Dr Paul Allen

Dick Harfield writes answers to theological questions on Quora. As a self-declared atheist, his responses follow a recognisable pattern: vague where precision is needed, occasionally accurate, but consistently thin on detail. He habitually invokes the phrase "most theologians today believe" without attribution, and on the rare occasions he does cite sources, they tend to be liberal, non-believing scholars who share his sceptical presuppositions — a kind of circular credentialing. His approach to engagement is equally revealing. He disables debate on his answers, insulating himself from challenge, and his followers tend to reinforce rather than interrogate his conclusions, often using his answers as a platform to sneer at orthodox Christianity rather than examine it seriously. The question below is a good illustration. It is a genuinely interesting theological question — but Harfield misreads its context entirely, arriving at a confident conclusion while missing the point th...

DICK HARFIELD'S RESPONSE TO THIS QUESTION Why couldn’t the conversation in John 21:17 have happened in Aramaic, and how does the Greek language change its meaning? Had Jesus asked in Aramaic whether Peter loved him, Peter’s answer that he loved Jesus, also spoken in Aramaic, would have satisfied Jesus each time, because the same verb ( ḥav ) would have been used, regardless of how strong Peter’s love was. Jesus could not have perceived from Peter’s answers that his love was not as strong as he might have desired. Koine Greek allows different nuances, so Jesus asked for sacred love ( agape ) but Peter responded by saying that his love ( philia ) towards Jesus was like the love of a good friend. The gospels were written in Greek for Greek-speaking readers, so the conversation would have seemed natural to people who probably did not even realise that Jesus and Peter could not meaningfully have had this conversation in the local language, Aramaic. When translated into Latin, the Greek ...

QUESTION: Has it been proven that Moses existed? DICK HARFIELD RESPONSE H istorians took the biblical narrative for granted until the Rosetta Stone was deciphered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, enabling linguists to begin translating Egyptian hieroglyphics. There was the expectation that evidence of the Israelites in Egypt would soon be found in the copious ancient Egyptian writings, but this gradually gave way to puzzlement because there was clearly no evidence of any Israelites in Egypt, nor of the ten plagues of Moses or even the biblical Exodus. Historians had to begin thinking the unthinkable: either there was no Exodus, or it was simply a minor event that did not really change history. Either way, there was no catastrophic series of plagues, loss of an entire army in pursuit of the Israelites, or even the dramatic economic downturn that one would expect after the loss of a huge number of productive slaves. The evidence is now in: nothing happened—there was  no bi...