So, I was a missionary kid. My parents were lay missionary teachers, not evangelizers. But they believed ... though it's sometimes tough to figure out what.
That said, let me tell you how luminescent your research and writing are for me. Deep down they reveal to me that "faith" is ... a method of control. (For example, I discovered that Thich Nhat Hanh does not use the word.) Thus, to notice where "faith" is foisted on us. From so many directions: faith in the "rule of law" or in Coca-Cola's longing for global unity or .....
By the way, your takeaway sentences carry a punch: "central doctrine of the faith is a Latin gloss that worked its way into the margin and then into the page" / Every church that bars women from the pulpit is running on the forgeries" / "God is the operator of the procedure and the temple is the clinic"
But bear in mind that you're often preaching to the choir. And, as is often the case, you're also preaching and writing to yourself. The latter is the most honest - no?
Alan, thanks for this. Growing up as a missionary kid put you close enough to the machinery to hear it running, and that shows in how you read the piece.
The point about faith as a control mechanism holds, and it isn't confined to religion. Rule of law, national story, a soft drink company singing about world harmony, they all run the same play at the moment they need you to stop asking. Where I'd add something is that once a religion starts working that way, what's operating is an ideology claiming descent from Christianity or Islam rather than the thing itself.
The choir line made me laugh. I usually say preaching to the converted, and I take it you haven't come across the pieces where I've said a few times that I'm no anti-Christian activist. The death of religion wouldn't solve much and I'm not after it. A good portion of my readers are Christian, a few are practicing Jews, and I take some pride in that. If someone walks away from a piece of mine with their faith stronger than before, that's fine by me. (You might be interested in this article, if you haven't read it already: https://www.theunholytruth.com/p/why-the-death-of-religion-wouldnt )
On writing to myself, yes and no. My working principle is that scholarly consensus comes first. Do I always agree with it? Of course not. I reach my own conclusions, especially where the question has a heavy subjective element. For example, I'll write about what scholars make of Paul as a man, and I might add what I think of that consensus, but I'll never write a piece designed to convince you that Paul was the man I personally believe he was. Armchair scholars do that constantly. Keeping the two apart is what I mean by being honest with yourself, and it's the difference between reporting and selling opinions as facts.
And I hope you'll keep commenting. A missionary childhood gives you a view of this world that no amount of reading gets you, and the details you've already dropped in here are worth more than most of what I could dig up in a library. Bring more of them.
You devote more time (including editing :-) to my comments that I deserve - thank you.
I have a project on a parallel path to yours -- not to convince anyone, but to offer a vision, a pathway. It's not for me, but it's for me. And it's not to salvation, but to awareness. (Does that summarize your thoughts on "writing to myself"?)
It's something I'd prefer to share offline. You'll discover that I'm a poobah law professor. You can reach me through my university email, if you're so inclined.
take care,
Alan
PS - on the question of how religions lose their way and descend into faith-based ideology, my project includes this vignette:
World peace
(a vignette on perspective)
As I placed my basket of groceries on the check-out bench at our neighborhood Trader Joe’s, the cashier Cadence (a music major at the local college) asked, “Did you find everything you were looking for?” I decided to have some fun. “Well, no. Do you carry world peace?” Cadence didn’t miss a beat, “That’s seasonal.”
“Wow!” I thought. She had beaten me at my own game. It took me a second to recover my composure. “Have you gotten that question before?” I stammered, “Was it a practiced answer?” Cadence said, “Not really. But when a customer can’t find something, it’s usually because it’s a seasonal item.”
I was almost speechless with admiration. “Well, that was an optimistic, a philosophical, a playful answer – I liked it a lot,” I said. Cadence paused, blushed a bit, “Thank you.”
Hmm. I'm a white evangelical and I am aware of each of the things you mention and have no problem with wider awareness of them. I could be mistaken, but many evangelicals of color may hold to the same beliefs you critique. This makes me wonder why white evangelicals are singled out. For what it's worth, evangelicalism is not a monolith. There is a significant subset that has been called "the other evangelicals" by researcher Wes Markofski and spoken of in an article he wrote at The Immanent Frame and his book Good News for Common Goods.
First of all, I want to clarify that on a personal level, your background as a white evangelical doesn't have an impact on how I view you. When I build relationships, I don't factor in someone's religious or political views. When people talk about "white evangelicals" or "new atheists," they are referring to the public figures and institutions that hold the microphone and set the talking points; it isn't a judgment on every individual within that group.
With that said, to address the core points of your comment:
In the piece, the term "white evangelical" is used as a sociological and historical classification, not a pejorative. Survey data shows that Black Protestants hold equal or higher rates of biblical literalism, so the underlying doctrine clearly spans racial lines. Where these traditions diverge—and by a wide margin—is in their political alignment.
The institutional history highlighted in this piece is distinctly white: the 1845 schism centered on whether slaveholders could serve as missionaries, the political mobilization of the 1970s was sparked by tax exemptions for segregated Christian academies, and the political pivot to abortion grew directly out of that movement. Randall Balmer documents Paul Weyrich’s role in this strategy, while Jemar Tisby details its historical consequences.
Thanks for bringing up Markofski; I’ll give Good News for Common Goods a proper read. His point about multicultural evangelical communities advancing a different public ethic is well taken, as are references to Jim Wallis, Sojourners, Rich Villodas, neo-Anabaptists, and the countless local churches missed by standard polling. Any demographic of eighty million people is far from a monolith.
My main point remains that this more general, more diverse subset doesn't hold the cultural microphone. The seminaries, denominational machinery, and political networks shaping public perception belong to the faction using biblical inerrancy as a gatekeeping mechanism—and that is the faction this piece targets. If you recognize these dynamics and welcome overall awareness of them, you validate your own argument, and I'm genuinely glad to have your voice in the conversation.
Hi, Tanner. Thanks for the clarification and further thoughts. I think you'll find Markofski interesting. I'm one of the "other evangelicals," working in multifaith engagement and religious diplomacy. My theological convictions and engagement with biblical criticism and the sciences is different than many of my fellows. Thanks for shedding additional light on your post.
The focus on white evangelicals represents the high percentage of bigots that come from the ranks of white Evangelicals. Atheist’s and agnostics do not share that outsized percentage of bigots among their ranks.
The Moral Majority was formed not as a response to Roe v. Wade - because the Evangelical movement was pro-choice at the time. It was a response to the loss of tax exemptions for churches that ran whites-only schools. It always comes down to racism for evangelicals, not opposition to abortion.
I would be interested in any statistics you have on American evangelicals in all their diverse expressions and an alleged high percentage of bigots. I think that's an assumption and a resulting allegation, but one that can't be substantiated. Sociologists and pollsters do not measure a specific "percentage of bigotry" for either atheists or evangelical Christians. I agree that there is bigotry. But to single evangelicals out seems problematic. At any rate, Tanner A. has clarified the thinking behind his post, and he does not seem to share your assumptions.
Thanks for the feedback. My general principle first: a source written to sell to the public rather than scholars on a position that runs against the scholarly consensus doesn't count as reliable to me, and neither does one that can't go three paragraphs without arguing God doesn't exist. They can still be right on any given point. The problem is that they've got an open agenda other than relaying knowledge, and I'd rather not fill my head with claims I have to doubt on the way in.
"A Defense of 1 John 5:7" is no exception. It builds its case on facts that are either wrong or invented.
Modern textual scholarship is virtually unanimous that the Johannine Comma ("the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one") is a later addition to 1 John. It shows up in no known Greek manuscript before the 14th century, and the best-attested early Greek, Syriac, and Latin witnesses all lack it.
The church fathers the document cites (Cyprian, Athanasius, Tertullian) never quote the Comma as Scripture. Their language is theological paraphrase of 1 John 5:8, which tells us nothing about a lost Greek verse. The claim that early Greek manuscripts once carried the Comma and were later destroyed is conjecture with nothing behind it: no catalog, no patristic commentary, no textual tradition.
The idea that heretics stripped the Comma out of the Greek copies leaves no backing either. The Comma's Latin origin is documented, and its absence from the Greek tradition holds without exception until the medieval period. Claims that ancient Greek lectionaries contained it are wrong too; it turns up in later printed lectionaries because of post-Renaissance Latin influence.
That leaves the suggestion that the Comma enjoyed 1500 years of universal acceptance, which the record contradicts outright. Greek Christianity didn't know it, Syriac Christianity didn't know it, and the earliest Latin manuscripts don't have it. Its rise is medieval, centuries downstream of anything apostolic.
Rereading my previous comment, I see it might have landed as smart-arse. I wasn't going for that. I was showing my working rather than just handing over a conclusion, and you're welcome to take or leave my thought process.
No probs. I don’t generally apply emotions to typed words. Plenty of people read texts and posts with a voice in their head, angry or whatever, colouring what is typed unnecessarily.
If intentionally funny or derogatory then that is different. I didn’t get ‘smart-arse’ from your response :)
This site has probably the best debate I’ve seen on the matter:
Good catch. Scofield's 1909 reference Bible put the commentary on the same page as the text in matching typeface, so two generations of American Protestants learned dispensationalism and absorbed it as scripture rather than as one man's notes. That’s a story in itself.
Dispensationalism is modernism just like liberal progressive higher critical thinking is modernism.
Both do not exegete scripture with scripture and the latter don’t even accept it as authoritative or inspired in any way including the “inerrant in the original autographs” position.
Both look to modern ideas and read back into the text.
Understanding ancient societies casts a different perspective on the received text. The Torah was an Iron Age document with a Mesopotamian perspective. 'Slavery in Egypt' is an example. There was no slavery in Egypt, just as in the 20th Century there was no slavery in the Soviet Union, despite what US pundits said. But there was slavery in Mesopotamia, and it was so bad that there was the institution of Jubilee, the periodic freeing of the slaves and forgiveness of debts (indebtedness being a major cause of slavery in Mesopotamia). Canaan was part of the land bridge between Mesopotamia and Egypt, and thus was contended. There was an ivory plaque found at Megiddo dated to the time of Solomon showing a king seated on a throne of cherubim, thus the king of Israel. The style of the image is recognizably Egyptian. The received text of the Torah commands "Don't follow the ways of the Egyptians" and says that God brought Israel out of Egypt. The Exodus appears to be mythical (no archeological evidence) and thus reflects a changing political situation in the Iron Age (the rise of Assyria against Egypt, Egypt and Assyria uniting against the Medes, Babylonia joining the Medes and the Persians to conquer Judah, Persia reestablishing Judah). Persia went on to conquer Egypt, but while Persia spread the Lydian concept of currency, money didn't become part of Egyptian practice until the conquest of Alexander the Great.
The Malory comparison is a good one, and it holds on the timing too. He wrote roughly nine centuries after whatever sat behind Arthur, and the gap between the Late Bronze horizon and the composition of the Pentateuch is in the same range. Cline's 1177 B.C. is the readable account of the collapse if anyone wants the full picture of what took down those cities.
Perhaps you might benefit and gain a bit of knowledge when making false claims about the Exodus. The minimalist position on the “mythical Exodus” has been painstaking updated based upon new evidence, and a revised dating system based upon dates recorded in the Book of Kings.
There are books aplenty documenting the new theory, along with the online popular and highly respected documentary series, “Patterns of Evidence.”
Gets annoying to hear the denial of the Exodus repeated over and over again, despite new theories that offer promising results.
The received text was written around 500 BCE. The best evidence for the Biblical story is 3 place names that date to the end of the Bronze Age (1300 BCE). That's like Thomas Malory writing about King Arthur.
A myth is something widely believed that provides meaning. King Arthur is a myth. So is Moses. The Bronze Age ended when a plague depopulated cities and toppled empires. There was also a plague between Malory and the events he wrote about.
Your response lacks clarity so I’m not certain I am following your logic. That’s ok, though. You sound pretty much like a religious fanatic who will hold fast to an argument despite evidence that might shatter long held beliefs. That’s ok, too. Many are there who refuse to acknowledge updated facts and evidence, and instead cling to their own myths and legends.
Not to worry, however. Minimalists will always find ways to keep spouting nonsense. But, so disappointing about King Arthur! Who knew!
Just tell all this to some of the people on Medium, which I have. It falls on deaf ears with a little lecture on the side. People are gonna believe what they want to believe.
That matches my experience too, and it's why I don't debate religion one to one. Two things go wrong. You stop talking about Christianity and start talking about someone's Christianity, which is a different subject with different rules, and the whole exercise turns fruitless the moment it becomes personal.
That doesn't make those conversations useless. They're the best source I know for understanding how people arrive at what they believe and how they hold it together once they're there. I just listen instead of arguing. Most of what I know about Jehovah's Witnesses came from a colleague I got along with well. I'd ask about the beliefs, the customs, the reasoning behind a given practice, and he'd explain. The traffic only ever went one way, and that's the only reason it stayed worth having.
Most Christians use the Bible as a prop. They never read any part of it, except perhaps during church service. Even those who attend Bible study groups only read the parts which they are directed to read.
The gap between what scholar-pulpit-level training covers and what gets taught in Sunday school is huge. For a lot of believers, engagement with Scripture stays tightly curated to support specific, pre-packaged narratives rather than wrestling with the raw textual history.
Every section tests the same claim: evangelical leaders read a perfect book plainly. The ending of Mark is missing from the two oldest complete Bibles we have, and the Trinity verse in 1 John 5:7-8 doesn't show up in a Greek manuscript until the late Middle Ages. The SBC's 1971 abortion resolution and its 1995 apology for slavery are both still posted on the Convention's own website. If any one of those is wrong, point to it and I'll correct the piece.
As I said, the shotgun presentation demands an encyclopedic response. It is argumentum ad acervum stercoris: pile enough claims together and require the respondent to remove them one at a time while the smell remains yours.
You say every section tests one claim: “Evangelical leaders read a perfect book plainly.” It does not. You have bundled several different questions:
What does textual age establish?
How did particular passages travel through the manuscript tradition?
Who wrote the disputed epistles?
What do contested Hebrew passages mean?
How does Scripture address slavery?
Why did one American denomination change its political positions?
Even if every isolated date you cited were correct, your interpretation of those facts would not automatically follow. The SBC’s resolutions may establish what the SBC said in 1971 and 1995. They do not establish who wrote Timothy, what Numbers 5 means, whether Scripture is inspired, or how Jesus read Moses.
So you may keep the pile. I will respond only in outline here and treat the individual questions more completely elsewhere, where each can be examined without collecting the stench of all the others.
1. Mark’s ending
The absence of Mark 16:9–20 from the two oldest surviving complete Greek Bibles is evidence about those manuscripts. It does not, by itself, disclose the entire history of the teaching. The age of the oldest surviving physical evidence does not prove a simple sequence in which one author ended at verse 8 and a later author invented the rest.
The longer ending was known before those fourth-century codices. More importantly, there is another textual possibility requiring investigation: early teaching may be preserved, removed, displaced, abbreviated, and later restored by someone who no longer understands the reason for the earlier treatment.
The signs in Mark’s ending are particularly vulnerable to literalization. Jesus taught in riddles and, on the Emmaus road, revealed the governing Christological meaning concealed in Scripture. “Serpents,” “poison,” healing, tongues, and unbelief must therefore be examined within that scriptural vocabulary—not converted immediately into Appalachian snake handling.
The history of the ending, what it teaches, why it may have disappeared, and why it returned constitute a study of their own. “Not in the two oldest complete codices” does not settle all four questions.
2. The Comma Johanneum and the Trinity
I do not need to defend the late textual history of the Comma Johanneum. Remove it.
The doctrine of the Trinity does not disappear with it. Your claim that this is Scripture’s only plain statement of the Trinity merely reveals how narrowly you have been taught to look.
The Trinity is disclosed four times in the formations of Genesis 1:1 alone—before John, before Greek manuscripts, and before any medieval gloss. Demonstrating that requires examining the consonantal Hebrew and its pre-vowel-point formations, not trading English proof texts. That also deserves its own treatment.
A late Trinitarian gloss cannot create a disclosure already present in the opening words of Moses.
3. Pauline authorship
Vocabulary statistics, assumptions about ecclesiastical development, and reconstructed theological timelines may support disputes about authorship. They do not transform disputed hypotheses into the established fact that “half of Paul’s letters are forgeries.” You have collapsed scholarly judgment, probability, pseudonymity, and deliberate fraud into one inflammatory word.
That argument must be demonstrated letter by letter.
4. Abortion
Numbers 5 never says the accused woman is pregnant and never calls its judgment an abortion. Exodus 21 does not indisputably say “miscarriage”; the Hebrew describes the child or children coming out, after which the text discusses whether harm follows.
You selected contested translations and interpretations, then reported the desired conclusions as textual facts.
5. Slavery
That Scripture regulates conduct within a slaveholding world is true. That its governing disclosure endorses one person owning another as God’s final purpose is not.
The question is not solved by collecting isolated regulations. Jesus said Moses wrote of Him. The law must therefore be followed through its concealed testimony to Christ, who takes the servant’s place, bears the debt, releases the captive, calls servants brothers, and gives Himself to obtain His bride.
The Cross does not merely supply a vague moral “trajectory.” It is the referent toward which the laws were speaking.
6. The SBC
The SBC’s history is relevant to the history of the SBC. Its resolutions can expose inconsistency, political calculation, repentance, or institutional failure.
They cannot establish that Scripture is false. A denomination changing its interpretation proves that a denomination changed its interpretation. It does not tell us which interpretation was correct.
So the factual fragments are not necessarily the principal problem. The problem is the connective tissue you supplied between them.
You assembled manuscript history, disputed authorship, contested translation, American racial history, denominational politics, abortion, slavery, and inerrancy into one enormous accusation. Then you offered to correct any individual fact, as though accurate dates would validate every inference connecting them.
They do not.
A pile of individually checkable statements is not automatically a coherent argument.
Your last line is the one I'd underline: many people aren't aware of the issues. That gap is what the piece is about. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the standard evangelical position since 1978, applies inerrancy to the original manuscripts, and nobody has ever seen one. Pastors learn that in seminary. Then on Sunday the congregation hears that the Bible is without error, and nobody mentions the fine print. That's what the title means by "don't want you to know."
On the rest being debated: nobody who has looked at the manuscripts disputes that the ending of Mark is missing from the oldest copies or that 1 John 5:7-8 came in late. The 1845 split over slaveholding missionaries isn't in dispute either, since it's in the Convention's own records. Who wrote the Pastoral letters (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) is debated. Most of the opposition on that question comes from scholars who teach under statements of faith that require them to say Paul wrote all thirteen letters.
If you work under the doctrine of inerrancy, you already have the answers before you ask the questions. History and science work the other way around, with the evidence first and the conclusion after. That's why mainstream scholars, Christian ones included, no longer give much weight to conclusions reached under the assumption of inerrancy. What scholars committed to inerrancy do provide is the phrase "still disputed," which pastors can repeat to their congregations on even the most obvious questions.
If you make your criticism more pointed, we can have a more meaningful conversation. Everything in the piece is either a manuscript claim or a historical claim, and all of it is verifiable.
If you think I made a factual error, point it out, and I will correct it after verifying.
Tanner,
So, I was a missionary kid. My parents were lay missionary teachers, not evangelizers. But they believed ... though it's sometimes tough to figure out what.
That said, let me tell you how luminescent your research and writing are for me. Deep down they reveal to me that "faith" is ... a method of control. (For example, I discovered that Thich Nhat Hanh does not use the word.) Thus, to notice where "faith" is foisted on us. From so many directions: faith in the "rule of law" or in Coca-Cola's longing for global unity or .....
By the way, your takeaway sentences carry a punch: "central doctrine of the faith is a Latin gloss that worked its way into the margin and then into the page" / Every church that bars women from the pulpit is running on the forgeries" / "God is the operator of the procedure and the temple is the clinic"
But bear in mind that you're often preaching to the choir. And, as is often the case, you're also preaching and writing to yourself. The latter is the most honest - no?
take care,
Alan
Alan, thanks for this. Growing up as a missionary kid put you close enough to the machinery to hear it running, and that shows in how you read the piece.
The point about faith as a control mechanism holds, and it isn't confined to religion. Rule of law, national story, a soft drink company singing about world harmony, they all run the same play at the moment they need you to stop asking. Where I'd add something is that once a religion starts working that way, what's operating is an ideology claiming descent from Christianity or Islam rather than the thing itself.
The choir line made me laugh. I usually say preaching to the converted, and I take it you haven't come across the pieces where I've said a few times that I'm no anti-Christian activist. The death of religion wouldn't solve much and I'm not after it. A good portion of my readers are Christian, a few are practicing Jews, and I take some pride in that. If someone walks away from a piece of mine with their faith stronger than before, that's fine by me. (You might be interested in this article, if you haven't read it already: https://www.theunholytruth.com/p/why-the-death-of-religion-wouldnt )
On writing to myself, yes and no. My working principle is that scholarly consensus comes first. Do I always agree with it? Of course not. I reach my own conclusions, especially where the question has a heavy subjective element. For example, I'll write about what scholars make of Paul as a man, and I might add what I think of that consensus, but I'll never write a piece designed to convince you that Paul was the man I personally believe he was. Armchair scholars do that constantly. Keeping the two apart is what I mean by being honest with yourself, and it's the difference between reporting and selling opinions as facts.
And I hope you'll keep commenting. A missionary childhood gives you a view of this world that no amount of reading gets you, and the details you've already dropped in here are worth more than most of what I could dig up in a library. Bring more of them.
Tanner,
You devote more time (including editing :-) to my comments that I deserve - thank you.
I have a project on a parallel path to yours -- not to convince anyone, but to offer a vision, a pathway. It's not for me, but it's for me. And it's not to salvation, but to awareness. (Does that summarize your thoughts on "writing to myself"?)
It's something I'd prefer to share offline. You'll discover that I'm a poobah law professor. You can reach me through my university email, if you're so inclined.
take care,
Alan
PS - on the question of how religions lose their way and descend into faith-based ideology, my project includes this vignette:
World peace
(a vignette on perspective)
As I placed my basket of groceries on the check-out bench at our neighborhood Trader Joe’s, the cashier Cadence (a music major at the local college) asked, “Did you find everything you were looking for?” I decided to have some fun. “Well, no. Do you carry world peace?” Cadence didn’t miss a beat, “That’s seasonal.”
“Wow!” I thought. She had beaten me at my own game. It took me a second to recover my composure. “Have you gotten that question before?” I stammered, “Was it a practiced answer?” Cadence said, “Not really. But when a customer can’t find something, it’s usually because it’s a seasonal item.”
I was almost speechless with admiration. “Well, that was an optimistic, a philosophical, a playful answer – I liked it a lot,” I said. Cadence paused, blushed a bit, “Thank you.”
Whirled peas! Those would be in frozen foods.
Hmm. I'm a white evangelical and I am aware of each of the things you mention and have no problem with wider awareness of them. I could be mistaken, but many evangelicals of color may hold to the same beliefs you critique. This makes me wonder why white evangelicals are singled out. For what it's worth, evangelicalism is not a monolith. There is a significant subset that has been called "the other evangelicals" by researcher Wes Markofski and spoken of in an article he wrote at The Immanent Frame and his book Good News for Common Goods.
Hi John,
First of all, I want to clarify that on a personal level, your background as a white evangelical doesn't have an impact on how I view you. When I build relationships, I don't factor in someone's religious or political views. When people talk about "white evangelicals" or "new atheists," they are referring to the public figures and institutions that hold the microphone and set the talking points; it isn't a judgment on every individual within that group.
With that said, to address the core points of your comment:
In the piece, the term "white evangelical" is used as a sociological and historical classification, not a pejorative. Survey data shows that Black Protestants hold equal or higher rates of biblical literalism, so the underlying doctrine clearly spans racial lines. Where these traditions diverge—and by a wide margin—is in their political alignment.
The institutional history highlighted in this piece is distinctly white: the 1845 schism centered on whether slaveholders could serve as missionaries, the political mobilization of the 1970s was sparked by tax exemptions for segregated Christian academies, and the political pivot to abortion grew directly out of that movement. Randall Balmer documents Paul Weyrich’s role in this strategy, while Jemar Tisby details its historical consequences.
Thanks for bringing up Markofski; I’ll give Good News for Common Goods a proper read. His point about multicultural evangelical communities advancing a different public ethic is well taken, as are references to Jim Wallis, Sojourners, Rich Villodas, neo-Anabaptists, and the countless local churches missed by standard polling. Any demographic of eighty million people is far from a monolith.
My main point remains that this more general, more diverse subset doesn't hold the cultural microphone. The seminaries, denominational machinery, and political networks shaping public perception belong to the faction using biblical inerrancy as a gatekeeping mechanism—and that is the faction this piece targets. If you recognize these dynamics and welcome overall awareness of them, you validate your own argument, and I'm genuinely glad to have your voice in the conversation.
Hi, Tanner. Thanks for the clarification and further thoughts. I think you'll find Markofski interesting. I'm one of the "other evangelicals," working in multifaith engagement and religious diplomacy. My theological convictions and engagement with biblical criticism and the sciences is different than many of my fellows. Thanks for shedding additional light on your post.
The focus on white evangelicals represents the high percentage of bigots that come from the ranks of white Evangelicals. Atheist’s and agnostics do not share that outsized percentage of bigots among their ranks.
The Moral Majority was formed not as a response to Roe v. Wade - because the Evangelical movement was pro-choice at the time. It was a response to the loss of tax exemptions for churches that ran whites-only schools. It always comes down to racism for evangelicals, not opposition to abortion.
I would be interested in any statistics you have on American evangelicals in all their diverse expressions and an alleged high percentage of bigots. I think that's an assumption and a resulting allegation, but one that can't be substantiated. Sociologists and pollsters do not measure a specific "percentage of bigotry" for either atheists or evangelical Christians. I agree that there is bigotry. But to single evangelicals out seems problematic. At any rate, Tanner A. has clarified the thinking behind his post, and he does not seem to share your assumptions.
Good point! I think you hit on the underlying problem.
They are using all this to further a political agenda all the while decrying their boogeyman of “Christian nationalism”.
Pick a Bible: King James, Roman Catholic, Greek/Russian Orthodox. Don’t confuse me with facts, I have a belief. 🫤
Just on 1 John 5:7 this link suggests a much earlier history:
https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/a-defense-of-1-john.php
Thanks for the feedback. My general principle first: a source written to sell to the public rather than scholars on a position that runs against the scholarly consensus doesn't count as reliable to me, and neither does one that can't go three paragraphs without arguing God doesn't exist. They can still be right on any given point. The problem is that they've got an open agenda other than relaying knowledge, and I'd rather not fill my head with claims I have to doubt on the way in.
"A Defense of 1 John 5:7" is no exception. It builds its case on facts that are either wrong or invented.
Modern textual scholarship is virtually unanimous that the Johannine Comma ("the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one") is a later addition to 1 John. It shows up in no known Greek manuscript before the 14th century, and the best-attested early Greek, Syriac, and Latin witnesses all lack it.
The church fathers the document cites (Cyprian, Athanasius, Tertullian) never quote the Comma as Scripture. Their language is theological paraphrase of 1 John 5:8, which tells us nothing about a lost Greek verse. The claim that early Greek manuscripts once carried the Comma and were later destroyed is conjecture with nothing behind it: no catalog, no patristic commentary, no textual tradition.
The idea that heretics stripped the Comma out of the Greek copies leaves no backing either. The Comma's Latin origin is documented, and its absence from the Greek tradition holds without exception until the medieval period. Claims that ancient Greek lectionaries contained it are wrong too; it turns up in later printed lectionaries because of post-Renaissance Latin influence.
That leaves the suggestion that the Comma enjoyed 1500 years of universal acceptance, which the record contradicts outright. Greek Christianity didn't know it, Syriac Christianity didn't know it, and the earliest Latin manuscripts don't have it. Its rise is medieval, centuries downstream of anything apostolic.
Cheers
Rereading my previous comment, I see it might have landed as smart-arse. I wasn't going for that. I was showing my working rather than just handing over a conclusion, and you're welcome to take or leave my thought process.
I appreciate this attitude.
No probs. I don’t generally apply emotions to typed words. Plenty of people read texts and posts with a voice in their head, angry or whatever, colouring what is typed unnecessarily.
If intentionally funny or derogatory then that is different. I didn’t get ‘smart-arse’ from your response :)
This site has probably the best debate I’ve seen on the matter:
https://puritanboard.com/threads/1-john-5-7-manuscript-evidence.51763/
Well worth a read. I think I’ll sit on the fence.
I'm surprised you don't mention the Scofield bible.
Good catch. Scofield's 1909 reference Bible put the commentary on the same page as the text in matching typeface, so two generations of American Protestants learned dispensationalism and absorbed it as scripture rather than as one man's notes. That’s a story in itself.
Dispensationalism is modernism just like liberal progressive higher critical thinking is modernism.
Both do not exegete scripture with scripture and the latter don’t even accept it as authoritative or inspired in any way including the “inerrant in the original autographs” position.
Both look to modern ideas and read back into the text.
Both use newspaper exegesis.
One to prove the end times
The other to keep up with the times.
Understanding ancient societies casts a different perspective on the received text. The Torah was an Iron Age document with a Mesopotamian perspective. 'Slavery in Egypt' is an example. There was no slavery in Egypt, just as in the 20th Century there was no slavery in the Soviet Union, despite what US pundits said. But there was slavery in Mesopotamia, and it was so bad that there was the institution of Jubilee, the periodic freeing of the slaves and forgiveness of debts (indebtedness being a major cause of slavery in Mesopotamia). Canaan was part of the land bridge between Mesopotamia and Egypt, and thus was contended. There was an ivory plaque found at Megiddo dated to the time of Solomon showing a king seated on a throne of cherubim, thus the king of Israel. The style of the image is recognizably Egyptian. The received text of the Torah commands "Don't follow the ways of the Egyptians" and says that God brought Israel out of Egypt. The Exodus appears to be mythical (no archeological evidence) and thus reflects a changing political situation in the Iron Age (the rise of Assyria against Egypt, Egypt and Assyria uniting against the Medes, Babylonia joining the Medes and the Persians to conquer Judah, Persia reestablishing Judah). Persia went on to conquer Egypt, but while Persia spread the Lydian concept of currency, money didn't become part of Egyptian practice until the conquest of Alexander the Great.
The Malory comparison is a good one, and it holds on the timing too. He wrote roughly nine centuries after whatever sat behind Arthur, and the gap between the Late Bronze horizon and the composition of the Pentateuch is in the same range. Cline's 1177 B.C. is the readable account of the collapse if anyone wants the full picture of what took down those cities.
Perhaps you might benefit and gain a bit of knowledge when making false claims about the Exodus. The minimalist position on the “mythical Exodus” has been painstaking updated based upon new evidence, and a revised dating system based upon dates recorded in the Book of Kings.
There are books aplenty documenting the new theory, along with the online popular and highly respected documentary series, “Patterns of Evidence.”
Gets annoying to hear the denial of the Exodus repeated over and over again, despite new theories that offer promising results.
The received text was written around 500 BCE. The best evidence for the Biblical story is 3 place names that date to the end of the Bronze Age (1300 BCE). That's like Thomas Malory writing about King Arthur.
A myth is something widely believed that provides meaning. King Arthur is a myth. So is Moses. The Bronze Age ended when a plague depopulated cities and toppled empires. There was also a plague between Malory and the events he wrote about.
Your response lacks clarity so I’m not certain I am following your logic. That’s ok, though. You sound pretty much like a religious fanatic who will hold fast to an argument despite evidence that might shatter long held beliefs. That’s ok, too. Many are there who refuse to acknowledge updated facts and evidence, and instead cling to their own myths and legends.
Not to worry, however. Minimalists will always find ways to keep spouting nonsense. But, so disappointing about King Arthur! Who knew!
Just tell all this to some of the people on Medium, which I have. It falls on deaf ears with a little lecture on the side. People are gonna believe what they want to believe.
That matches my experience too, and it's why I don't debate religion one to one. Two things go wrong. You stop talking about Christianity and start talking about someone's Christianity, which is a different subject with different rules, and the whole exercise turns fruitless the moment it becomes personal.
That doesn't make those conversations useless. They're the best source I know for understanding how people arrive at what they believe and how they hold it together once they're there. I just listen instead of arguing. Most of what I know about Jehovah's Witnesses came from a colleague I got along with well. I'd ask about the beliefs, the customs, the reasoning behind a given practice, and he'd explain. The traffic only ever went one way, and that's the only reason it stayed worth having.
Most Christians use the Bible as a prop. They never read any part of it, except perhaps during church service. Even those who attend Bible study groups only read the parts which they are directed to read.
The gap between what scholar-pulpit-level training covers and what gets taught in Sunday school is huge. For a lot of believers, engagement with Scripture stays tightly curated to support specific, pre-packaged narratives rather than wrestling with the raw textual history.
LOL When no single argument can carry the conclusion, pile every grievance into one article and let the noise impersonate cumulative evidence.
When you have nothing to say, say it all.
Every section tests the same claim: evangelical leaders read a perfect book plainly. The ending of Mark is missing from the two oldest complete Bibles we have, and the Trinity verse in 1 John 5:7-8 doesn't show up in a Greek manuscript until the late Middle Ages. The SBC's 1971 abortion resolution and its 1995 apology for slavery are both still posted on the Convention's own website. If any one of those is wrong, point to it and I'll correct the piece.
As I said, the shotgun presentation demands an encyclopedic response. It is argumentum ad acervum stercoris: pile enough claims together and require the respondent to remove them one at a time while the smell remains yours.
You say every section tests one claim: “Evangelical leaders read a perfect book plainly.” It does not. You have bundled several different questions:
What does textual age establish?
How did particular passages travel through the manuscript tradition?
Who wrote the disputed epistles?
What do contested Hebrew passages mean?
How does Scripture address slavery?
Why did one American denomination change its political positions?
Even if every isolated date you cited were correct, your interpretation of those facts would not automatically follow. The SBC’s resolutions may establish what the SBC said in 1971 and 1995. They do not establish who wrote Timothy, what Numbers 5 means, whether Scripture is inspired, or how Jesus read Moses.
So you may keep the pile. I will respond only in outline here and treat the individual questions more completely elsewhere, where each can be examined without collecting the stench of all the others.
1. Mark’s ending
The absence of Mark 16:9–20 from the two oldest surviving complete Greek Bibles is evidence about those manuscripts. It does not, by itself, disclose the entire history of the teaching. The age of the oldest surviving physical evidence does not prove a simple sequence in which one author ended at verse 8 and a later author invented the rest.
The longer ending was known before those fourth-century codices. More importantly, there is another textual possibility requiring investigation: early teaching may be preserved, removed, displaced, abbreviated, and later restored by someone who no longer understands the reason for the earlier treatment.
The signs in Mark’s ending are particularly vulnerable to literalization. Jesus taught in riddles and, on the Emmaus road, revealed the governing Christological meaning concealed in Scripture. “Serpents,” “poison,” healing, tongues, and unbelief must therefore be examined within that scriptural vocabulary—not converted immediately into Appalachian snake handling.
The history of the ending, what it teaches, why it may have disappeared, and why it returned constitute a study of their own. “Not in the two oldest complete codices” does not settle all four questions.
2. The Comma Johanneum and the Trinity
I do not need to defend the late textual history of the Comma Johanneum. Remove it.
The doctrine of the Trinity does not disappear with it. Your claim that this is Scripture’s only plain statement of the Trinity merely reveals how narrowly you have been taught to look.
The Trinity is disclosed four times in the formations of Genesis 1:1 alone—before John, before Greek manuscripts, and before any medieval gloss. Demonstrating that requires examining the consonantal Hebrew and its pre-vowel-point formations, not trading English proof texts. That also deserves its own treatment.
A late Trinitarian gloss cannot create a disclosure already present in the opening words of Moses.
3. Pauline authorship
Vocabulary statistics, assumptions about ecclesiastical development, and reconstructed theological timelines may support disputes about authorship. They do not transform disputed hypotheses into the established fact that “half of Paul’s letters are forgeries.” You have collapsed scholarly judgment, probability, pseudonymity, and deliberate fraud into one inflammatory word.
That argument must be demonstrated letter by letter.
4. Abortion
Numbers 5 never says the accused woman is pregnant and never calls its judgment an abortion. Exodus 21 does not indisputably say “miscarriage”; the Hebrew describes the child or children coming out, after which the text discusses whether harm follows.
You selected contested translations and interpretations, then reported the desired conclusions as textual facts.
5. Slavery
That Scripture regulates conduct within a slaveholding world is true. That its governing disclosure endorses one person owning another as God’s final purpose is not.
The question is not solved by collecting isolated regulations. Jesus said Moses wrote of Him. The law must therefore be followed through its concealed testimony to Christ, who takes the servant’s place, bears the debt, releases the captive, calls servants brothers, and gives Himself to obtain His bride.
The Cross does not merely supply a vague moral “trajectory.” It is the referent toward which the laws were speaking.
6. The SBC
The SBC’s history is relevant to the history of the SBC. Its resolutions can expose inconsistency, political calculation, repentance, or institutional failure.
They cannot establish that Scripture is false. A denomination changing its interpretation proves that a denomination changed its interpretation. It does not tell us which interpretation was correct.
So the factual fragments are not necessarily the principal problem. The problem is the connective tissue you supplied between them.
You assembled manuscript history, disputed authorship, contested translation, American racial history, denominational politics, abortion, slavery, and inerrancy into one enormous accusation. Then you offered to correct any individual fact, as though accurate dates would validate every inference connecting them.
They do not.
A pile of individually checkable statements is not automatically a coherent argument.
Catchy title but not accurate.
I think it’s pretty well known that no one has the original texts.
How would you know if the one you have was the original? You can’t know.
But that is why there is textual criticism.
As for the rest of your claims. These are all debated constantly with many books written to refute your claims
Your title makes it look like someone is trying to hide something
This is simply not the case
Many people aren’t even aware of the issues and are completely happy
Hi John,
Your last line is the one I'd underline: many people aren't aware of the issues. That gap is what the piece is about. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the standard evangelical position since 1978, applies inerrancy to the original manuscripts, and nobody has ever seen one. Pastors learn that in seminary. Then on Sunday the congregation hears that the Bible is without error, and nobody mentions the fine print. That's what the title means by "don't want you to know."
On the rest being debated: nobody who has looked at the manuscripts disputes that the ending of Mark is missing from the oldest copies or that 1 John 5:7-8 came in late. The 1845 split over slaveholding missionaries isn't in dispute either, since it's in the Convention's own records. Who wrote the Pastoral letters (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) is debated. Most of the opposition on that question comes from scholars who teach under statements of faith that require them to say Paul wrote all thirteen letters.
If you work under the doctrine of inerrancy, you already have the answers before you ask the questions. History and science work the other way around, with the evidence first and the conclusion after. That's why mainstream scholars, Christian ones included, no longer give much weight to conclusions reached under the assumption of inerrancy. What scholars committed to inerrancy do provide is the phrase "still disputed," which pastors can repeat to their congregations on even the most obvious questions.
If that’s what the congregation hears. (I don’t think most even consider it anyway but)
Then, that’s a good thing.
It means that you can trust it and it’s authoritative.
What’s wrong with that?
They need to know, “thus says the Lord”
That is what church is about along with the liturgy, sacraments, worship, prayers, and fellowship of course.
I don’t think anyone is “not wanting you to know”
If you’re that suspicious, why are you in that church?
I'm not white or evangelical, but this guy is spouting nonsense by mixing real facts with progressive theological poison.
If you make your criticism more pointed, we can have a more meaningful conversation. Everything in the piece is either a manuscript claim or a historical claim, and all of it is verifiable.
If you think I made a factual error, point it out, and I will correct it after verifying.