In a sense you’re right in the case of the Gospels. These are books full of tall tales written by anonymous authors. That means they had essentially no evidentiary value from day one. You can’t have evidentiary value less than zero, so anything that happened to these books later could not have affected their (nonexistent) usefulness in determining what actually happened. (Of course this is overstated slightly, but not enough to matter.)

What you’re basically arguing is that the fact of redaction doesn’t prove that the Gospels are false on any essential point. Sure, it doesn’t prove that. But it might conceivably cast some doubt on it. The redactors were by definition people who had no respect for the integrity of another man’s work; they didn’t mind falsifying what the author had said. But we are supposed to believe that they were scrupulous about not falsifying the events depicted?
“Assume” is the key word here. You assume that Jesus’ teachings were communicated accurately to the “communities”, which then wrote them down accurately. The fact that you recognize that the different Gospels reflect differing “viewpoints” – i.e., that the authors (or communities) had their own agendas and tailored their stories accordingly -doesn’t disturb your faith in this accuracy. The operative word here is “faith”. There is no reason whatever to “assume” that truth was preserved as these tales were passed around. This contradicts everything we know about how such tales are propagated.
Well, this wouldn’t matter except that the Gospels pretend to be narratives of Jesus’ life, and the truth of Christianity depends on these narratives being accurate at certain critical points. The pericopes being out of order tells us that the authors (or redactors – who knows?) were not interested in literal accuracy. They made things up. But you are confident that, in spite of the clear evidence that the authors invented some stuff out of whole cloth, they were scrupulously accurate about other stuff. On what grounds?

The main problem you have is that, while you can make up a story about how the Gospels came to be in the form we find them in today, I can make up another, and Pete over there can make up a third. All of them are consistent with the known facts. And all of them are almost certainly false. There’s no way to tell what the truth is.

When you can’t tell what the truth is, the sensible thing to do is to pick the most plausible explanation of the known facts (which, remember, are not the events narrated in the Gospels, but merely the fact that the Gospels as we have them were written and have survived), and then remember that you’re probably wrong. And the most plausible explanation does not involve a man walking out of his tomb after being dead for two days.

If you want to believe in a man walking out of his tomb, I can’t stop you. If you want me to believe that this is rational, that’s another matter. The mere fact that something might conceivably be so doesn’t make it so. I might have won the Virginia lottery in spite of never having bought a ticket. But if I believe that I did merely on the grounds that I can make up a story of how it might have happened which is not inconsistent with any known facts, I will be hauled off to the booby hatch.
Yes. Remarkable, isn’t it?


[This message has been edited by bd-from-kg (edited May 29, 2001).]

Lance

I think the main reason people equate redact with lie is the simply fact that numerous churchman (Eusibus for one) are on record stating that lying is okay if it advances the faith.

This is why most skeptics have little to no faith in the accuracy of the christian scriptures from a historical perspective. They're still historical documents, but no more than the Homer is.

Metacrock: I liked his books The Primative Chruch at first because I thought he particularly tore up the Bible. One day as I read through the book again after several readings I came across a statement to the effet "we see the light of our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ shining through any of these textual difficulties." I was stunned. How could it possibly be tha the actaully beleived after so effectevly tearing up the Bible? Hadn't he proven that it is all redacted? Hadn't he proven that they just told the stories over and over in the coumminity and pasted them together form different versions? Doesn't taht eleiminate the possibility that it could be the word of God?

Why do you presume a god had anything to do with the JC Bible? Could it not have been inspired by human imagination?

You sound like a person who was looking for a god and found precisely what you wanted, in spite of the evidence.

rodahi

Well, I guess my post from this morning
didn't make it, so here it is again:

LP - I agree with you. In the Newsweek
from first part of May, there's an
article on a neurologist who has found
a direct correlation between "religious
experiences" and the shutting down
(through meditation, prayers, etc) of
the region of the brain which perceives
spacial awareness.

Go to newsweek.com and search on "Religion
and the brain".

Meta's arguments here remind me of just more
apologetics. And the first thing I think
of when I hear this kind of stuff is that
it's the first thing to expect when someone
is trying to blow smoke up your....

You know, the ones that fall along the lines
of:

"You shouldn't question God"

"You're just being an arrogant human"

"It's beyond our comprehension"...

(Hey, maybe we could start a thread to collect these types of "arguments" to cover
inconsistencies?).

Meta =>Say you arent the chrisian who posts on CARM as "James" are you?


1) Deletion (eg Luke and Matthew dropping some of the hard sayings in Mark such as 3:21)
2) Updating or changing their sources (even more common than the first type, basically rampant in Luke and Matthew)

Meta ->Yea can't deal with everything in one post. But right that's another one. Nevertheless, Koster argues that Luke and Matt had different versions of Mark. So the reason for leaving it out may just be that they didn't have it. Now how would it get out in the first place? Could be lots of ways other than just saying "I can't deal with that verse." For one, some copying form memory could have been done, but not likely, Missing pages. Also, idological reasons for leaving it out but not ones as simples as "that's too problematic for me." That's more likely that the original omision would be due to some factional reason we don't understand.


Meta =>Weeeeeeeeeeeeelll that's a good point. I shouldn't have said 'doesn't pose any problem,' but not the problem a lot of people see in it, meaning that it is an attempt to just make things up or like. The Geiseback school sees all of Mark as a tuncation of Matt, but not because they think he's trying to lie, but just synopsizing for bevity or something.

Yea they did. I forget who now but Its currently on a post on the board. I;ll look it up if I get energetic.

Meta ->Perhaps because I was an atheist. And I bet I was a better atheist than you! I knew more about it than any of you do. You really find it so hard to beleive that an atheist can "convert?" Are you one of those "true beleiver" types who thinks there are "atheist genes" or something?

Had you read any atheist philosophers? Bertram Russell?


Why did you feel the need to disprove the Bible?

Meta =>Cause I was a kid, I started that project in highschool. Why do you feel the need to post here and bash Christianity?

And if you did, why read liberal theologians?

Meta =>Because I had never had any grounding in theology and didn't really know the difference. But the books said "Canon Streeter, Official Reader at Cambridge Universeity" and he seemed to be showing that inerrency was impossible, so it looked like he was an atheist actually, until you got way into the book. But only because I didn't know what "canon" meant or what a reader was. That older type of 19th century and early 20th century style liberal was very very liberal. Goodspeed, Von Harnack, Wellhousen, those kind of guys were very productive ground for artuments against the fundies, and for all I knew back then that made them atheists. These were old books with black covers, no shiny dust jacketts with information about the author on them. They assumed that the reader knew something, and I didn't know much at that time about that field.

What was your conversion based on - an emotional experience, or something you read, or a personal contact?

Meta => You say that as if to imply that somehow "emotional experince" is a bad thing and somehow that must invalidate it. That is silly. Most of what we beleive about the nature of the world is due to the way we experince the world. Ojectivity is a pretense. It was a combindation of all of those things.

And you say:

MEta =>That would not be the first time that Doherty is wrong. Even Helmut Koster (big liberal) agrees that Paul refurrs to several phrases and ideas in the Gospels and presents a little list. It has about 12 passages which he sees as coming form Jesus' words in the Gospels. Not full quotations but obviously the same idea, with similar phrasology. So he's clealry alluding to the saying.

In fact Koester theorizes that Paul had in his possession a unique sayings list of Jesus that we do not have, one which coantianed parts of Q.

I would venture to say taht most scholars would agree that Paul is quoting Jesus.

So you are actually saying that if it was written a long time ago, that in itself is reason not to beleive it? Do you beleive in ancient Rome? How do you know it existed? All the records from people who were there are at least 1800 or so years old?

Meta =>Talk about desperate! What a silly argument. "You must not have been a true atheist becasue, you didn't read all the guys I've read." And why do you assume I haven't? I know more about philosphy than you do, I have a Ph.D in the history of idea. do you have any idea what that is? It's basically the history of philophy! And I was reading Bertrand Russell when I my voice was just chaning. I had read Neitzsche before I even had a date. Where do you come off just assuming I haven't read them? But more importantly, where do you come off assuming that there is some sort of offical criteria that one must pass in order to be a "true atheist?" There isn't. If you don't beleive in any sort of God than you are an atheist, period. But if it helps your sense of true beleiverism I was a member of O'Hair's organization and I subscribed to Humanist magazine, and I read the Humanist Manifestoes in highschool; I also read Sir James Jeans and Aldus Huxely in highshcool. I bet you heven't herad of Jeans have you?

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2"> And as to the "God's voice booming from heaven" model of revelation, that appears in the law-code parts of the Bible, which are depicted as having been delivered in just that fashion.</font>

Meta =>You just display such profound ignorance on the subject. There are many models of revelation in the Bible. That's just one of them.

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2"> But revealing something to a few people, and then letting their followers rewrite the words of their masters -- sheesh. IMO, it's unworthy of an omnipotent being. If I was an omnipotent being and I wanted to reveal to everybody that it is wicked to eat beans, would I reveal it to a few people only? And would I let some of their chroniclers turn my prohibition of beans into a prohibition of peas? And would I appreciate having some silly, Celestine-Prophecy-type narrative be written around that teaching? Those are some of the sorts of "redaction' that are in the Bible.</font>

Meta =>That is sooooo silly. You know what? Every liberal theologians accepts that model! Yup, that's what makes them liberal, from Baultmann to Croasan none of them beleive in the big booming voice and the prophet taking dictation, they all have some view of an inner expenrice or verbalizations of the feeling of utter dependence or something like that, begining with Schleiermacher who is called "the Father of Liberal Protestant theology" to Tillich, Neibuhr, Knock, whiteley, Johnson, Neil, Dulles, Ogden, Whitehead, Baff (both brothers) Meguse Bonino, Gutierez, Pagles, H.Richard Neibuhr, Metz, Lonergen,Lamb, all of them. That is the distinguishing feature of liberal theology.

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2"> Much the same thing can be said about other supposed revelations of absolute truth, like the Koran.</font>

Meta =>What? The Moslems beleive that the agnles took Mohamid by the throat and forced him to copy word for word.

Quote:

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2"> And as to religious and mystical experiences, I'm sure that they are brain artifacts, something like hallucinations -- consider some recent research on that subject. As Bertrand Russell has noted, "if you eat too little, you see heaven, while if you drink too much, you see snakes."

Meta =>And that's where you are totally out to lunch and disproven empirically. Fist of all, mystical experince is not hearing voices or seeing visoins, it is a change in awareness, in consciousness. Seocondly, there are about 25 studies which prove that mystical experinece is not akin to mental illness that is has long term positive effects which mental lillness does not have, which mere fantacy or food deprivation does not have. That whole senerio is blowen out the window. Try reading for a change. Try looking for the facts rather than merely asserting youir ignorance.

[QUOTE]
And as to the "God's voice booming from heaven" model of revelation, that appears in the law-code parts of the Bible, which are depicted as having been delivered in just that fashion.

Meta =>That only applies where its found and since most of that is mythology or idealized history it really doesn't apply at all. But they didn't know they were writting the Bible. It didn't fall out of the sky all bound in leather with a big fish on it. It was put together out of preivously existing works and they are all different. So there are many models of revelation in the Bible because it's not all just one unitive work. It's a list of different works.

I should have been more specific about my view. I've posted it several times. I'm tired of having to go through it. It's not just that one thing along, not just the feeling of utter dependence along. I think that's a major part of it, but not all the parts of the Bible were inspired in the quite the same way. Some points may have been the big booming voice and actual dictation. Some may have been other things, such as actual eye witness experince to events and than they are recorded in the authors own words, so it's the events that are "inpsiried" and the Bible is just the record of them, and so on. You have to read Dulles book to get the full model. IT's kind of complex. Basically he shapes it up into a process he calls "dialetical retreval" which means that the word of God is found in a dialetical relationship between the reader and the text.

That model comes from Karl Barth the neo-orthodox champoion. So there is major precident for these views in Christian theology. Expand your understanding.

[This message has been edited by Metacrock (edited May 30, 2001).]