At the last Sound Faith conference in 2024, I heard about a magnificent presentation by Michael Licona, that was based on his academic publications, but presented with a slideshow to the layperson. In that presentation, he made a case that there was more flexibility for authors of biographies in ancient times than modern people understand.
Basically, the take-away I got out of it was “if you like your inerrancy the old-fashioned way” (and I do like my inerrancy that way) then you can make that work with harmonizations. But if you are a dirty, stinky skeptic like Bart Ehrman, then you can find enough flexibility in the style of ancient biographers to avoid contradictions in the Bible by understanding how ancient biographers worked.
So, I have been nagging and hen-pecking at Mike and Tyson James since that presentation to put the presentation online, so we can see how to address skeptics like Bart Ehrman. And they finally did it!
And here it is:
Share that with all your non-Christian friends.
This presentation draws on Mike’s academic work, for example, his book “Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography” which was published in 2016 by Oxford University Press.
This book is not designed for evangelizing people who already accept the “ordinary” view of inerrancy in the Bible. This is a book designed to allow skeptics to stop getting hung up on alleged contradictions. None of you reading this post need to be convinced about inerrancy. But Bart Ehrman does and so we need to make a special academic university press case for him. Put the cookies on the bottom shelf, as it were.
Anyway, here is the news about the debate, which is actually their eighth debate! It happens on the first day of the Sound Faith 2025 conference, November 20-22, in Boston, Massachusetts:
This November, join Sound Faith 2025 in Boston for a three-day conference to learn from and engage with the most influential voices defending the Christian faith today. Held at the beautiful Tremont Temple Baptist Church, this event will feature interactive sessions on topics such as God’s existence, the resurrection of Jesus, faith and science, and more. One of the feature events will be a hard-hitting debate between Christian historian Michael Licona and agnostic textual critic Bart Ehrman – on a topic neither has ever publicly debated before! We’ll also have an in-depth discussion on the resurrection between Licona and Dale Allison, whom William Lane Craig described as “a very prominent New Testament scholar of considerable repute.” Our tremendous speaker lineup includes philosophers, historians, professional apologists, social media influencers, and more! The magic of these conferences happens when attendees are able to ask questions and have discussions with speakers and other attendees, so throughout the conference there will be tons of interactive opportunities, both inside and outside of the presentations. Our goal is this: to equip you with a SOUND FAITH ready to face the toughest challenges facing Christianity today!
The debate is on day 1 of the conference and then on day 2, Mike has to go up against another high-power historian, Dale Allison. Rose and I both have Dale Allison’s book on the resurrection, because although he is skeptical, everyone thinks his work on this topic is top shelf quality.
Now, I want to say one more thing about Mike’s arguments and who they are for. I had a friend Murdina (“Dina”) who lived in Inverness, Scotland and she was my best friend for a long time. Just the wisest person you could ever meet. She had multiple degrees in medicine and was extremely respected in health care management. She was also Young Earth, King James Bible only, and super, hyper Calvinist. She used to call my allegiance to Middle Knowledge “Middle Earth Hobbitry”. And she had lots of mocking words for everything else that I liked, for example, calling my fondness for the Etrian Odyssey series of games “Estrogen Oddity”.
Anyway, Dina had an evil older brother, who had abandoned the faith of the family and become an atheist. Because I had been buying her all the best books in apologetics (Stephen C. Meyer) and economics (Thomas Sowell), she had really learned a lot about how to do evidential apologetics. One day, her brother came up from Glasgow for a fishing trip. And Dina called me on Skype and dropped the phone into her pocket so I could hear them talking. Then she layed into her brother with both apologetics fists for 2.5 hours. She used the arguments of old-Earth intelligent design smash every single objection he made from his brittle atheistic fundamentalist view of Christianity. By the end, he was so flustered that he started to say the stupidest things and I laughed and laughed at how badly she had beaten him. All he could do was make fun of her for her young Earth and KJV only views, but she had never argued anything of that against him. She was on the most solid ground.
For weeks after, this evil brother would text her constantly trying and failing over and over to wiggle out from the thrashing that she had given him. But there was no escape. Although he had mocked her constantly prior to this engagement, in private and in public, he never ever mocked her again.
I asked her why she used the mainstream science arguments instead of just quoting the Bible to him, or trying to argue young Earth. And she said “first step is to get him into the church. After that, I will fix his wrong views about the age of the Earth, the right Bible translation, and Reformed theology”.
I tell you all this so that you will understand how I see Mike Licona’s work. It is a tool for the most hardened skeptics. The first step, as Phillip E. Johnson used to say, is to get the thin edge of the wedge into the log. After that comes the hammering.
I don’t think anyone has ever debated the reliability of the gospels with an academic skeptic like Bart Erhman eight times. To me, that says that Mike is a special person who is able to make friends with his opponents, so that they keep coming back. He isn’t rude, insulting and abrasive like some other Christians who want to talk about these issues. So you have a rare package of extraordinary ability as a historian, paired with extraordinary character. And that’s what allows him to make a difference. He makes more of a difference than other Christians who just don’t have that same combination.
