Bumble Bee Tuna

Has this ever been discussed? You know, the challenge issued by Dan Barker (And, coincidentally, myself as well) to Christians, to come up with a story, any story, of the events that occured on the first Easter. Found here:
<a href="http://www.ffrf.org/lfif/stone.html" target="_blank">http://www.ffrf.org/lfif/stone.html</a>

Has this ever been discussed here? I would love to see a story written for this, as the stories I read for the Judas story were already incredibly implausible and this one seems 100 times worse. There are just so many contradictory elements...Have any of the marvelous apologists here ever undertaken this task?

What I find amazing is that this story is THE central story of Christianity, yet it is the most error-ridden one I've ever seen...It seems like if there was anything the people who came up with Christianity would try to get their stories straight on, it would be this...

-B

Darwin's Finch

I've posed it to a few acquaintances, too. I'm always told, "Well, let me do some research and get back to you." So far, &lt;silence&gt;....

Butters

I ran around a while posting this all over Christian boards. Only one guy took up the challenge, and though he did a fair job, he could not get past adding to and takeing away from the text in a effort to "harminize" the accounts.
This piece shows the difference in thinking between Christians and skeptics. If I had been a Christian, and was shown this, it would have been enough to wake me up.

Benjamin Franklin

If you go to google and do a search, you will find a few people who have done the harmonization but usually it is something like the Judas case, distorting the natual reading of the text and inventing far fetched scenearios. Or they will say it does not matter because different eye witness of a same incident will give contradictory accounts for it.

BF

[ December 02, 2002: Message edited by: Benjamin Franklin ]</p>

Tercel

I did see a reasonable response to Barker's Challenge a year or so ago, but I don't seem to have bookmarked the link and I can't find anything (relevant!) on Google. It wasn't a complete solution like Barker supposedly wants, of course - since such is obviously impossible. But I seem to recall being reasonably impressed with it - the writer gave a reasonable (if cautiously agnostic on some of the conflicting details) harmonisation and explained why the lack of a complete harmonisation was no detriment to Christianity.

Personally I think Barker's challenge is a bit of a joke. Sure it proves that Bible's not inerrant, but nothing will convince a dedicated fundamentalist - so why bother? As far as I'm concerned it simply shows rather narrow thinking on the part of Barker.
eg the "What time did the woman visit the tomb?" - an issue on which all accounts agree in the idea being conveyed but happen to use different words to say it and he interprets it as a "contradiction".
Also he amusingly tries to show discrepancies between Luke and Acts - very interesting since there is little that's more certain in Biblical Scholarship than that they were written by the same person. Now if one person when mentioning the same event twice does so in such a way as to make Barker scream "Contradiction!", what does this say about Barker's skills at interpretation and judgement? Biased, or incompetent?
What it clearly demonstrates is that writers do not always put all of what they know about an event into a passage. -Showing that we can reasonably expect accounts by different people to differ quite significantly in what they happen to mention (and that if one account doesn't mention something we are not justified in claiming that that author didn't know about it, or believed it didn't happen) without this at all undermining our confidence in the overall accuracy. If Barker's capable of interpreting things in such a way that people start contradicting themselves, then it simply leaves Barker's judgement rather suspect in my eyes. He undermines his own case here significantly, which is the main reason I have never seriously considered writing a proper response to his Challenge.

Vorkosigan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tercel:
Also he amusingly tries to show discrepancies between Luke and Acts - very interesting since there is little that's more certain in Biblical Scholarship than that they were written by the same person. Now if one person when mentioning the same event twice does so in such a way as to make Barker scream "Contradiction!", what does this say about Barker's skills at interpretation and judgement? Biased, or incompetent?

Or, maybe, the writer was incompetent. Or didn't care. Or didn't remember what he'd wrote. Or got confused. Look at any writer's output, say something like MZB's Darkover series. There are always contradictions, confusions, errors, even from the same pen. It's not as simpleminded as you make out. MZB has a poignant note about this problem in the back of one of her books. Some writers are more careful than others in this regard, while others get help from their editors and publishers. But it is difficult to produce a story of thousands of words, and keep chronologies straight and locations clear 100% of the time.

If Barker's capable of interpreting things in such a way that people start contradicting themselves, then it simply leaves Barker's judgement rather suspect in my eyes.

Well, to reflect your own comments about Barker back at you, do you think that your failure to understand the simple problems that face writers of large stories reflects bias or incompetence on your part? Or just a failure to think through the consequences of writing two different works on related but somewhat different topics, without taking detailed notes or constructing a rigid framework to keep track of the story? The existence of contradictions in stories is one common to all writers of fiction.

Vorkosigan

Butters

I have to agree with you on the point of what time the women visited the tomb. I found it a non point to anyone other than a strict fundie. On the other hand the contrdictions regarding the apperance of an angel(angels?), the time and plce of Jesus apperance,etc, show the whole collection of stories as unreliable works of fiction.

CX

Any such discussion is an exercise in futility. One cannot reasonably harmonize contradictory accounts. Further there is no motivation to do so unless one holds to the idea that the NT consists of inerrant historico-biographical information. Someone who adheres to such a doctrine has much greater problems to overcome than simply harmonizing the post-resurrection accounts. The cognitive dissonance required for such a position precludes rational debate.

CX

That really depends on the perspective of the person reading the story. If your goal is to cull literal historical data from theological myth then yes the stories are "unreliable". That isn't really the point though. The post-resurrection accounts are meant to convey an idea, which is to say a particular theological position, rather than details of historical events. From that perspective they are as effective as any other religious myth. Ultimately religious belief, regardless of the system, is predicated on faith. Faith and reason are invariably in tension (though not necessarily mutually exclusive). For someone to whom faith is significant the post resurrection stories are completely "reliable" in a theological sense.

CX

More like fighting windmills. Let me ask you this. Why is it not reasonable that a fallible human being writing two rather lengthy tomes over a period of several years could not contradict himself? It happens even today in an era of mass communication and high technological advancement. Unless you hold to inerrancy and the scripture as "god breathed" nearly anything is possible given the vagaries and inconsistency of the human mind.