apatura_iris

This might seem like a paradoxical question, but let me explain.

If I were going to write a forgery in the hopes of springing up a new religion (Christianity) drawing from another religion (Judaism) I would be very careful not to betray the fraud through inaccuracies. I would fact check and make everything as pristinely accurate as possible in the hope that the fraud could be passed off as genuine.

Yet when I look at the NT I see 1) Clear evidence of knowledge of 1rst century Judaism and rabbinics while at the same time 2) seeming inaccuracies, that should have been avoided were the alleged fiction writer knowledgeable of 1rst century rabbinics.

In a roundabout way this makes some of the writings look more legitimate, to me, than they would otherwise (and by legitimate, I don't mean "religiously true," I am not Christian-- by "legitimate" I mean "not a concocted and premeditated historical fraud").

For instance, there is the alleged meeting of the Sanhedrin that tries Jesus (Mk 14). Halachically (under Jewish law) the Sanhedrin was not allowed to meet at night, and even when they did try such a case (during the day), a decision could not be made until the following day (to give the judges time to sleep on it and not rush to a decision). Yet the Sanhedrin that tried Jesus met at night and decided immediately. Handing someone over to a gentile authorites was halachically tantamount to an actual execution-- since the Jews were under occupation they could not carry out the death penalty themselves. (This is codified in the Talmud, that handing a criminal over to the gentiles is equivalent to legal execution.)

So it appears to me that this is an actual, historical, report of an illegal convocation and trial by the Sanhedrin. If the writer(s) were knowingly creating a fraud, wouldn't they have been careful to write the fiction by illustrating a legal convocation of the Sanhedrin that wouldn't raise any questions?

Amaleq13

Along the same lines, if one believes the entire story to be based on Hebrew Scripture, why is the correspondence not perfect and direct throughout?

aa5874

First of all, when people lie or make false statements, it is the inconsistencies in their stories that give the indications of falsity. And many who lie or give false statements try to be careful to appear accurate, however, it appears to be very difficult.

How accurate was Joseph Smith when he claimed that an angel called Moroni showed him some plates which he should copy?

The most important aspect of a new religion, it would appear, is its believeabilty.

Toto

Very few people think that Christianity was a "forgery" made to fool modern people with different standards of truth.

Keith&Co.

How full is your email inbox?

I get something once a week, at least, that is not only not accurate, it's already been written up on SNOPES as innacurate, or mistaken or an outright lie.

Pepsi isn't removing 'under god' from the pledge, space shuttle rockets can get across the nation without being forced through one tunnel on the rail system, the new jet the Navy is rolling out is from the movie Stealth, there are no police officers in the Jacksonville Sherrif's office, they never found uncongealed blood in a T-Rex fossil, so on and so on and so on.

Hell, if an email claims 'i've already checked this on Snopes so rest easy' i've pretty much learned that it's an outright lie. It may be a sincere effort to address a problem that the originator thinks is real, but somewhere in there is a non-truth presented as historical fact. Even if every person after the originator forwards it out of ONLY the best of intentions, it contains a mistruth.

It doesn't even need to start as a lie. Some of my own descriptions of events in the Navy later came back to me with extra elements by the time the tale tellers are through shifting it around, 'improving' it and matching it to their or their listener's preferences.

Chili

Of course it is since Catholicism is the religion that Jesus had in mind for Peter and Paul.

Christianity as a religion is still a forgery ans a sham since it is the end of Catholicism and Judaism alike.

Wedge

This is a weird analogy, and I might have mentioned it before, but think about the history of comics.

Back in the 1920-1950's, when comics really took off, no one bothered about continuity of the storylines, or at least not much. Then, when comics because more adult, if geeky, and collections and graphic novels started being big business, continuity became an issue. If I remember correctly, DC comics even ran a whole series where their characters went through some kind of reality warp, consolidating all their storylines, setting an 'official' history, and 'erasing' the inconsistencies (as far as possible).

So, were the comic writers and artists in the 1950's totally incompent, deliberately creating poor fiction without continuity? Of course not. If the Simpson's comic book geek went back in time and started complaining to a kid that issue #39 contradicted what went on in issue #17, he'd get a blank look. Continuity is a question that wouldn't even occur to him as being important. That's not what comics were all about.

Likewise, the development of scientific thought hit the way people think and changed it. It's not that ancient authors didn't know the difference between truth and fiction, or what accuracy was. It's that you're looking at their writings from a perspective that is simply different.

Sure, you would try for the greatest historical accuracy possible, because it is most important to you and to your audience. But why do you think that is something that would be a prime consideration to the authors? We can't get into their heads, but we can read what they wrote and try to understand that they were coming from a different place.

Another way to think about it is an oil portrait: it might show a person in clothes and in a setting that never existed, might artistically smooth over some imperfections, may show an attitude or action that were never physically real. Is the portraitist a 'liar' and 'inaccurate'? Or are you inappropriately applying the standards of a photograph to a portrait?

Although modern readers want to call the NT history it's uncertain that that is even what the gospels were trying to be, much less that they were trying to be what we think of as 'accurate.' Could Jesus walking on water illustrate a spiritual truth, one which some people could belive literally and otheres symbollically, to the salvation of souls? Let go of the idea that 'historically accurate' in the modern sense and 'deliberate fiction' are the only two options!

(I'm not trying to argue that reality was entirely unimportant to them, either; I know it was. Also that trying to evaluate the historically reliability of the gospels is both possible and desireable. I'm just pointing out that thinking of the gospels as modern-type histories is weird from the get-go.)

jeremyp

What if the writer was deliberately concocting an illegal trial?

2-J

It seems the authors of the gospels were at pains to point out the trial was illegal. For the initial audience (perhaps jewish-based?), this must have been an important fact. We lost sight of that now (it isn't crucially important, perhaps, or isn't apparently so, to christians nowadays).

Amaleq13

That would be the Crisis on Infinite Earths series.

Yet another reason to prefer Marvel in my admittedly comic-geek opinion.

Back to BC&H.