[This old blog post has been restored thanks to the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, the formatting is a little wonky and the linked references no longer work.]
Christian apologist J. P. Holding has responded to some of the arguments I make in my book, Politely Rejecting the Bible, specifically those points where I engage with his work. I’ve already offered some follow-up remarks on one topic, related to Holding’s theory about Judas Iscariot’s death in the Gospel of Matthew. As I explained there, that was something I brought up in the book in order to give an example of why the debate over the Bible’s inerrancy requires more nuance, and although I think the point was lost on Holding, I don’t think that the manner of Judas’ death provides useful evidence against inerrancy, at least not in the context of the actual debate.
However, in the book I engaged with Holding’s work regarding a couple of other issues, related to cases where I really do think the Bible gets things wrong, and Holding has responded to them as well with his usual dramatic flair. In this post I will offer what I suppose you could call my rebuttal to his rebuttal. Before getting into all that, two issues need to be addressed.
Misattribution in my Book
As Holding points out, in one case it looks like I accidentally attributed an article from his website (“Why did God use lying spirits?”) to him rather than to the actual author, Eric Vestrup. I am glad to have been made aware of this, and the error will be corrected in the book as soon as possible. [Note from 2/3/2026: I am currently working on an update for the book, it has unfortunately been a long project due to other commitments but I hope to publish it this year.]
Of course, Holding wastes no time in making sure he attributes the mistake to my “comic ineptness.” It’s a harsh comment because really it’s just a simple mistake that stemmed from me not realizing that the contributors’ names were listed at the bottom of the article rather than the top. But since Holding uses this as (yet another) opportunity to insult me, I want to make a few comments about his approach to these discussions.
Insulting People for Jesus
As anyone who reads his responses to my book will clearly see, Holding (for reasons that are known only to him) insists on insulting my intelligence and academic background at every opportunity. He also seems to enjoy pointing out that I’m a comedian, although I don’t know why he thinks this is a criticism. I’m assuming he has other interests outside of apologetics, and I can’t imagine using that as a reason to openly mock him.
As I’ve talked about on my podcast, while the title of my book is supposed to be a little lighthearted, it’s also rooted in the fact that I think it’s important, when engaging in these types of debates, to keep things friendly and civil. Far from being a mere personal preference, there is a real philosophy behind this choice.
The problem with getting caught up in insulting the people whose arguments I criticize, or trying to respond to their insults with better insults, is that it brings my ego into the equation. If I do that, then when someone insults me, I begin to think less about figuring out who has the better argument and more about making sure I can find a way to embarrass my opponent, or make a fool of them at least, so that I come off looking superior by comparison. But this would only make it harder for me to admit that a belief I’ve held is false, if it should turn out to be, and as a result my pride will become an obstacle to following the evidence wherever it leads.
The problem with using ad hominem arguments is that you wind up attacking the person making an argument rather than the argument itself. And maybe that’s more fun sometimes, but in the end, it won’t help anyone get one step closer to figuring out whether the proposition being debated is true or false. So even if I had no seminary background or ministry experience, and no graduate degree at all, and devoted 90% of my time to making stupid jokes on the internet, this would all ultimately be irrelevant to whether or not my arguments hold up. (Of course, in spite of Holding’s objections, I don’t think it hurts to have the seminary degree.)
Another obvious problem with relentlessly insulting other people’s intelligence is that it puts you in an incredibly awkward position if you should happen to make a mistake yourself. Not only that, but it implies that anyone who does not share your beliefs is an imbecile. This doesn’t really make sense when you think about it, because even if your beliefs are correct, there was obviously an earlier point when you did not yet believe them. That doesn’t mean you were an imbecile, it just means you were in an earlier stage of learning than you are now. I don’t make fun of Christians precisely because I used to be one, and I know how seriously I took it, and how much thought went into it, and I remember how frustrating it was when interlocutors ignored my arguments so that they could demean my intelligence.
Incidentally, even as a comedian I am not such a big fan of insult humor. I’ve won a couple roast battles (nobody was more surprised about this than I was), but I found that I didn’t really enjoy it that much. I’d much rather tell jokes about how I’m socially intimidated by pigeons or how I can’t play the game “Bloody Mary” because I get nervous talking to girls.
If Mr. Holding wants to keep on insulting my academic background and my other interests and refer to me as inept, ignorant, and “insensate” (amazing word, I had to look it up), that is his choice. Personally, I think it makes his own arguments seem weaker and undermines his ministry, but those are no concerns of mine. At least he’s plugging my comedy.
The Field of Blood
General summary: In Matthew 27:3-8, the Field of Blood gets is name because it was purchased by the chief priests using the “blood money” that was paid to Judas Iscariot for betraying “innocent blood.” But in the book of Acts, the field seems to get its name from the manner in which Judas died there, since he fell to his death and his body burst open:
Now this man acquired a field for the wages of his wickedness, and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his intestines spilled out. And it became known to all who live in Jerusalem, so that that field was called in their own language “Akeldama,” that is, “Field of Blood.”
Acts 1:18-19 (LEB)
Holding has argued that the passage in Acts is not actually attributing the Field’s name to Judas’ gory death, but rather to the purchase of the field using blood money, as it says in the Gospel of Matthew. On this view, the phrase “it became known” is referring, not to the description of Judas’ death, but to the statement that “this man acquired a field for the wages of his wickedness.” Holding argues that it would not make sense for the name “Field of Blood” to be connected to Judas’ death because “there would not be blood everywhere.” In my book, I discuss a couple of problems with this theory. I’ll recap them here and then look at Holding’s response.
First, if you remove the description of Judas’ death from the passage in Acts, the mention of blood seems to come out of nowhere. The text seems to make far better sense if we read it more naturally as connecting the field’s name to Judas’ death. Second, Holding’s reasoning for denying that the name could have anything to do with Judas’ death fails to persuade, because it is perfectly possible for people to give an outlandish name to a place associated with death—especially a gruesome death! I give the example of Skull Valley, Arizona, which received its name because settlers found a bunch of human skulls scattered throughout the field. It would seem silly to reject this story on the grounds that there were not skulls covering the entire valley or filling it to the brim.
Holding’s response:
In case Kapr forgot, Matthew relates the origins of the “field of blood” name without any reference to Judas’ guts blowing out. Matthew gets the etymology from the payment to Judas being “blood money” — a payment for turning Jesus over. And Luke relates that episode in his own gospel. So no, the reference to blood doesn’t “come out of nowhere” at all; it alludes to the prior account Luke provided of Judas being paid for his treachery, Kapr’s inability to make sense of the writings of a culture removed from him by time and priority notwithstanding.
Kapr finds it “strange” that I wouldn’t connect Judas’ death in Luke with a lot of blood, but that is his problem, not mine. Luke himself didn’t mention blood gushing from Judas, and he didn’t say it became known as the “Field of Spilled Intestines.” In other words, it is clear enough that it wasn’t the blood that caught his attention. Kapr needs to break out of his fundamentalist notions that only what he thinks the text “clearly says” is what matters.
My answer: Regarding the first sentence in the quotation above, I obviously didn’t forget that Matthew relates the origins of the Field of Blood’s name without mentioning Judas’ gut-bursting death. That is, after all, the whole reason for claiming there’s a discrepancy here. As for the last sentence, Holding says that I need to break out of the notion that what I think the text “clearly says” is what matters, but I can’t help but smile at how this statement follows immediately on the heels of Holding telling us that his own view is “clear enough.”
Holding claims that the author of Acts is not connecting the Field of Blood’s name to Judas’ death because he never directly mentions Judas’ “blood” but simply says that “his intestines spilled out.” Since the field is not called “Field of Spilled Intestines,” Holding sees this as a decisive refutation. I can’t say that I agree. Surely Holding must recognize that if someone falls to their death and their body bursts open, there is an obvious implied presence of blood. It doesn’t take much imagination to think, even hypothetically, that someone could hear the story of Judas’ gruesome demise and conjure up a mental image of blood.
It is true that the Gospel of Luke tells the story of Judas agreeing to betray Jesus for money (and of course I never suggested otherwise). But the problem here—which, again, seems glaringly obvious—is that, unlike the story in Matthew, the narrative in Luke never refers to the payment as “blood money” and does not have Judas admit to betraying “innocent blood.” It makes no connection between the payment and blood at all. Whereas blood is an obvious element in a gruesome death, it is not quite so obvious that one would hear of a man acquiring a field with the reward of his wickedness and necessarily think of blood. It is possible that someone hearing the story could associate the payment for betrayal with “blood money” in their minds, but the fact that the author of Luke tells the story of Judas’ betrayal without saying anything about blood money or innocent blood cautions us against putting too much weight in this possibility as the best interpretation available, especially if there is a much more plausible interpretation at hand.
When we combine both of these points—the obvious connection between blood and a gruesome death, and the not-so-obvious connection between blood and betraying someone for money—Holding’s reading of Acts seems quite feeble. This is why I say that if we remove the description of Judas’ death from the account in Acts, the mention of blood comes out of nowhere, because the author of Luke literally does not mention anything blood-related in connection to Judas—well, apart from his gory death.
As for my illustration involving Skull Valley, Arizona, Holding does not address it. The contradiction between Matthew and Acts regarding how the Field of Blood got its name remains a powerful piece of evidence against the strictest versions of the doctrine of inerrancy.
The Lying Spirit
General summary: The doctrines concerning the Bible’s inspiration and inerrancy are grounded in the truthfulness of God. The Bible teaches in several places that God does not lie (in my book I mention Numbers 23:19 and Titus 1:2). Yet in 1 Kings 22, God deceives King Ahab by putting “a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” In other words, the prophets are not actively lying to Ahab; they are prophetically delivering a false message that was given to them by God. This seems to conflict with the notion that God does not lie.
Eric Vestrup (not Holding, as I originally wrote in my book) addresses this problem on Holding’s website. He says, “It appears that this objection is asserting that the fact that God does not like lying necessarily implies that He could not use this evil for His own ends as a judgment.” Since there is allegedly no contradiction here, he triumphantly concludes that “no further discussion is required on this point.” Of course, this is a straw man argument. The question here is not whether God can use an evil person’s actions for his own good purposes. It is whether a God who does not lie (cannot lie?) could commission a member of his heavenly court to lie on his behalf. This is where the contradiction seems to lie.
Holding’s response:
Eric wrote this item for me some 20 years ago, and I consider it a courtesy to guest writers to not alter their material without permission, even when I disagree with their views. In this case, and since Vestrup wrote this article, I have engaged social science scholarship which puts me at odds with certain standard arguments presumed to be held by apologists, including the one Kapr so blithely sums up as, “It is hard to understand how God could commission someone to lie on his behalf if he himself is incapable of lying. It is even harder to understand if the reason God cannot lie has to do with his perfect goodness.” No, it isn’t. In the agonistic world of the Bible, lies could and did serve an honorable purpose. Even someone as insensate a Kapr has surely heard the example of lying to Nazis about the Jews in your cellar. In such cases, lying is indeed compatible with perfect goodness.
There is therefore no moral dilemma is God commissioning someone to lie on His behalf, if He is indeed actually incapable of lying. In terms of whether He is indeed incapable of lying, I would note that the verses appealed to in this regard (Num. 23:19, Titus 1:5, Hebrews 6:18) carry the context of pledges made by oath and do not clearly state an all-around blanket declaration that God cannot lie about anything whatsoever. One might ask whether God could lie to Nazis about Jews hidden in a cellar. However, the debate seems really rather pointless since as the example of Ahab shows, God is just as able to use a surrogate — and I might suggest that His level of honor makes it such that He would never put Himself in a position to have to lie Himself in the first place.
My answer: It will be helpful to break my response into two parts, for the sake of clarity.
Part 1: God’s deceptiveness
I think we need to separate five different questions that are being addressed here.
- Is it ever ethical to lie? (e.g., the Nazi scenario)
- Is God capable of lying?
- Does the Bible teach that God does not lie?
- If God does not lie but sends a spirit to lie on his behalf, is that an act of deception on God’s part?
- If God is directly involved in an act of deception, can it still be true that he does not lie?
Regarding the first two questions, I have no stake in the matter. It’s irrelevant to my argument because at no point do I argue that “lying is evil, the Bible says that God lies, therefore the Bible implies that God is evil.” And whether or not God can lie in real life is not my concern either. My concern is more of a logical problem: Can the Bible’s different claims about God’s relationship to truth be reconciled?
The debate really begins with the third question. Does the Bible teach that God does not lie? On a plain reading of the verses mentioned above, the answer seems to be yes. But Holding has raised some important objections. On Holding’s view, there is no contradiction between the Bible saying that “God does not lie” and the idea that sometimes God does lie. It would be easy to dismiss this as pure nonsense, but Holding suggests that the verses which tell us that God does not lie are not meant to be taken as a blanket statement, such that God never lies at any time, period. They are only meant to entail that God always keeps his promises (pledges made by an oath).
While Holding does not use this example himself, his discussion made me think of Galatians 1:20, where Paul swears an oath about his truthfulness. He says, “In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!” Paul is not saying “I do not lie” as in “I never lie”; rather he means that “I swear that what I am saying at this moment is true.” In a similar way, Holding seems to be suggesting that the biblical statements about God’s truthfulness are not telling us that God never lies, but rather are reflecting his oath that he will not break his promises.
I think it’s an interesting and thoughtful argument, but I don’t find it convincing, because it seems to miss something important. First of all, let me just clarify that I intentionally omitted Hebrews 6:18 from the discussion in my book, and am perfectly willing to acknowledge that this verse does not seem to involve a blanket statement that God does not lie (this is why I didn’t mention it in the book).
As for the other two passages, it is true that these statements in the Bible about God’s truthfulness both occur in a context related to God’s promises. But they appeal to God’s truthfulness precisely as the basis for trusting that he will do what he has promised to do. In other words, these verses don’t come across as saying, “God does not lie when it comes to his promises,” but rather, “God does not lie, therefore his promises can be trusted.” This seems clear enough in the passage from Numbers:
“Stand up, Balak, and hear;
listen to me, son of Zippor!
God is not a man, that he should lie,
nor a son of humankind,
that he should change his mind.
Has he said, and will he not do it?
And has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?Numbers 23:17-19 (LEB)
The passage from Titus is even more compelling in this regard. The key Greek word here is apseudes, and in order to get a sense of what the passage is actually saying, I will leave that one word untranslated and provide a literal rendering of the surrounding words:
Paul, a slave of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ according to the faith of the chosen ones of God and the knowledge of the truth that is according to godliness, on the basis of a hope of eternal life which the apseudes God promised before the ages of time, and manifested his word in its own times by the proclamation with which I was entrusted according to the command of God our Savior.
Titus 1:1-3
The word apseudes is an adjective used to describe God. It literally means “without lie.” Compare this to what Paul says in Greek when he swears to be telling the truth in Galatians 1:20: “In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie (ou pseudomai).” Paul is not using an adjective to describe himself, but rather a verbal phrase to explain what he is doing in that moment. (See also 2 Corinthians 11:31, where he does something similar using the same Greek words.)
By contrast, the author of Titus calls God the “without lie” God, suggesting that being “without lie” is part of who God is. He is connecting the fact that God is “without lie” to God’s promise of the hope of eternal life. It is the fact that God is the “without lie” God that his promise can be trusted. This is a much stronger claim about God’s truthfulness than merely saying that God is swearing an oath that his promises will be kept.
What we have here is a strong biblical affirmation that God does not (and, for all we know, cannot) lie. These verses really don’t leave room for the possibility that God might sometimes lie. If God does sometimes lie, then these verses are wrong. As a result, if any other Bible passage depicts God as lying, then we would seem to have a real (and significant) contradiction.
That brings us to the fourth question. In sending a spirit to lie on his behalf, does that mean God is engaged in an act of deception? I think the answer to that one is obviously yes.
So we come to the fifth and final question: if God can engage in acts of deception, such that people are intentionally led to believe something that is not true, does this mean that God lies? To answer in the negative seems like wishful thinking to me. God may not be the one who is uttering the falsehoods, but he is still directly involved in tricking Ahab into believing what is false. In fact, he is the one who initiated and authorized the scheme. It’s not exactly a truth-telling endeavor.
As a result, I really do think we have an undeniable (and hugely significant) Bible contradiction here. But I think there’s a theological problem that Holding must consider as well, because it remains a problem even if the Bible does not contradict itself on this point.
Part 2: The theological problem of inspiration
To affirm the possibility that God could lie (or at least send a spirit to lie on his behalf) opens the door to a troubling theological paradox. Evangelicals justify God’s deception of Ahab on the grounds that God turns the wicked over to their own delusions, giving them exactly what they deserve. Actually, what 2 Thessalonians 2:11 says is a bit stronger: “God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie.” The implication here is that they would not have believed the lie if God had not sent the delusion.
What makes the story in 1 Kings 22 so troubling from a theological perspective is that it has God sending a delusion to Ahab via an act of inspiration—literally inspiring prophets to deliver a message on his own behalf. And we are supposed to believe that this is God’s just punishment of a wicked man who refused to love the truth.
But now we must confront the biblical claims that all humans are sinners deserving of God’s wrath, that nobody seeks God and nobody is righteous, and that God is willing to deceive the wicked through false acts of inspiration. If these things are really true, then we can no longer ground the truthfulness of the Bible in its divine inspiration. It may be inspired, but that alone would not be enough to trust its message, because for all we know it was inspired for the purpose of leading us into further delusion, as we all seem to deserve. On the other hand, if we deny that God would ever do something like this, we face the problem of 1 Kings 22 which suggests that, actually, he would, and on at least one occasion he did. So if we believe the passage, we lose the theological foundation for biblical inerrancy; and if we disbelieve the passage, we reject inerrancy anyway.
Holding does not address this argument (it is part of the discussion in my book), but perhaps he will in a future addendum. I would also be curious to hear his response (minus the harsh insults) to my comments on 2 Kings 3, which is another important part of my case against the Bible’s perfect truthfulness, and in my opinion, a much more damaging piece of evidence.