After a long silence, Dr. Price has returned to make another try at proving that the prophet Jeremiah accurately predicted a 70-year Jewish captivity in Babylon. Price actually sent his latest article to me in February, but by that time, I had already begun the exchanges with Everette Hatcher on the authorship of Daniel, so I have had to wait until now to return to the Jeremiah debate. I have even reshuffled editorial plans in order to resume the discussion with this issue, Price's article was over 10,000 words in length, so I have had to divide it into two sections. The nature of his wild assertions throughout the article will require more than just one response for each section, so after I have made my replies to part one, I will publish part two and reply to it. Dr. Price indicated at the beginning of his latest article that it will "bring [his] defense of fulfilled prophecy to a close," but if he wishes to respond to my latest rebuttals, I will be glad to publish it as long as he addresses arguments I have presented against the authenticity of Jeremiah's 70-year prophecy. If, however, he just wants to rehash his charges of "radical skepticism" and "anti-supernatural bias," I see no need to give him an extended forum for that.
The Nonexistent Claim of a Nonexistent Prophet: Dr. Price has wrongly accused me of alleging that Jeremiah may not have been an actual historical person, but he either misread my statement that he quoted in defense of this assertion or else he was setting up another straw man (as he has done throughout our debate) in order to have something to kick around and wrongly leave the impression that he is addressing the issues of the debate. Dr. Price quoted the following statement that I made in the September/October 1997 issue: "There are no nonbiblical records from Syria or Egypt or Babylon that mention a Hebrew prophet named Jeremiah who prophesied during the first year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign that the Jews would be taken into bondage but released after 70 years" (p. 9, emphasis added). I have emphasized the restrictive "who" clause in this statement to show that I was not claiming that there is no extrabiblical evidence to confirm the historicity of Jeremiah but that there is no extrabiblical evidence to confirm that Jeremiah made the 70-year prophecy during the first year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign. When the statement is examined in context (quoted below), it becomes even more obvious that this was what I meant. To call attention to how he has misrepresented its meaning, I have italicized the sentence that Dr. Price pulled out of context.
A Reasonable Demand: To insist on extrabiblical confirmation of the date of Jeremiah's prophecy is certainly reasonable, because, without it, we have only the word of a Hebrew text that was transmitted by scribes and editors who were committed to the ethnocentric belief that their people were the chosen ones of the god Yahweh, who had spoken to them in certain "holy writings" of which Jeremiah was considered a part. Thousands of variations in the text that they transmitted, not even to mention the existence of two distinct versions of the book of Jeremiah, are sufficient to justify the suspicion that these guardians of the sacred text had not been above tampering with it to make it conform to prevailing views of the times. To think otherwise is to assign a far higher degree of integrity to the Hebrew scribes than biblicists are willing to grant to the scribal transmitters of other ancient religious documents.
As noted in "Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy" (March/April 1998, p. 1), many biblical events and characters have been corroborated by extrabiblical records. The Moabite Stone contains an inscription attributed to king Mesha, who is mentioned in 2 Kings 3; tablets discovered in Babylonian archives refer to an allotment of sesame oil that was given to Jehoiachin, the captive king of Ia-hu-da (Judah), thereby supporting the claim in Jeremiah 52:31-34 that the king of Babylon released Jehoiachin from prison and provided him with a "continual allowance." The Israelite king Jehu was mentioned in Assyrian records, as were Omri and Ahab. This is the type of extrabiblical corroboration that would give credibility to the dating of Jeremiah's 70-year prophecy, but unfortunately for Dr. Price, no such corroboration is known. The fact is that archaeological corroboration of biblical information has always been confined to the ordinary, and nothing has ever been discovered to corroborate any of the many extraordinary biblical claims, such as the parting of the Red Sea, walking about unharmed in a fiery furnace, prolonged darkness at midday, resurrecting the dead, etc., although these are the very types of claims one would expect to find in extrabiblical records if such events had indeed happened. Their nature is such that, had they actually occurred, at least some of them would have attracted enough attention to have been recorded in secular records of the times. Since such records do not exist, this rationally justifies the suspicion that they were only religious myths and legends that developed in superstitious times. Dr. Price may call this view a "radical supernatural bias" if he wishes, but reasonable people will recognize that the real radical is the person who gullibly accepts such claims with nothing but religious writings that attest to them. Ironically enough, Dr. Price himself noted that "(t)here is nothing extraordinary about the existence of prophets among ancient peoples" (p. 4, this issue). That is exactly right. In ancient times, prophets, seers, and mystics were as common as dirt, and so the very fact of their commonness is sufficient reason to demand very convincing evidence before accepting the claim that some of them were genuine prophets. In the case of Jeremiah, Dr. Price has presented no such evidence.
The Existence of Other Ancient Writers: While punching around on his straw man, Dr. Price asked "what modern historian doubts the existence of ancient writers like Tacitus or Suetonius, Josephus, or Herodotus." Since no one has said that Jeremiah was not a historical character, the statement was irrelevant. I wonder, however, if Price is unaware that the writings of these ancient authors have been subjected to historical criticisms just as rigid as those that have been applied to biblical writers. The accuracy and authenticity of some of their writings have been questioned for the same reason that scholars have challenged the accuracy and authenticity of some biblical passages: they bear the earmarks of probable exaggeration and forgery. In "Those Amazing Biblical Numbers" (TSR, Winter 1995, pp. 5-8), William Sierichs, Jr., discussed probable exaggerations in the sizes of biblical armies, and in so doing explained how that historical critics have recognized that ancient writers, including Herodotus, were prone to exaggerate numbers. As for probable forgery, no better example can be cited than the famous "testimonium" of Flavius Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews (18:3.3). This passage refers to Jesus as "the Christ" and said that he had been resurrected from the dead "as the divine prophets had foretold," as well as "ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him." Since these were unlikely statements to come from the pen of a person who never converted to Christianity, scholars have long suspected that at least some of the material in this statement was interpolated by Christian scribes who wanted readers to think that the historicity of Jesus had been attested to by a famous Jewish writer. Besides this problem, scholars knew that early Christian apologists like Origen had quoted Josephus in support of their arguments but had never once cited this particular passage, which would certainly have been one of their important proof texts had they known of its existence. Furthermore, the passage concluded with the statement that the "tribe of Christians named from him [Christ]" were not extinct "to this day." Many scholars, whom Dr. Price will probably label "radical critics," have seen the expression "to this day" as a "give-away" of late interpolation, because it implies a substantial time span between the events mentioned and the date of authorship and, therefore, would not have been a likely phrase that Josephus, a first-century author, would have used. The use of this same expression in the Pentateuch, by the way, has led scholars to recognize that at least some sections were written by authors who were more remote to the events than Moses would have been, so Dr. Price is very wrong if he thinks that scholars just pick on the Bible but accept without question the authenticity of all other ancient documents.
Dr. Price asked "what historian regards these ancient works [Tacitus, Suetonius, etc.] to be the fraudulent product of multiple authors, editors and redactors, produced over a long period of time." I have just shown that in some cases historians do regard some of these works as such, but in setting up this straw man to kick around, Price has conveniently ignored a question more relevant to the issue: What historian regards these ancient works to be accurate in everything they reported? Does Dr. Price think for one moment that none of the "historical" information reported in these works has ever been challenged? Since he is a contributing writer to TSR, Dr. Price is the recipient of a free life-time subscription, so I have to wonder if he has been reading it. In responding to Roger Hutchinson ("Inerrantist Tail-Chasing," November/December 1997, pp. 3-5, 11), I cited several examples of fabulous claims that both Tacitus and Suetonius attested to and asked why Hutchinson does not accord to these claims the same consideration that he grants to similar New Testament claims about miracles that Jesus allegedly performed. Perhaps Price would like to answer that question and tell us if he thinks that the emperor Vespasian's healing of a blind man and a man with a withered hand, as both Tactitus and Suetonius claimed were done in the presence of many witnesses, were actual historical events. If not, then why is he so willing to accept similar claims just because they are recorded in the Bible? Does he expect us to believe there is no bias here?
Biblical Inerrancy: Price spoke disparagingly of the allusions that I have made to biblical inerrancy during this debate. He said that it "is indeed a nonissue," but it certainly isn't. It is paramount to understanding Price's motivation. He desperately wants us to believe that he is the rational one, who has reached a conclusion about Jeremiah's prophecy solely on the basis of "objective information" that he has examined, but this is as far from the truth as white is from black. He believes that Jeremiah accurately predicted the 70-year captivity in Babylon primarily because the Bible in its present forms indicates that he did, but the truth is that there is no "objective evidence" that Jeremiah and/or his scribe Baruch wrote the book of Jeremiah in its entirety and that it has been transmitted to us intact basically as it was originally written. Without such evidence, Dr. Price cannot make this "prophecy" satisfy the list of criteria that he himself has said is "satisfactory." As long as a substantial body of biblical scholars exist, who, after subjecting the book of Jeremiah to proven methods of textual criticism, conclude that this book is a work of multiple authors over a long period of time, too much doubt about its authenticity remains an obstacle that Price cannot overcome in his quest to prove prophecy fulfillment. I will have more to say about this in my responses to the second part of Price's latest defense of the 70-year prophecy.
A Simple Challenge: Price is upset over my "continuous harping on the issue of biblical inerrancy in this debate" (p. 4), but he will just have to remain upset. I will not allow him to deceive the readers of this debate into thinking that he is just the epitome of reasonableness and objectivity and that his fundamentalist view of the Bible has had nothing to do with his position on Jeremiah's 70-year prophecy. He wants us to think that he has sat down, with an open mind, and thoroughly researched this issue and found that the evidence objectively considered forced him to believe that Jeremiah made an amazing prophecy. "I have stated that the inerrancy of Scripture is not crucial to my arguments," Price said. "Fulfilled prophecy can be true even if presented in an errant Bible." Yes, I know that this is what Price has been claiming, but I also know that it is the claim that Dr. Norman Geisler made about the resurrection during our debate at Columbus, Georgia. It is the claim that many pseudoobjective "apologists" like to parade before gullible debate audiences. "What, me biased?" they love to boast. "Not on your life! I've just looked at the Bible objectively and found that it is reasonable to believe it." But what objective person could read a book filled with tales of people being raised from the dead, walking unharmed through a fiery furnace, making the sun stand still, healing the lame and the blind, parting the water of a sea, routinely seeing angels and even "God," etc., etc., etc. and actually believe that all of these claims are historically factual, especially when it is known that the literature of other people living in the same era was also filled with such tales? There is no objectivity at all in people who have such beliefs. The truth is that they believe in the resurrection, the prophecies of Jeremiah, and other extraordinary biblical claims primarily because they want to believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant "word of God," and objectivity has little to do with it.
If Dr. Price truly believes that biblical inerrancy is a "nonissue" in this debate, he can prove his sincerity very quickly. All he has to do is tell us just one biblical miracle claim that he thinks is unhistorical or one statement in the Bible that he thinks is errant. This is a simple challenge, but he will not accept it because he knows that if he makes a public admission that there is something in the Bible that he doesn't believe is true, his position at Temple Baptist Seminary will immediately be put in serious jeopardy. A nonissue indeed!
It is certainly true that truth is found in errant books. Who doesn't know this? But it is not true that biblical inerrantists like Dr. Price believe in extraordinary claims like Jeremiah's prophecy only because they have objectively examined the evidence and concluded that the claims are true. Archaeologists could uncover tomorrow a shorter manuscript of the book of Jeremiah, which was written in Hebrew and predated all other manuscripts of this book but contained no reference at all to the 70-year prophecy, and Dr. Price and other inerrantists would immediately go to work to find reasons why this discovery would not prove anything about the authenticity of the prophecy and other information in the Masoretic text that the new discovery did not contain.
Till's Theology: After complaining about my references to biblical inerrancy, which he described as a "nonissue," Price immediately claimed that the existence of God is relevant to the debate. "How can we debate the possibility of supernatural revelation of prophecy," he asked, "without considering the possibility of God's existence?" Well, I suppose we could do it the same way that Price expects us to evaluate his position in this debate without considering the fact that he is a biblical inerrantist. At any rate, we see how that Price speaks out of both sides of his mouth. As just noted, he tries to argue that we cannot debate the possibility of supernatural revelation of prophecy without considering the question of God's existence, but later, he argued that the supernatural has nothing to do with whether genuine prophecy occurs and that he has no obligation to demonstrate that it does. In reference to my criteria of valid prophecy fulfillment, he said that he had accepted my criteria but that they "did not include proof that the prediction came from a supernatural source" (p. 7, this issue). So he apparently accepts the relevance of the supernatural when it suits his need but rejects it when it doesn't.
As biblicists invariably do when they get painted into corners by their inconsistencies, Price again desperately tried to shift the burden of proof to me, as if I am asserting anything that I need to prove. He said that "when a person develops organized opinions and arguments about God, revelation, and religion, whether positive or negative, that is a theology." And so, just like that, Price turns me into a theologian with "organized opinions and arguments" about God, revelation, and religion, but he does so without even considering my motivation. My so-called theology is merely reactive. I am reacting to the absurdities of the real theologians, who attempt to impose their opinions on others at risk to individual freedom and liberty. If no one had ever asserted that "God" exists, no one would ever have opposed this view. If no one had ever asserted that a certain book is "inspired of God," no one would ever have opposed this view. Likewise, if no one had ever asserted that Jeremiah made an exceptionally accurate prophecy statement, no one would ever have opposed that claim. Price apparently can't see that the absurd assertions of the theologians are the reason why skeptics and atheists even exist in the first place. However, the fact that theologians make assertions that rational thinkers question, or even outright deny, puts no burden on them to prove that the assertions of the theologians are not true. All it would take for Price to agree to this basic principle would be for another religion like Islam or Hinduism to gain a majority in this country and actively try to impose its religious views on everyone. In such a scenario, I don't think it would take too long for Price to oppose that new majority, and I'm sure if any of them insisted that he prove that their beliefs are not true, Price would quickly inform them that he was under no such obligation. Yet when his religion is the one that is flying high, he expects everyone who questions it to assume the burden of proving that it is not true.
The Unverifiable Fabulous Claims of Atheism: Price said that he asserts again that my "theological presupposition is based on a sequence of unverifiable fabulous claims" (p. 4). "One of those unverifiable fabulous claims," he said, "is that God does not exist." Price realized that this is an outright falsehood, and so he quickly backpedaled and noted that I don't assert that "a deity does not exist" but "simply say that I do not believe in the existence of a deity." Price labeled this a quibble, and so he presumes to tell atheists what they are supposed to say and what they really believe. If I should say that I do not believe that alien beings are visiting the earth in spaceships, Price wouldn't have any problems understanding that I am not flatly asserting that alien beings are not visiting the earth but only that I have no belief that they are. They may well be visiting the earth, but I have yet to see sufficient evidence to make me believe that they are. Hence, I have no belief that aliens are visiting the earth. I suspect that Price is upset because he knows that he makes an untenable assertion when he baldly asserts that "God" exists, and so he seeks to push me into making the equally unverifiable assertion that "God" does not exist. Because I refuse to play the game by rules that he wants to impose, he cries that I'm not playing fairly.
In response to Price's claim that atheism ignores evidence that the universe is temporal, I showed that some very reputable physicists like Michio Kaku and Andrei Linde, to name only a few, have postulated theories about a self-reproducing, inflationary universe that has always existed. In replying to this, Price had the gall to say, "(T)his hypothesis is unverifiable" (p. 5), as if his hypothesis of an omniscient, omnipotent creator of the universe is verifiable. He went on to castigate Kaku and Linde for "making use of such terms as `immortal,' `eternal,' and `infinite,'" and he said this as if there were mountains of evidence to justify the constant theistic use of such terms as "immortal," "eternal," and "infinite" in reference to the Hebrew god Yahweh. He said that "(n)one of these attributes [of the universe] are verifiable by physical measurements," a claim that I am not informed enough in physics to evaluate, but even if the claim is true, it would put Kaku and Linde in no worse position than Price, because he certainly cannot verify by physical measurements that his god is immortal, eternal, and infinite, yet that doesn't keep him from asserting that he is.
Price wagged in the second law of thermodynamics, of course, and said that these "atheistic physicists" had sought to "avoid the necessary conclusions demanded by" this law by "expand[ing] their conception into a mega-universe" with characteristics of eternality that cannot be verified. I suppose Price expects us to believe that a professor of Bible and Hebrew at a fundamentalist seminary is in a better position to evaluate a scientific theory than are some of the most renown physicists in the world. I hope he will excuse me for suspecting that these physicists have given due consideration to the second law of thermodynamics and see no conflict that it poses to the theory of an eternally existing, self-perpetuating universe.
Price appealed again to thermodynamics and said that "(c)ontrary to the first law of thermodynamics, such an eternal, self-perpetuating ocean [multi-verse] must presuppose the existence of an infinite and inexhaustible source of new energy within the system." Otherwise, he went on to say, "the second law of thermodynamics would have forced the frothing ocean into equilibrium, and it would have settled into a motionless nothingness by now" (p. 5). I wonder if Price expected us to say, "Hey, I'll bet that those atheistic physicists never thought of that!" But if he had read Kaku's article, he would have noticed that he dealt with that problem:
Price's "Good Company": Price argued that the physicists I referred to "do not enjoy a consensus about naturalistic explanations" of the universe "but are just as controversial among themselves as the radical literary critics are," so we see again how Price responds to opinions that conflict with his views. If biblical scholars disagree with his interpretation of the Bible, Price dismisses them as just "radical literary critics," and if physicists suggest naturalistic explanations for the existence of the universe, he labels them "atheistic physicists" who are "just as controversial among themselves as the radical literary critics." He apparently believes that labeling opponents as "liberal" or "atheistic" somehow constitutes refuting their arguments.
Price offered in support of his opinion of "atheistic physicists" an article in The Wall Street Journal that claimed "40% of American physicists, biologists and mathematicians believe in God--and not just in some metaphysical abstraction, but... the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" (p. 5). From this he reasoned, without any supporting evidence, that probably a much higher percentage of scientists are theists of some sort or at least "simply agnostics." I checked the article cited but found only that it claimed that "a recent survey in the journal Nature" had revealed that this percentage of scientists believed in a personal deity, but when I looked in both Info-Tract and Readers' Guide, I was unable to find any such survey in Nature or any other journal. I did find, however, that the author of the article that Price cited was obviously a believer in the biblical god himself, so I have to wonder about his objectivity.
For the sake of argument, let's just assume that some such survey did report that 40% of scientists believe in the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That would mean that 60% of them don't. Does Price see no significance in that? Moreover, the way the article stated the results, one could reasonably conclude that only American or at least western scientists were surveyed, because it would be unlikely that 40% of scientists in predominantly Hindu or Buddhist or Shinto countries, such as Indian, China, Thailand, or Japan would be believers in the biblical god. That would mean that the survey reflected a cultural bias and would therefore not be an accurate gauge of objectivity in the matter of this god's existence. Furthermore, if the evidence for the existence of Price's god is so compelling, we have to wonder why only 40% of scientists who grew up in a society in which Biblical religions are in the majority believe in the personal god of Abraham. Somewhere along the way, 60% have found reasons not to believe in this god, who must not be as scientifically obvious as Price seems to believe. He may think that he is "in good company," but when the survey he cited is objectively analyzed, his company really isn't very impressive. I think I prefer the company of Kaku, Linde, and the Nobel laureates in physics whom they cited in their articles.
Modern Miracles: To show that he does not limit his acceptance of miracles to those recorded in the Bible, Dr. Price cited the case of Marolyn Ford as an example of what he believes is a genuine, modern-day miracle. The claim was that Mrs. Ford had been blind for eleven years from macular degeneration, which had destroyed the retinal nerve tissue in her eyes, but, lo and behold, when she and her husband prayed one night, her vision was suddenly restored, and she can now see with remarkable clarity. My reasons for doubting this claim were detailed in my last response to Price, and, of course, he considers my rejection to be "the behavior of a person with a closed mind" (p.5). He wondered why I had not investigated "the alleged miracle and expose[d] it as a fraud," and the answer is simple: I didn't investigate this claim for the same reason that I don't investigate the hundreds of other miracle claims that religious zealots publicize every year. To check them all, I would have to do nothing but investigate miracle claims. If a genuine miracle should actually occur, I'm sure that it would create such notoriety that it would be publicized all over the world by responsible news media. The fact that this did not happen in the case of Mrs. Ford's allegedly miraculous healing is reason to suspect that it wasn't as miraculous as Dr. Price seems to believe. I might also add that investigating miracle claims cuts both ways, so I wonder how much time Dr. Price spent investigating the evidence in Mrs. Ford's healing. Did he check her medical records? Did he interview her doctors? Or did he just accept her mere word that the miracle had occurred? Somehow, I suspect the latter.
In the next issue, I will continue my response to Dr. Price's
article. When I have addressed all of his arguments, quibbles, and
straw men, I will then publish part two and respond to it.
