thentian

gMark is the oldest and also the most sober throughout. It seems to me that the later gospels get more miraculous the later they are put to paper. It is not so hard to think of a reason for why this could be; as time passes, the story gets embellished more and more.

I would not call the missing guards or the failure to mention the sealing of the tomb inaccuracies, but rather omissions. Because you and your fellow apologists keep insisting that all that is told in all the gospels are literally true, you end up painting Mark as a writer who made more omissions, misrepresentations and inaccuracies than anyone else. IMO, you even paint him as an outright liar in some cases.

I take the opposite view; since his gospel is the closest to the events it relates, it is likely the one closest to the truth.

I admit it may be overly harsh of me to call every discrepancy a lie, though. However, the bible is full of them, and I don't think inaccuracies, omissions, misrepresentatons and discrepancies are much better than "contradictions".

This comment of yours (to JamesABrown) makes me curious: suppose archeologists were to unearth a manuscript which was soon recognized by the majority of christian scholars as being the so-called "Quelle". Would you dismiss it out of hand? What if it contained material indicating that some of your beliefs -but not the most important ones- were wrong? E.g. the Arian herecy that Jesus did not pre-exist his birth.

Just trying to find out how inflexible you really are!

thentian

It is so good to see that we can agree on some things, at least! ><

angelo

I presume you have heard of the Isus,Zeus and Horus, myths from millennia before christianity? They are also very similar to the christian myth.

James Brown

Any one of Jesus' followers, part of the great crowds of people who followed him around and believed his preaching. Why would the women have to know every person who called himself a disciple?

So now you are saying there may have been three people sitting in the tomb--Mark's one young man and Luke's two angels. And the contradictions increase. Not only do we read about one gospel's singular Mary, and another gospel's Mary, Salome, and the other women, you want us to accept that there were three characters in white robes.

And if you bestow angelhood on Mark's young man simply for the act of announcing a resurrection (something Jesus had been preaching prior to his crucifixion), then let's look at this from a different angle. John doesn't equivocate like Mark and Luke--none of this ambiguous man vs angel line. John comes straight out and calls them angels.

So tell me, what exactly does John's angels do to make them angels? They don't announce a resurrection, they don't descend from the sky, they don't cause earthquakes. No, one of them--one of the two--asks Mary why she's crying, and the other just stands there. They don't even console Mary or give her a word of hope. All they do is ask her a question--unarguably a non-supernatural action--and for their trouble John calls them angels.

Let's suppose that John's gospel is the only one that survived antiquity. You call Mark's young man an angel because he does angelic things (questionable) AND it's backed up by other gospels (Matthew and Luke). But if you didn't have other gospels to back you up for John, then you couldn't argue that John's characters absolutely must be angels on the grounds they are performing supernatural acts like you do for Mark.

So in the Bible sometimes angels are angels because an anonymous author just said so; sometimes they are angels because they do something supernatural; sometimes angels look like men; and sometimes men look like angels. And you can't understand why people who aren't committed to Biblical inerrantism find these explanations constrained?

Me, I think John's hand was forced. He wrote his gospel last, and so likely knew about the other gospels, but he wants Jesus to have the glory of announcing his resurrection. John's Jesus is a much different character than that of the other gospels, Mark especially. Yet Luke has two men/angels conversing with the women and so John has to do the same thing, even if he has nothing for the angels to actually do. He turns them into anonymous spear-carriers.

The same reason you have confidence in the old gospels--because church authority has declared them to be canon. So you've admitted you could swallow Mark writing about one young man and two angels but neglecting to actually mention the two angels. So what about three angels? Or four? Would you accept a fifth gospel's claim that there was a heavenly host at the tomb singing glory hosannah the Lord is risen? If someone told Mark that there were too many angels to count at the tomb, and Mark digested this and wrote, "There was one young man in the tomb," you'd be okay with that?

So again I repeat my example. If one eyewitness of a bank robbery said there was one man with a note, and another said there were two men each armed with guns, you would conclude that they were both describing the same scene?

Okay then, I've had a change of heart. I believe there were ten thousand angels at the tomb singing and praising the maker of the Universe, just like at Jesus' birth. Prove me wrong. After all, the gospel authors didn't mention the large heavenly host because all they wanted to do was prove the resurrection. The actual numbers are irrelevant.

Prove me wrong.

sschlichter

An investigation would involve the location, the credibility, etc, etc of each witness. You could not assume they were wrong. Did they come in at different times, were there at one time 2 robbers and then a 3rd one was in the vault and came out at the same time as the witness so that witness only reported one. Myriad of possibilities. with the gospels you do not get an interview and you do not have enough information to properly conduct this type of investigation.


prove? are you looking for proof? All I can say is that there is no evidence that you were an eye-witness and no evidence that you have any authority in the matter. This makes me disregard your claim but I cannot prove it wrong. I can only declare it not worth examining further.

This is not the case in the gospels. We have eye-witnesses and eye-witnesses to the eye-witnesses. We have the lives of the apostles, we have the unavoidable footprint of the early church.

bacht

No we don't. That is the whole point: scholars challenging this assumption for last two centuries.

Believers say that the Gospels are mostly history. Scholars say that the Gospels are mostly fiction. Since believers don't accept the methodology of scientific analysis (eg. form criticism), and scholars don't accept the methods of faith (eg. prayer), I don't see how these positions can be reconciled.

Christian literalists want to "have their cake and eat it too": they want a supernatural Christ that stirs their hearts and promises eternal life, yet they also want to prove that this character walked the earth as a living breathing eating drinking shitting pissing human being. You can't have it both ways, unless you surrender to psychosis.

Huon

What lives of what apostles ?

andrewcriddle

IF you are suggesting that the similarities between the Gospel accounts of Jesus and Philostratus' account of Apollonius arise from common usage of ancient myths, then I think you have to be more specific.

Which common elements in the lives of Jesus and Apollonius derive from which ancient myths ?

Andrew Criddle

aa5874

None of the disciples and the visitors to the tomb were EYE-witnesses to the resurrection as stated in the Gospels. His body was not there when they all arrived. They only heard he was resurrected.

thentian

Exactly the same can be said of the Qur'an. I'm sure you're as sceptical to that as I am. How would you propose we deal with the claims of the Islamists?