"William Lane Craig is one of the best-known Christian apologist in the world today. Unfortunately, in the last few years, he has severely departed from his calling..... In an interview with the New York Times, well known as an anti-Christian source that was once a sympathetic trumpet for Stalin in the USA, Craig folded on biblical inerrancy, including in Genesis:
Nicholas Kristof: You don’t believe the Genesis account that the world was created in six days, or that Eve was made from Adam’s rib, do you? If the Hebrew Bible’s stories need not be taken literally, why not also accept that the New Testament writers took liberties?One wonders why a secular Assyriologist should be taken as, well, Gospel truth on the genre of Genesis. But indeed the Gospels are a historically reliable ancient biographies. But one thing Craig repeatedly ignores is that these reliable Gospel writers and their chief subject, Jesus Christ, affirm Genesis as history!
William Lane Craig: Because the Gospels are a different type of literature than the primeval history of Genesis 1–11. The eminent Assyriologist Thorkild Jacobsen described Genesis 1–11 as history clothed in the figurative language of mythology, a genre he dubbed “mytho-history.” By contrast, the consensus among historians is that the Gospels belong to the genre of ancient biography, like the ‘Lives of Greeks and Romans’ written by Plutarch. As such, they aim to provide a historically reliable account.
Kristof: How do you account for the many contradictions within the New Testament? For example, Matthew says Judas hanged himself, while Acts says that he “burst open.” They can’t both be right, so why insist on inerrancy of Scripture?
Craig: I don’t insist on the inerrancy of Scripture. Rather, what I insist on is what C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” that is to say, the core doctrines of Christianity. Harmonizing perceived contradictions in the Bible is a matter of in-house discussion amongst Christians. What really matters are questions like: Does God exist? Are there objective moral values? Was Jesus truly God and truly man? How did his death on a Roman cross serve to overcome our moral wrongdoing and estrangement from God? These are, as one philosopher puts it, the “questions that matter,” not how Judas died.
So when faced with a village-atheopath–level attack on the Bible, Craig just punted.
A common and reasonable explanation for Matthew 27:3–8 and Acts 1:18–19, but not the only one, is that he hanged himself, as Matthew says, and eventually the branch broke. This would result, as Acts says, in Judas “falling headlong” (which Kristof omits), so his body broke open, as bloated dead bodies can do."
CMI
