aChristian

You would think wrong. I would not expect this unless the authors were all robots mindlessly repeating a dictated message.
On the dates, they are right although John could be as late as 90AD.

thentian

Well, at least you are the first person to attempt to give me an answer to the question "what it means to be inspired"! Kudos for that! But I must confess that I am as baffled as ever. God "gave him the words to write"? How so? You don't seem to mean that god dictated to them what to write, but... what?!

I'm not sure which web-pages you mean here. This topic has reached 30 pages now, so I'm not too keen to search them all for your previous posts.

rizdek

Lets talk about some examples where the "words" don't CONTRADICT the fact, but we still feel they are duplicitous.

Jim has been dating Jane for several months. He picks her up one Saturday evening and during their evening casually asks what she did that day. She says, "I went to the mall with my sister, Diane. We went to a movie, had lunch and then came right home." What she really did was go to the mall with her sister where they met two guys. Then the four went to a movie together and hung out at a bar for 2 hours. Then Jane and Diane dropped the guys off at the mall, had some lunch and came directly home.

Did what Jane told Jim contradict what Jane actually did that day? She DID go to the mall with her sister, they did go to the movies, they did have lunch, they did come straight home. When Jim finds out later that Jane and her sister had actually gone to the movies and a bar with some other guys, does Jim have a good reason not to trust Jane?

Jim visits his doctor, who after diagnosis says you have "some and such rare disease." During the course of the visit, the doctor says, "There's a good chance you have 6 months to live." Jim is naturally shaken up and proceeds to get a second opinion. The other doctor provided the same diagnosis, but says that disease has never been known to be fatal. Jim goes back to his original doctor and asks him why he said he only had 6 months to live. His doctor corrects him and says, "I only said there is a good chance you have 6 months to live. I said nothing about your dying."

Is the first doctor's prognosis contradicted what the second doctor said? Does Jim have a good basis to change doctors and get his medical advice from someone who talks more precisely?

On Jim's first day on the job, his boss explains that Jim "will get paid $10 per hour for making 10 widgets per hour." Jim works for several months and then finds out that all his co-workers are making $20 per hour by making 15 widgets per hour.

Did the bosses statement to Jim on his first day contradict the actual pay scale? He was being honest, the company policy is that if you only make 10 widgets per hour, you only get $10 per hour. Does Jim have reason not to trust his boss?

A teenager and his father are working on a project one Saturday. They need something at the hardware store which is only 15 minutes drive from the house. Junior asks can he go and get the stuff since he just got his drivers license etc. Dad says yes, but says, "Come straight home." Junior says, "OK, I'll run to the hardware store and come straight home." Junior gets sidetracked on the way to the hardward store and goes by his girl friends house for a couple of hours, then goes to the hardware store and then drives directly home. When he gets home, his dad asks him why it took so long. Junior explains that he went to his girl friends house BEFORE he went to the store and DID come straight home from the store.

Does dad have reason to think Junior misled him with his statements? Did Juniors promise to run to the store and then come straight home contradict what he actually did? I mean, he did run to the store right after he spent two hours at his girl friends house. Well, whatever you think, I can tell you my dad thought I had misled him. He was an avid believer in the bible where it says thou shalt not bear false witness. Telling half truths, to him, was the same as bearing false witness. But maybe modern christians have a different moral code.

So, are we to trust the bible to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Or should we be suspicious when accounts don't match?

angelo

The canonical gospels were edited over a long period of time, probably at least fifty years, beginning more than thirty-five years after the death of Jesus.
For the most part we have no knowledge of the true identities of the redactors.
These authors wrote down testimonies collected from different types of informants. those who had known Jesus himself, such as Simon-Peter, one of the twelve; those who claimed to have known one or more of Jesus' disciples; or other sources judged as trustworthy.
The writings were then reworked, corrected, and copied many times by various scribes who were more or less rigorous and scrupulous.
Many of the ancient documents have disappeared over the centuries, either because of their fragility or because they were deliberately destroyed.
Texts were added during the first centuries of the early church as well. either out of concern for protecting the true faith or to facilitate it's propagation among the pagans.
All these factors have major implications for assesing the historicity of the documents that have came down to us.

Texts that I repeat were written and edited long after the gospels were first written down.
Up to 300 years later they were still been edited and copied accoding to who was doing the editing.
If there was a kernal of historicity there, it has long ago disappeared. :huh:

aChristian

Here are the web pages again. The second one puts it in one column and includes Acts and I Cor. as requested. I have seen several others in books as well.

http://www.lifeofchrist.com/life/harmony.html

(I thought this one was good at harmonizing some of the details.)
http://bible.crosswalk.com/Commentar...ourfoldGospel/

http://davidsonpress.com/harmony.htm

As far as what I believe on how God inspired scripture, I believe the standard conservative view. God inspired every word the writers put down on papyrus or parchment. God is clever enough to allow the individual writers to tell the story (or write the epistle) in their own words, while helping them with their thoughts to put down absolute truth. They did not write mindlessly like robots, but as God spoke to them they wrote, in a natural manner, sensing his direction, but writing the thoughts as they came to them. I imagine it is similar to how I sense God speaking to me. I 'hear' a thought, just as I 'hear' my own thoughts, but recognize those that are from God and are not just my own.

Keith&Co.

Some?
Is that the challenge?

aChristian

There is no evidence of any editing of the gospels. They were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That is who the historians and the people who were alive at the time said wrote them. I don't believe in 'redactors' 'whom we have no knowledge of' since no one alive at the time corroborates this wild claim. I will stick with the evidence, the written testimony of people (who give evidence of being honest and knowledgeable) who were around when it was written and during the hundreds of years after the original writing.

aChristian

No the challenge is all. I didn't check the entire harmonization, but the parts I looked at looked reasonable and well thought out. If you see any mistakes in any details, point them out.

aChristian

All of your examples are of liars and you assume that the Biblical accounts don't match in your last statement. The point I am arguing is that they do match and when there are statements that at first we don't see how they match because we don't have all the details, that doesn't mean that we do have all the details and they don't match.

To modify one of your examples, say that the boy went straight to the hardware store, but got a flat tire and took 6 hours to fix it because the tire iron was not in the trunk where it should have been and he had to walk to a garage to borrow one. He could tell his dad that he went straight to the store and came home. His dad not knowing all the details could blow up and say that there is no way it can take six hours to go to the store. The son could then fill in more details and the dad would understand that he was telling the truth when he first said that he went straight to the store and came home.

sschlicter also gave a really good example using 911 on what can happen when merging multiple accounts, giving several seemingly contradicting accounts of 911 that were all true. Because we are so knowledgeable of the 911 events, we can read all the accounts and instantly realize how they are all true. We can easily fill in all the details that show how the accounts are in agreement. When dealing with the gospel accounts, we are farther from the occurence in time and don't know all the details, but have to guess at some of them.

Keith&Co.

So, you didn't read the whole thing, but offer it up as an answer because they say that they harmonize the gospels? And leave the homework to others.
And you believe the gospels were written by Mark and Matthew, etc, because someone else says they were?

And pretty much ignore any critiques of either the harmonization or the authorship, because you know what the Truth is, by golly.

I'd have to say that You haven't met the challenge, then. And you seem to have no interest in meeting the challenge. Just have a teddy bear thought to warm to your chest, to know that some darned smart people seem to have met it, and that's all you need.