Blogging With Ike

The Truth Project, Part 5, History

Feb 24

theisaacgroupfocus on the family, History, The Truth Project 6 Comments

This is part four of my critique and review of The Truth Project. This is part five of the Truth Project which deals with History. As it turns out history is one of my prime subjects.

I wonder sometime where I start on these commentaries. As one of my favorite quotes says,

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. ‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’ – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

This week, Dr. Del Tackett, DM (Doctor of Management, Colorado Technical University) looks at history.

Let me say that this will seem like some serious nitpicking on certain items. To a point I agree. However, one of my problems that I have is that of believability. If there is a subject which I know something about, as an example, history, Christianity, Bible, theology, Judaism, Biblical languages, as well as a few other subjects, and you are wrong on something I know, why should I trust you in something else.

As far as I am concerned The Truth Project has a higher standard of burden based on their claims of presenting truth and defining truth for Christianity, or at least evangelical Christianity. I consider the same burden for all, including myself. I try to be extremely accurate and mostly fair in all my studies and critique. I have to confess that I sometimes I do go over the top.

Now that I have set the burden high for myself, I shall proceed.

Dr. Tackett looks at the perception of things through numbers in particular 911. This is a good demonstration of how things change. He also brings out the bogeyman of Darwin.

The first thing that screamed out at me was slide number 12. This slide talks about misusing history. The quote on the slide is “Whether her book, is true, I’ don’t care . . .” My note on this was, one professor? What kind (of professor)? What else was said?

In the group we had afterward, I asked the question is this indicative of historians? Is it one? As usual was kicked down by feel goodism and not by truth. My question was dismissed as obvious there are many historians who feel this way. Being a historian I questioned the comment. So now, let’s look at the reality.

Agosin, Marjorie (1999). Cited in Robin Wilson, Anthropologist challenges veracity of multicultural icon. Chronicle of Higher Education (Online). [sic]

The footnote says that Marjorie Agosin was cited in an article by Robin Wilson. So I decided to find the original citation and look at the original work by Agosin. The good news is that I was actually able to find the original article entitled Anthropologist Challenges Veracity of Multicultural Icon. As it turns out it was a quote not a citation, which I found discouraging. Nonetheless, here is the original quote from the article.

“I think Rigoberta Menchu has been used by the right to negate the very important space that multiculturalism is providing in academia,” says Marjorie Agosin, head of the Spanish department at Wellesley College. “Whether her book is true or not, I don’t care. We should teach our students about the brutality of the Guatemalan military and the U.S. financing of it.”

As it turns out Dr. Agosin, is a Spanish professor who is also a human rights activist. Her whole point of this quote is the issue of human rights problems that occurred in Guatemala. To this end her quote is a good one. It is also worthy to note that there are many comments saying how bad her comment was. Now for the Tackett problems: Tackett intentionally misquotes and misleads with his comments. After all the original quote was there as a whole and he used exactly what he wanted to use. This makes Tackett at best a deceiver and at worst an out and out liar.

The Mayflower Compact

The Mayflower Compact is told by Del Tackett to have what is called the “New School Version.” The NSV as written by Tackett as:

In the name of God, Amen.
___________________________________
We whose names are underwritten, . . .
having undertaken,
_________________________________
a voyage to plant the first colony . . . [sic]

The issue here is that it looks like and is said to be the version in school books across the country. Makes sense to me does it not? Once again, I will have to strip away gilding and point the problem.

The original version is:

“In the name of God, Amen. . . .
Having undertaken, for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia,”

The real question comes down to, is what he said true? There are admittedly 100s of US History textbooks published every year. I personally have a collection, or access to, about 25 differing US History textbooks used for American History by middle school and high school students over the last 30 or so years. I also have a smaller collection of college level textbooks. I decided to do a little test, did Tackett tell the truth?

The answer is, clearly a no. My current oldest textbook is from 1979. This particular books does not quote the Mayflower Compact at all. I have another printed in 1998 that has a single edited sentence from the text. This was the one that the group focused on, of course. The other 24 books had the Mayflower Compact complete and unedited. So once again, I am wondering how accurate Tackett’s statement is once again.

The next section, is a re-quote of Josh McDowell’s list of the New Testament compared to other ancient literature. Here is the problem with >24,000 texts of the Greek New Testament (GNT), dated from 25 years from the writing of the New Testament. The text that is within 25 years is p52. This fragment has small portion of John 8 (about 4 verses). Here is a copy of the fragment:

The 25 years is from the writing of the book of Revelation (about 90-95 AD) and the best dates from the fragment are 125CE to 160CE. Therefore the number can be as read as 70 years and as low as about 30 years.

The second problem that I must give credit to Tackett on is the number of manuscripts. He correctly identified that only about 19000 of the 24000 fragments to whole books are written in Greek. The other 5000 are written in other languages. What he fails to mention is that majority of the manuscripts are written after 500 CE. Which is 400 years after and many of those are written 700 years after the fact. McDowell does do a decent job of dealing with in his book. Which I will note is cited correctly.

Does the Bible deserve special treatment?

Does the Bible need to be treated differently then other pieces of literature. The answer is both yes and no. When reconstructing the text to be as close as to the autograph, the Bible cannot be beaten. The New Testament stands head and shoulders above every other book in antiquity. I am of the opinion that we are at about 98% of the autograph.

However, Cesar’s commentaries on the Gaelic War all the other examples used, do not make the truth claims that the Bible makes. Hence, the Bible needs to be treated differently.

Here we have another problem with Tackett’s lack of scholarship. There are people who doubt that Socrates existed. There are many many people who doubt that Homer existed. So complaining that the Bible is so different is a hollow argument.

Memorial Stones

Next is the discussion turns to the memorial stones of the Torah. Here occurs the best line so far: Our Problem, remembering what we should forget, forgetting what we should remember. Here is also notes that paradoxes in the Bible and the sovereignty of G-d.

Slide 38 is a fun slide to just pick on. This one slide is by far the worst slide so far out of the 300 or slides he has. This gives “The Providential View of History”. My question is simple: what does the right side tell us? Is G-d’s Providence 0% or 100% at Creation and then at the time of fulfillment is it 100% or 0%? Not to sure but the wrong graph was chosen for this visual.

The next segment is this overview of Biblical History. This mini movie was very good and I loved the design of the stills. Kudos to those who spent months working on this visual.

Tackett closes with a view of his story. Then quotes Bradford saying the pilgrims showed themselves as stepping stones.

One More Thing
Tackett is all concerned with historical revision and really proved there was none. However, he fails to mention Christian historical revisionism. Which is coming up and I will comment on that later.

Most examples of G-d being removed from society comes not from historians and textbooks but from politicians and monuments.

Technorati Tags: Truth Project, Tackett, The Truth Project, History, Church, Philosophy