Thanks for sharing this, Uncle Onion.
Strobel is very typical for a range of apologists who is an evangelical and writes for evangelicals. Critics have, I think, been most annoyed by his hypocrisy in setting himself up as a "mock skeptic" who may satisfy his evangelical audience, but a more knowledgable person will see some very obvious counterarguments and rebuttals that Strobel does not put into the mouth of this skeptic.
I will respond to some of the sentences you quoted from his book.
First, let me note I mentioned Apollonius simply as one of the best known of scores of more or less mythological miracle workers in the centuries around Jesus' time. Strobel seems to assume critics consider the legends about Apollonius credible. The whole point is that they are not.
I needed specifies, not generalities. "Go ahead," I said. "Do your best to shoot it down." "OK. Well, firsts his biographer, Philostratus. was writing a cen- tury and a half after Apollonius lived, whereas the gospels were writ- ten within a generation of Jesus. The closer the proximity to the event, the less chance there is for legendary development, for error, or for memories to get confused.The last sentence is correct. Strobel (ok, I know it is really an "interview" but I apply this to Strobel himself) is simply begging the question when he asserts that the gosepels were written within a generation of Jesus. We don't really know when Jesus lived, if at all. We can assume he died around 30. If the synoptic gospels were written around 60, as evangelicals seem to claim, we are talking next generation. Of course, scholars date the synoptics to after the destruction of Jerusalem 70 AD, probably closer to 90 AD. Considering the havoc and destruction, and the time passing, nobody who had ever met the historical Jesus would be likely to be alive. It is also extremely notable that no gospel author even asserts to have any first hand knowledge about these events. They don't even claim to have talked to eyewitnesses. And the earliest source, Paul, did not know about any historical Jesus at all. If anything, neither is very credible. Of course, as we will see later, Philostratus was source critical and gave his sources, something the gospel authors did not. So, even if Philostratus is a bit later, compared to the events he writes about, this fact at least compensates for the extra decades.
"Another thing is that we have four gospels, corroborated with Paul, that can be cross-checked to some degree with nonbiblical authors, like Josephus and others. With Apollonius we're dealing with one source. Plus the gospels pass the standard tests used to assess his- torical reliability, but we can't say that about the stories of Apollonius.This is mere handwaving. When we compare the gospels with themselves and the little we have of "nonbiblical" sources, we see they are hopelessly out to lunch. How this should support the gospels' historicity is beyond me.
"On top of that, Philostratus was commissioned by an empress to write a biography in order to dedicate a temple to Apolionius. She was a follower of Apollonius, so Philostratus would have had a financial motive to embellish the story and give the empress what she wanted. On the other hand, the writers of the gospel had nothing to gain-and much to lose-by writing Jesus' story, and they didn't have ulterior motives such as financial gain.Since we know nothing of the gospel authors, it is anybody's guess what their motives are. How can he know they did not have finanical gain in mind? We do know that Luke was writing specifically to a person named Theophilus, obviously a well-to-do man. How can knowledge about the history behind a work make it less credible? In many respects, the gospel texts could just as well have fallen down from the Moon.
That said, anyone dealing with religious ideas knows that financial gain is far from being the only motivation. Strongly religious people have every interest in convincing people to accept their ideas. We have a few such people on this board. Nobody pays them very much. Yet, will you take their claims at face value?
"Also, the way Philostratus writes is very different than the gospels. The gospels have a very confident eyewitness perspective, as if they had a camera there. But Philostratus includes a lot of tentative statements, like 'It is reported that or 'Some say this young girl had died; others say she was just ill.' To his credit, he backs off and treats stories like stories.This is an amazing line of argumentation. Philostratus is source critical. He gives his sources, and explains how he has obtained his information, and how he values it. Obviously a much better source for reliable information than the gospels, which may be pure fiction for all we know.
"And here's a biggie: Philostratus was writing in the early third century in Cappadocia, where Christianity had already been present for quite a while. So any borrowing would have been done by him, not by Christians. You can imagine the followers of Apollonius see- ing Christianity as competition and saying, 'Oh, yeah? Well, Apollo- nius did the same things Jesus did!' Sort of like, 'My dad can beat up your dad!'Sure, the Apollonian legends are vulnerable to the claim that since they are later than the Jesus legends, they have copied them. Those who know how small part of a big tradition Jesus/Appolonnia was, knows this is unlikely to be the case.
And the Jesus legend is of course very vulnerable to claims that it had stolen from even earlier legends. Jesus is far from being the first god/hero who died and was resurrected in the spring! Isis/Osiris myths from ancient Egypt is but one. And it seems very likely that some Christian rituals, especially the Eucharist, was borrowed from Mithraism and other mystery cults of the day. Naturally, Strobel's readers know very little about the complex religious situation in the first few centuries, and how Christianity fits right in there with the other beliefs, neither more nor less credible historically than any other.
"One final point. I'm willing to admit that Apollonius may have done some amazing things or at least tricked people into thinking he did.Actually, skeptics are likely to disbelieve Apollonius legends, too. Strobel has it upside down.
But that doesn't in any way compromise the evidence for Jesus. Even if you grant the evidence for Apollonius, you're still left with having to deal with the evidence for Christ.To which one can only respond: WHAT evidence for Christ?
- Jan
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Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. [Ambrose Bierce, The Devil´s Dictionary, 1911]