mountainman

Answers to the question "Were the gospels written in "good faith"?" appear to be ....

(1) YES - and there is evidence to suggest that this is so.
(2) YES - but there is no evidence to suggest that this is so.
(3) NO - and there is evidence to suggest that this is so.
(4) NO - but there is no evidence to suggest that this is so.
(5) OTHER - please specify.

Toto

You took that out of context from a discussion I had with a person who seemed to think that the only alternative to believing that the gospels were true was to think that Christianity was the result of some big conspiracy.

All I meant when I typed that was that most religious skeptics do not think that the gospels were written as satire or fraud or as part of some conspiracy theory. There are many more plausible alternatives.

I will not vote in your poll.

Chili

Number 1 is for me but I agree that it is not a life manual and should never be read with curious eyes. In short, there is no salvation in the bible and John 5:39 tells us that. So why would anyone want to read it?

grip_daddy

If the gentiles were the authors, then most probably they believed the supposed lies from their counterpart Jews Christians like Peter. They must have believed Peter and the rest of the disciples, including Paul, when they asserted that they saw a resurrected Jesus and had interacted with him.

I voted for the second choice.

Secartos

Could you clarify the question? What do you mean 'written in good faith'?

mountainman

It represents the generalization of the standard spoon-fed oblivious-to-historical-truth question and answer. History discloses that the evolution of Christian philosophy has been from option 1 to option 2. Always we are supposed to believe implicitly in the "good faith" of the gospels: we are to answer YES to the question "Were the gospels written in good faith". Were are supposed to capitalize gospels as Gospels. It is the party line - the situation of Christendom is that it will not permit any other ...

(1) YES - and there is evidence to suggest that this is so.
(2) YES - but there is no evidence to suggest that this is so.

The position of course was that the generations who lived for hundreds of years under the power of trhe church were not allowed to even consider any other options other than YES, and that the Church had the evidence. We now are aware that the church has no evidence.

This leaves us with the converse - perhaps the gospels were not written in "good faith" at all.

You are effectively claiming option 5 OTHER but are refusing to specify the logic by which you would select neither of the earlier options. This is of course your privilege.

Myself, I am not so sure there are other options. Either the gospels were written in "Good Faith" by their authors, or they were not. What does the evidence itself suggest? The evidence as far as I can determine suggests that the Gospels were first widely published in Greek to the Greek gentiles as the official canonised Roman state religious cult by the Pontifex Maximus Constantinus, c.325 CE. Why should we reserve "Good Faith" for the literary publications of a fascist warlord who eliminated the indigenous religious milieu of the Greek civilization by the sword and by Draconian laws?

Toto

Since I used the term, I will clarify it. There are a few people who think that the gospels were written by a conspiracy for ulterior motives - usually by some Roman imperial agents as a device to mislead people.

I see no evidence for that. I don't think that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses, or that they are historically accurate, but I think that the authors genuinely intended to promote a new religion and thought that their gospels represented some sort of truth, mostly allegorical or symbolic.

mountainman thinks that Eusebius forged the gospels under instruction from Constantine, and that the Christian religion did not existe before the 4th century. He has no evidence for this, and there is some archeological evidence against this. I think it is more likely that Eusebius took an existing religion and puffed up its history, but not that he invented anything out of whole cloth.

mountainman has failed to produce any clear evidence for his hypothesis and had outworn the patience of this board by continually bringing it up.

mountainman

See WIKI for example Good Faith and Bad Faith.

mountainman

This response suggests you would answer this question using option (2) YES the Gospels were authored in "Good Faith" - but there is no evidence to suggest that this is so. Many people probably think along the same lines. If we were to examine the source of this way of thinking what would we arrive at? A gut feeling? There is after all no evidence to suggest the gospels were authored by the flaming finger of an angry god.

This may represent a fundamental difference of opinion.

Toto

In general, we tend to read historical documents the way we read modern ones. The gospels show no evidence of intentional deception of the sort that you have charged. I tend to assume that people who write imaginative religious documents are sincere, but deluded. This does not mean that the writing was totally honest, or that the gospels are reliable.

The charge that the gospels might be part of some vast conspiracy is usually brought up by Christian apologists who argue that there is no evidence for such a deception, there fore the gospels must be true. I argue then that the gospels were not part of a conspiracy, but that does not make them true by default.

Is there any point to this thread? What do you hope to prove?