way to argue this.

Everything else is shady. Which actually has the opposite effect on skeptics than intended: trying to trick us with distorted facts and concealed defects only makes you look more wrong than before you tried debating the point. It’s practically telling skeptics to not believe any of it. Which is why I suspect this more “usual” apologetical approach is really not designed to convert anyone (it can only drive people away from, not toward, the Christian mission). It is, rather, a propaganda control-doctrine: its purpose is to prevent Christians leaving. Because it leans on emotional appeal rather than sound critical reason, and that works (and only works) on someone already inclined to believe, because of emotional attachments or identity threat.

This is why skeptics clock that as shady. Especially skeptics who used to be believers and thus had been falling for those stunts a lot—and now, having escaped, are disgusted by it all. You’re not going to win them back by doing it to them again.

How This Flips the Script

I’ve mentioned before my growing disdain for debate as a medium. It seems more and more with every passing year to become just a machine for rhetoric, propaganda, and emotional manipulation (see How Pseudo-Rationality Grounds Conservative Worldviews). So it is refreshing to see Sheffield turn these tables.

With Licona, I feel like I’m being manipulated, with all the distortion and omission and over-confident over-inferencing. It’s a perfect case of what usually happens with all apologetics: as soon as you put back in all the information left out, it falls apart—and so obviously that the concealment looks or feels deliberate. I feel like I have to wipe the slime off afterward. And I roll my eyes at having to reverse yet another travesty with honesty. It’s tiresome. And this is even with Licona, one of the most honest apologists there is. So you can only imagine my moral repulsion at the more typical Christian apologist.

But Sheffield actually makes this happen with Ehrman. You can easily see the flaw in Sheffield’s case, because he doesn’t hide it. “You’re being too gullible.” That’s pretty much the sum of any reply needed. The rest is commentary. But Ehrman tries to rebut this instead with misinformation. Which makes Ehrman look like the untrustworthy apologist who’s got the wrong end of the stick. Which is hard to do. I won’t fisk the whole thing but just give one example that continued back and forth between them in this debate: Ehrman tried to argue against the traditional authorship by insisting the apostles were all illiterate day laborers. Which isn’t true even in the myth. And isn’t plausible historically either.

Nor is Ehrman’s response even logical. Because tradition did not say “the apostles” wrote the Gospels, but a literate assistant (Mark) specifically hired for the job by Peter (and hiring people to write things for you back then was common) and a highly educated medical scientist (Luke) attending Paul, neither as witnesses to Jesus themselves (note that the middle class often achieved high educations—Galen and Lucian are famous examples). While the only disciples assigned Gospels are both depicted as literate: Matthew, as a tax contractor, could easily have had the requisite education, or completed it by the time he composed; and the best scholarship confirms the Beloved was certainly originally meant to be Lazarus (who was in any case certainly a follower), who enjoyed a singular tomb burial, implying wealth and station (in a suburb of Jerusalem, where Greek education was available), and the authors of John claim he was literate enough to have “written” the account they used as one of their sources.

Even beyond that, most of the disciples’ professions and education aren’t described so we cannot make assertions about it. Many slaves and freed slaves had advanced educations. It made them worth more, and more useful; and they’d use their educations to run businesses after being freed, which their former masters collected a royalty on, further incentivizing funding their education (and we have examples of authors who were former slaves, like Epictetus). And many elites could have been among them as well. The Gospels even say so. Joseph of Arimathea. Nicodemus. Even the wife of a royal procurator, who would in such contexts be a literate elite herself (as men then usually married wives of equal standing, which is why elite fathers paid for the education of their daughters), and would certainly know literate people to bring into the fold. But every relevant study of ancient literacy (including Harris and Cribiore, both of whom I studied under at Columbia; and Hezser for Judea) establishes about 10% of the population was literate, and the Gospels say there were actually some 70 or even a 120 close followers of Jesus in his lifetime, which just on average predicts 7 to 12 potential authors. Most of the disciples are also not described as day laborers (in fact, not even one of them ever is), but businessmen—not day laborers, but professional fishermen who owned a considerable amount of fixed capital (boats, nets, houses).

Yes, we can doubt any of this is true. My point is that Ehrman is not responding to Sheffield’s point (tradition says the actual authors were credibly literate, so you can’t just gainsay that) and is ignoring historical fact: plenty of adequately literate personnel would have been available, even among the disciples (at an average expected rate of 1–2 members), much more apostles (at an average expected rate of 7–12 members) or later attendants and converts (as tradition held Mark and Luke to be, exemplifying the point). Even if we used a lower percentage (for example, if we mix urban with rural populations, average literacy between them may have been 3% rather than 10%), that’s still at least 2 apostles (curiously exactly as many claimed) and at least 8 or more among first-generation converts (again, like Mark and Luke—just as tradition said—and we know there were others: Paul, Clement, the author of Hebrews, even members of Paul’s entourage and the congregations who wrote to him). It should also be obvious that Jesus would specifically pick the most educated people he could convert for his disciples—and needed literate converts, if he wanted to be taken seriously. So we shouldn’t be applying the average literacy rate to that group anyway.

Ehrman is also wrong to say there were no Greeks or Greek schools in Galilee. Sepphoris was a full city and had a Greek (indeed even some pagan) population and thus would have had Greek schools, and it was just a two hour walk from Nazareth. Even more so Tiberias, just a few hours walk from Cana, itself just two hours from Nazareth. And even more so Ptolemais, a day’s walk from Cana. We have Greek inscriptions from first century Magdala, Mary’s supposed hometown, just a few hours walk from Capernaum. The Gospels even have Jesus preach around Tyre, which certainly had schools, and through the Decapolis alongside the Dead Sea, an explicitly Greek territory full of Greeks and Greek schools. Galilee was also traversed by pilgrims, clients, merchants, and officers from all over the Greek Diaspora, and from the neighboring Decapolis. Likewise Greek slaves and freedmen, who’d have been hired-in specifically for their expertise in Greek. Galilee was more Greek than Judea. And had more cities and urban sophistication.

There just is no way to argue “these traditions can’t be true because all (!) the disciples were illiterate day laborers.” That’s not only illogical, it’s provably false. It’s even worse than I am making out, as we actually expect most of the disciples, especially Peter, to have been formally educated Rabbis; but I’ve made that point elsewhere, with citations to scholarship now in Obsolete Paradigm (index, “illiteracy”). Ether way the effect is that Sheffield won this argument rather decisively. He made Ehrman look like the untrustworthy fact-fudging apologist. And he accomplished that by simply sticking to being honest and informed. That was an own-goal for Ehrman (he should not have attempted such a bad argument). But it was enabled by Sheffield’s honest and studied approach. Licona seemed more on the back foot over this, and too in the weeds defending less plausible premises he should never have attempted in the first place (yet which Sheffield methodically avoided).

For example, in his own debate with Ehrman, Licona burned too much clock arguing that other historical biographies were anonymous—a completely false claim that (I suspect) is the result of Licona gullibly trusting the Christian apologetics grapevine, but never thinking to check if it was true. It isn’t (see Dispelling the “Anonymous Sources Are Kosher” Argument). So here Licona becomes Ehrman: the guy disinforming his audience with uninformed errors confidently asserted as verified facts—despite, evidently, never actually having verified it, making this borderline lying. As soon as you get caught doing this you’ve made your position worse—you are anti-selling Christianity this way. Licona is doing the atheist’s work for us here. It’s an own goal. If he adopted the Sheffield approach (taking care to be sure your information is right first, then not fudging or hiding anything at the podium, and earnestly arguing for trusting what the sources say), he’d never end up in that self-defeating mess.

Conclusion

As I said, I won’t fisk everything said in these two debates. This is just a general picture of how they fundamentally differ in approach, and what this means for the prospect of any Christian mission. Licona’s approach will be worse than a failure, because you cannot “trick” doubters, and just trying to makes them distrust your entire religion, while onlookers who observe all this will trust it even less (for more examples of this see On Getting Confused by the Idea That Atheism Predicts Nothing and Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism? or, for examples of the worst cases, see Addressing the New Christian Apologetics, or my series on Timothy Keller). By contrast, Sheffield’s approach will only fail because it isn’t convincing—not because it is trying to trick anyone. Because it isn’t. Which I now realize is what makes it respectable, leaving a better impression of Christian earnestness rather than a worrying impression of Christian shadiness. Maybe that’s still doomed (after all, Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory). But it’s at least honest—and thus not annoying.