What if they attested that the elephant hockey landed on them?

Then it would be embarrasing.

Then we could presume they were shit-faced drunk.

rodahi

I have to admit that the story doesn't seem to pass the smell test.

Picture the scene:

A group of guys walks out of the woods covered in elephant dung. "Hey man, did you see those damn flying elephants go by? They shit on us as they passed over. Damn elephants."

I wonder if they would make up an "embarassing" story of being shit on by the passing elephants to compensate for the really embarrasing fact that they were all just stupid (took the wrong path) and happened to stumble into it.

Hardly! Lowder doesn't go very deep, he stops at the surface and with Craig's arguments only. He's also ignoring several tride and true methods, including the embrarrasement thing which Grant talks about, and form Criticism. Grant is totally wrong on that form Criticism and in saying that he's up against none other than Rudolph Baultmann, the greatest of the great! See my answer to Lowder linked to my board in the thread entitled "The Lowder they Protest"

But the reason Grant is attacking these methods is not because he knows that Layman and Nomad use them, but it is becasue they are standard methods.He's not saying they are not standard methods, he's saying that the standard methods haven't been effective. However, they are more effective than just throwing stones at the text.

And nother thing, Grant is an historian who is attacking the methods of textual criticis. So there's a professional bias there. He's not a textual critic, so one wouldn't expect him to be too sympathetic on form criticism. But Bible scholars have proved it works.

Er..Wasn't that the point of the article? To address Craig's arguments? Perhaps if you read it again you'd catch this "subtle" point.

Grants criteria are all wrong, and plenty of other good schoalrs will back me up on that. The multiple attestation thing is silly, because it's not just a matter of the Gospels. No other sources exist that offer different versions of the basic Jesus story, not until as late as the third century. There are tons of Gosples from the second and thrid century, and none of them offer any other acocunts, they all assume the canonicals. Now Grant would say they are coming from a single source, if that is ture it is a source much ealier than that of the canonicals, as Helmut Koester demonstrates. That is an invalid argument. NO ealier versions developed, that could as easily be becasue everyone knew the facts, and they were so well known that no one could dispute them.

Doesn't matter. If the Talmud was influenced by Christian sources, even if it was also influenced by other sources, then it can't be considered independent. This is because we can't separate out what influenced what.