I’m currently reading Trent Horn’s Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties and at about halfway through, I’ve definitely formed some definite opinions about the book. Most strikingly, I’ve come to realize it’s mistitled. Instead of Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties, it should be titled The Passage Makes Sense if We Assume… : A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. That phrase — “The passage makes sense if we assume…” — is a quote from the book, and it’s indicative of the whole argument. In fact, Horn doesn’t just suggest that we have to assume to Bible is correct to really understand how it’s correct, he says it outright:

[I]t is the critic’s burden to prove that there is a contradiction in the Bible because he is the one accusing the text of being contradictory. All the believer has to do is offer one or more reasonable explanations of how the passages could be reconciled, thereby showing that the critic’s evidence is not conclusive (152).

This is ridiculous: there is nothing to prove with the contradictions. They’re sitting on the page, obvious as the sun in the sky. This passage says X; that passage says not X. There — it contradicts itself. It’s the believer’s burden to explain how it only appears to be a contradiction.

But Horn’s approach makes it possible for him to weave his conditional explanations of problems with the Bible and feel that they suffice. And does this book ever have a ton of conditionals. Within X pages, we read that “Mark may have referred to him…”, that the “name Jethro appears to be a title on par with ‘your excellency,'” that it “could be that the Midianites…”, that “[o]ne way to resolve this contradiction … is to propose,” that “both are probably referring…”, and that “It could be the case.” Let’s make a list of those statements:

  • may have
  • appears to be
  • could be
  • to propose
  • probably referring
  • could be the case

This is an argument of possibilities, all of which are extra-Biblical and simply endeavor to save the Bible for people who want it saved. These explanations are just ways of explaining away obvious problems, and these types of “arguments” will only appeal to those who have already accepted the conclusion. In other words, another possible subtitle could be “Begging the Question.”