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There was no virgin birth in Mark's gospel, for the simple reason that, it was regarded as no more special than any other miracle of Jesus, had no yet attained any theological significance, and because ancient biography did not require that a biography start at birth. Wrong answer, Shorto. [J. P. Holding, based on More and better scholarship]

Having presumed to dump apostolic succession with just a few burps, Pikachu now dives headfirst into the fantasy realm of the politically correct. You'll recognize what comes next -- the old Bauer hypothesis and all its later permutations; apparently Pikachu hasn't heard that Bauer has been debunked, and that only the fringe is still trying to give his theory CPR. In contrast, the mainstream is represented by scholars like Philip Jenkins (Hidden Gospels), who remain with the view that what we call orthodox Christianity was there firstest with the mostest -- while all of the other folks were Johnny come latelys offering permutations on and reactions to the reality. "Oh my"...Pikachu just bit the dust again.

Dating ancient documents
If you're like Pikachu, you never bothered to critically ask the question of how ancient documents are dated and authenticated. The plain fact is that once you apply the same criteria to the Gospels that you do any other ancient document, traditional dating and authorship comes out smelling darned good. Darned good. Having no interest in comparative homework that might make him get up and do some real research, Pikachu naturally opts to parrot the usual line of Gospel anonymity. No surprise there. Follow the link to see arguments he won't touch.

Here's a big fat lie by Pikachu, or more likely a sign of his ignorance. It is just plain false that the gospel manuscripts don't name the authors. Yes, they most certainly do -- the names of the authors are on every superscription at the beginning of each Gospel. No exceptions. Every copy has one, and there is no confusion (i.e., no difference in attribution). And if that's not enough for you, then you need to explain why Tacitus' Annals, with no better evidence than such a superscription at the beginning, are any more doubtful. No, Pikachu, you're not nuts. You're just ill-informed.

Since the original gospels do name the authors, Pikachu's attempt to foist the naming on to Papias (not a "Catholic" at this early date, by the way) is ridiculous; however, Papias does give crucial external evidence, of an earlier date and a better quality than we have for secular documents, once again.

I'd like to see Pikachu pull his "scholars just take a guess at the dates" routine on classical scholars. There are indeed only gospel fragments in the second century; on the other hand, it is another falsehood that there are no complete Gospels till the fifth century. Make that late second or early third century. And it's still better than works like Tacitus, where we don't have complete copies dated earlier than say, the 11th century!

Yet more fudge is the argument that Apostolic Fathers, guys like Clement, Polycarp and Ignatius...do not quote, or even mention, the gospels. They do in fact allude to the Gospels (see here, and anyway, if we want to play that game, Pikachu just dated Tacitus to 200 AD based on Tertuallian. What he needs to show is that there should have been a mention of the Gospels as documents where there wasn't. Good luck.

7-11 scholarship
Don't buy into this piece of wildness: The books in our New Testament were chosen by Catholic officials in the fourth century AD. It's a much more complex process, and it started long before the fourth century.

You can also ignore Pikachu's little whinge about differences in the Gospels. No oops, ands or buts. Not even with the old "Luke and Matthew give genealogies with different people on them" canard.

You have to plug in to literary techniques of the first century to understand And things like difference in chronological presentation. Ancient biographies like the Gospels, because they were not strictly history, arranged material either chronologically or topically, depending on the author's purpose. Jesus "says things one way in one gospel and He says them differently in another" because of, for example, cultural differences in the audiences they addressed.

Actually, no one argues that the gospels are "7-11 surveillance videos" as Pikachu claims. But it's just a swing to the opposite extreme of error to claim that any of this makes the Gospels "unrelaible".

Next Pikachu falls for the overstatements that the gospels describe different theologies. As though what they offer is mutually exclusine. Sorry, but "Mark's Jesus" is not the only one who does miracles and "gives out his message in cryptic parables whose meaning he explains only to His inner circle." He does miracles in Luke, Matthew, and John as well; and the use of cryptic teaching explained to an inner circle was a typical educational process for the period. Nothing unique there. That John's Jesus is self consciously transcendent is true, but also explained by John's supplementing the Synoptic record -- and that his Gospel is designed as an "resocialing" document (see more here). There's a long list of reasonable explanations for these differences that Pikachu has obviously never investigated -- he's too busy blathering details from his own limited study.

Many late heresies
Next up, we have a look at what Pikachu calls "early Christianities" -- better known by mainstream scholars like Jenkins as the Boys of Too Little, Too Late.

Jesus, People!
Think there's anything to Pikachu's claim that Jesus' first followers didn't believe Jesus was the sacrificed, resurrected savior? Forget it. This is arrived at not by evidence, but by little games of slice and dice and fantasy document creatiopn, to say nothinhg of a hugely begged question.

What a dip!

To start, they invent a collection of Jesus' sayings Matthew and Luke used to write their gospels called Q There are a passel of problems with this idea; you can see details here, but among the problems are 1) lack of hard evidence for such a document; 2) that the creation and use of such a document as theorists describe would not be in accord with the methods of composition -- theoretical and practical _- of the period; 3) the arbitary nature of the theory, so that as one scholar put it, "Q is what you make it". And is that ever true with the folks Pikachu uses.

The next step they do is to claim that this Q -- which has never been seen in print, and which is unknown in any later writing (talk about inconsistency, since Pikachu whinges about lack of mention of the Gospels!), never mentions Jesus death and resurrection, or Jesus bringing salvation. Actually there are some Q theroists who would dispute that -- some versions DO mention all those things, to various extents, but that just testifies to how unstable and flimsy the whole hypothesis really is.

Helmut Koester's sound bite is thus not representative at all>>

In the Synoptic Sayings Source, "Christological titles for Jesus are strikingly absent, [scholar-speak for 'Jesus is never called Christ'] nor is Jesus proclaimed as the one who rose from the dead and who will return in the future." [Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, volume 2, History and Literature of Early Christianity, 2d ed, pg153]

and

Synoptic Sayings Source is evidence "for the development of a Jesus tradition that had no relationship to the proclamation of the cross and resurrection of Jesus." [Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, , volume 2, History and Literature of Early Christianity, 2d ed, pg154]

However, even if it were, at the heart of the whole theory lies a fallacy: Even allowing that it is present in Matthew and Luke, all we can truly say is that Christians possessed and use the Q document - we can NOT infer what that document contained in its entirety, nor that it represented the complete beliefs of the early church, any more than "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" represented the entire theological perspective of Martin Luther King. As Biblical scholar Arland Hultgren observes: It is one thing to describe the theology of Q as a document; it is another to declare that the community's theology as a whole is represented by it; and it is still another to say that its theology is fully contained in it. The same could be said for the "synotpic apocalypse" and the "collection of parables" Pikachu cites. No hard evidence. Just slice and dice games coupled with presumption. Duh!

Again, this is NOT mainstream scholarship Pikachu uses. It is a tedious and tendentious fringe that likes to overrepresent itself, and I suggest you start with Professor Jenkins' excellent book, the whole thing. [Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels]
Gnostics? Naughty!
Ready for another cuckoo idea? Pikachu wants us to believe that the gnostic Christians were around at the same time as orthodoxy! Sorry, Pikachu, Gospel of Thomas is not a "mid-first-century collection of Jesus sayings." It's at best a mid-second-century collection dependent on the canonical Gospels. Too bad. Jesus' earliest followers weren't "Thomas Christians"!

An old canard
Yte more equivocation as Pikachu says, The New Testament book of Acts describes the orthodox history's first Christian schism. What's he think this is? He thinks it has to do with "circumcised, or not, Paul vs Peter". It wasn't about circumcision at all, though. It was about ritual purity, and keeping company. Acts also shows (did Pikachu forget this?) that the parties all came to an agreement, against a minority fringe, that there was no need for Gentiles to be circumcised. Of course he has a ready, convenient, and conveniently unfalsifable explanation for this: "Paul and his pals won" and made sure that they rewrote history. It's amazing how much history Pikachu has to invent to explain away the history that is there already.

By the by

We don't need to go down Pikachu's list of "different Christianities" -- -- all of these were decidedly late, and had ideas that would never cohere with Christianity's origins in first century Jewish Palestine. The variations on the Trinity all fail at the template of pre-NT Jewish Wisdom theology and were in fact efforts to cohere the Trinity with Greek thinking. We don't need to look at his list of "different Bibles", either -- we have noted above both the lateness of these documents and given a link to a much more sophisticated exposition on the formation of the canon than Pikachu's "they did it in the 4th century canard.

The one book that Pikachu recommends here that needs new comment is his endorsement of this one by Walter Bauer. Bauer's work was hideously flawed and relied extensively on arguments from silence. You can see more here but here are some details now.

First, Bauer ignored data from the New Testament. He regarded the NT as "both too unproductive and too much disputed to be able to serve as a point of departure" - which is rather an easy way to shove it under the carpet! Second, his work is full of arguments from silence. Bauer's book is full of might nots, perhapses, and could bes; even those who fully supported his point of view plainly admitted that silence was a primary source of his argumentation. And finally, but most importantly: Bauer was just plain wrong! There are two major disassemblings of the Bauer thesis by Thomas A. Robinson and H. E. W. Turner that show where he went wrong; and as Glenn Miller has noted: ...(Bauer's) hypothesis of 60 years ago IGNORED key elements of the data (BTE:129-161), and considerable data has come to light (in both literary and archeological arenas) documenting the "early and strong" appearance of orthodoxy (e.g. RNC:47ff; BTE:35-91). His position is called 'overly simplified' by even the editors of his 2nd edition (!), and yet his hypothesis is often assumed uncritically...

Another good point is made by Hultgren: "The traditional view, that orthodoxy preceded heresy, does not require that orthodoxy existed in every conceivable place prior to heresy." This means, in terms of Bauer's thesis, that even IF it were proven that heresy got somewhere firstest with the mostest, that does NOT mean that it emerged on equal terms with orthodoxy! Such an absurd position as Bauer's would require us to believe that Mormonism was a religion equally dominant with general Christian beliefs in America from the start in 1776, since the Mormons were there "firstest with the mostest" in Utah!

No wonder the big boys reject this book. Cumbersome and tendentious, it deserves to be out of Print, not available at Amazon.