The Dumplin' Dumbash Page

Dating the Gospels

As Dumplin's dumb readers continue to desperately scour sources like Wikipedia looking for information on Greco-Roman patronage, Dumplin' himself continues his downward spiral into idiocy by commenting on the dating of the Gospels. Mind you, he'll never touch items like this where we provided detailed outlines of how ancient documents are dated, and set up an epistemic scenraio of comparison to the work of Tacitus. Dumplin' doesn't have the mental horsepower to do that kind of thing, so as usual, he just picks out ONE argument and makes a fool of himself with it. This time, choosing from Geisler and Turek points that lack of mention of the Temple's actual destruction date the Gospels before 70 AD.

Dumplin' tries to upend this with the most rigorous form of argument, the bad analogy combined with the puerile anecdote. On the one hand, he wants to use the destruction of the World Trade Center as a parallel. Dumb, dumb, DUMB. No, Dumplin'. That is NOT analogous to the Temple as it was seen by devout Jews. We did not visit the WTC as many as four times a year on pilgrimages. We did not view the WTC's presence as a signal of God's favor on our land and believe that our God resided there. The WTC was not the social, political, and religious focus of our people. It's a stupid, misinformed analogy to start.

But anyway, Dumplin's point is that today, we don't "go into detail about exactly what happened every time we make a reference to the event". The point here, despite the bad analogy, makes some sense with respect to a different topic related to high and low contexts, but as an argument for why the Gospels don't mention the actual destruction of the Temple, it fails. We may not mention every detail, but our conversation assumes it was destroyed. We don't speak of the WTC in present tense as though it still exists. We don't say that we'll be hiring a broker there, no more than Matthew would make an issue of the temple tax if the temple had already been destroyed. We also would not have serious apologetic reasons to make it clear it was destroyed -- as early Christians would; for that destruction vindicated Jesus as a prophet and reversed the shameful evaluation of him by those who crucified him. The Gospel authors were quite intent on noting when Jesus "fulfilled" some past OT passage by repetition; to say that they'd pass up an actual prophetic fulfillment of this magnitude and significance is inane in the extreme.

Dumplin' has no answer to this, other than the plaintive whine, "you can write about how things are different today, but no law says you have to." With that, he as much admits that he has no real answer to the argument. It doesn't take "incredulity" to accept this point -- it takes sufficient knowledge of the social context of the NT authors, and that is knowledge Dumplin' never got at By-bull college while taking classes like Screaming from the Pulpit 101.

Dumplin' next pulls this jackass out of his hat: "Duh...we have quite a few early Christian writings, dating after 70AD, and we know that they rarely, if ever, bothered to mention the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, duh." Not that he names any of these documents, though yes, there are many; but he needs to not just name them, but show that they mentioned the Temple in "present tense" or even mentioned it at all, period. As it is the lack of examples and analysis speaks for itself in terms of Dumplin's intellectual bankruptcy.

Other than that, Dumplin' makes his usual erroneous appeal to NT use of the OT (which we have answered before, and to which all he said was, "Duh -- what?") and refutes a red herring version of the "too early to be legend" argument. Sad news, as usual, from the place where they think the way you learn about complex issues like patronage is to look in a dictionary. Duh ah....