aa5874

Irenaeus is IRRELEVANT to this discussion.

Virtually everything that "Irenaeus" wrote with respect to the dating, authorship, chronology and even their contents at times of the four Gospels have turned out to be in ERROR.

"Irenaeus" did not even know the supposed age of his Lord and Saviour when he was crucified, the Emperors of Rome or the governors of Judea at that time.

"Ireaneus" was either a liar, a completely incompetent character or the writings were forged under his name..

But, there is an apologetic source that did NOT account for the four Gospels. Justin Martyr did write of a SINGLE source called the Memoirs of the Apostles that was used in the Churches on Sundays up to the middle of the 2nd century.

It does not even make any theological sense for a sigle cult to simultaneously use FOUR cotradictory Gospels, it would therefore seem more reasonable that each christian cult used some single version of a Jesus story or some other version like Marcion, the Valentinians, and others, and that it was under the Constantine in the 4th century that four versions were selected from the numerous versions available at that time.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Doug,

You make an interesting point.

However, I would say that the contradictions between the gospel accounts are quite real and obvious, no matter how some inerrantists deny the obvious. For example, the cleansing in the temple (2:12) at the beginning of John and at the end of the synoptics (Matthew 21:12-13) is a little hard to miss.

Whether telling truths or lies, human beings like to be believed. Nothing shatters belief as fast as discrepancy in telling the same story. When you tell me that you won the Noble Peace Prize in 1994, I might be mildly skeptical, but I give you the benefit of the doubt. When I meet you again and you tell me that you won the Noble Peace Prize in 1999, my belief is shattered. I now assume that you were lying in both cases. It is much harder to believe that you won the Noble Peace Prize in both 1994 and 1999, and forgot to mention your double win each time you presented the story. Credibility goes out the window with discrepancies in details in retelling stories. We know this almost intuitively, at least at a very early age.

Let us say that I was having an affair on Tuesday Night with Priscilla Lane. My wife asks me where I was on Tuesday Night. I say I was having a drink with Montgomery Cliff. She asks me the next day where I was on Tuesday Night. I forget what I told her, so I say I went to a movie with Patrick McGoohan. Displaying her excellent memory, she shouts that yesterday, I said I was with Montgomery Cliff. She calls me a liar, says she will never believe anything I say anymore and throws me out of the house. Her behavior is perfectly normal and understandable and reflects our hatred for lies, and shows how we find out lies through story discrepancies.

Discrepancies always have to be seen as problematical to people telling or listening to a story. People go to great lengths to avoid them. Being religious or not doesn't matter.

I take it that the publishers would have realized that they were undermining their own historical credibility by publishing contradictory accounts of Jesus. The question is what were they were getting in return such that this undermining seemed a minor lose in comparison to the gain.


Warmly,

Jay Raskin

stephan huller

Yeah. The first guy to ever mention the fourfold gospel is 'IRRELEVANT' to a discussion about the origins of the fourfold gospel.

Kuckoo. Kuckoo. Kuckoo.

aa5874

Well, for one who has claimed OVER and OVER that the writings of Irenaeus may have been corrupted and Marcion in "Against Heresies" is actually some character called Mark then there is something fundamentally wrong when you cannot even accept that there may be other information in "Against Heresies" that have been manipulated.

Has it not been deduced by Scholars that the information about the four Gospels in "Against Heresies" are in ERROR with respect to dating, chronology and authorship.

"Against Heresies" 3.1.1 Please state the kuckoos who accept "Against Heresies" as a RELIABLE sources for the dating, authorship and order of writing the four Gospels.

Until you can show that "Against Heresies" is a CREDIBLE source for the four Gospels then I will maintain that "Against Heresies" is IRRELEVANT since it appears to be filled with ERRORS.

DrZoidberg

That's what I've understood too based on what I've read. But it's way more complicated than that. As I understand it the exiled elites that were expelled under Babylonian invasion were placed in power by the Persians. They'd evolved Judaism while in exile, while the Jews (Judeans and Israelites) that had stayed had kept the old religion. Since the exiled Jews had basically invented monotheism (not completely but almost) and the "orthodox" Jews were still henotheist, much conflict ensued. They were radically different types of religion. It didn't get easier by the Persian king Cyrus insisting on the ruling Jews (the monotheists) to change their Bible to justify Persian rule over the Jews. As I take it, this conflict never really was resolved. The Old Testament is quite a mix of pagan and henotheist ideas, and various justifications for various kings, that don't really fit together. The Jews didn't really embrace the monotheist variety of Judaism until well after the fall of Masada in 70 AD.

mountainman

It has been elsewhere suggested that the political reshuffle that Diocletian instituted at the end of the 3rd century CE called the "Tetrarchy" ["The Leadership of Four People"] may have been inspired by the overwelming popular success of the four christian gospels in daily use among the citizens in the Roman Empire.

Doug Shaver

Nevertheless, they do deny them, and if they can do it now, then their predecessors could have done it.

Yes, hard to miss, but not so hard to explain. John didn't give a sh!t about chronology. Therefore, no contradiction.

mountainman

All the more need for a stronger force. We all know what the impatience of an ambitious military commander will do when his literary experts are embroiled in ascertaining the nuanced esoterics of holy writs.

Philosopher Jay is not in any way incorrect to bring up the name of the Emperor Constantine, since everyone reading this thread should remember very clearly that the earliest reports of the Council of Nicaea record the strong measures of this emperor. We need not belabor the preliminary destruction by the military machine of the most ancient and highly revered architecture in the eastern empire, and we need not belabor the preliminary screening war council of Antioch, where Constantine himself took to the speaker's chair and told the pagans what was new in town, and lied through his teeth about the BCE Roman poets predicting Jesus, via the Sybil.

The council of Nicaea is often reported as having been convened "on account of the words of Arius". We all know what these words were dont we? At the Council of Nicaea Constantine called upon the attendees for written petitions. Once the attendees were all assembled what did he do?

There's a good example of the maneuvering ability of strong force needed to bring together the four gospels harmoniously in the midst of a great and seemingly petulant controversy of "priests" over their shall we say "future status".

Sheshbazzar

This is a well articulated summary of what is my own understanding, and 'faith' position with regards to the formation and attempted imposition of The Tanaka.
I hold a strong distinction between the ancient term 'Hebrew' and the much latter terms 'Jew' or 'Jewish' which properly refer to that type of religion that the these exiled and returned Jews forced upon their Hebrew kinsmen.
As such, the Torah is not a documentary recording of actual Hebrew history, or of what comprised actual 'Hebrew' beliefs.
What it is is a political propaganda document that was forged by the Judean 'Jewish' religious power faction to bring about political unity and national stature through a religiously forced domination of, and incorporation of a diverse set of formerly 'free' (thinking) individuals and tribes.
This political-religious literary forgery cleverly but crudely co-opted, re-wrote, and incorporated material from many earlier sources placing it all under the figment of being the sole production of one 'Moses'.
Yahweh the Elohim of these Hebrew hill tribes was, by the means of this 'Jewish' produced political propaganda document, fully anthropomorphised and used as a tool to disenfranchise and/or eliminate all Hebrew opposition to these 'Jewish' religious 'reforms'.

When you read in the Bible about 'Yahweh growing wroth and smiting' various opponents of 'Moses' and 'Aaron', it is simply Jewish propaganda cover for that murder, mayhem, and genocide that the Judean faction was carrying out against these free (thinking) Hebrew inhabitants of the land.
'Moses' was not an actual living being, but a Jewish fabricated figurehead, a stand-in code for the Judean 'Jewish' fabricated national 'Laws', with 'Aaron' a fabricated figurehead stand-in for that returned Judean 'priesthood' that was engaged in the forcing of its own will and power, and enforcing its particular fabricated and perverted version of a 'national' religion.
The real life heroes of the story, are not those 'victors' that survived to perpetuate their lies, but all of those that sacrificed their lives in the resisting of such an imposed religious abomination.

In all of this, it was the Name Yahweh and what it originally represented to the Hebrew peoples, that so anthropomorphised and 'used', becomes the ultimate victim of Judiasim and Christianity.
But the greatest wonder of all, is that in the end, when the real truth will finally prevail, the Name of Yahweh will be found to be free of all charges and fully vindicated.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Doug,

Yes, we all know ways of getting out of contraditions. To go back to my example:

At this point, I call her up and say, "Darling, you misunderstood me. On Tuesday Night, I went to have a drink with Montgomery Cliff and while in the bar I met my old friend, Patrick McGoohan, and he was going to the movies, so I joined him. It is only you and your crazy, suspicious mind that believes I was at Priscilla's house on Tuesday."

Admittedly, in this instance, telling the two difference stories was a stupid thing to do. So stupidity can account for such contradictions. However suppose that after I told her about Montgomery Cliff, I realized that my wife and I had watched "the Heiress" (Wyler, 1949) with Montgomery Cliff, last month. I had realized that she would not believe that I had a friend named Montgomery Cliff, so that had forced me to transform my lie into the one about Patrick McGoohan. One could say that I was actually being smart by changing my lie and hoping she wouldn't remember the first lie.

Since the gospels were important, primary documents for the religion, I would assume that a great deal of time and effort went into their preparation and there was a desire for believability and to avoid contradictions that would lead to skepticism. Now, there would have been no problem in harmonizing the accounts if both sides, the John gospel users and the synoptic gospel users, had agreed. They could have inserted a line saying that John is describing the first cleansing of the temple or inserted a line in the synoptics that they were describing the last or second time that the temple was cleansed. They did not do this, but left the open and obvious contradiction/s in.

While I believe there were some minor attempts at harmonization (the longer ending of Mark, for example), it does seem that the publishers did not care about the obvious differences, especially visa vi John against the synoptics. This suggests to me that publishing the different gospels together was done not in a spirit of cooperation, but due to pressure to fight off a more significant dis-unifying force that was perceived as a threat to Christianity.

The United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union had tremendous internal differences, but it was the desire to destroy fascism that allowed them to produce the founding documents of the United Nations in 1945. Although, the analogy only goes so far because in that case negotiations led to single documents and not to four different sets of documents.

I think the four sets of contradictory documents suggests an outside force that just wants unification and does not care if they contradict each other.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin