buckshot23

This old canard. :huh: Would it be fair to say that if you go to disneyland with your family and later I tell someone else about it and the first person I tell I tell them that you went with your wife and two kids and later to another person I say you went to disneyland are either of these versions wrong? Of course not.
Because she didn't go twice. Simple.
Yeah, I agree it doesn't.

Kosh

Bingo.

And that explains all the effort to nitpic at the details of the challenge, rather than just confront it.

Roland

Yea, I can't understand why these apologists just can't accept the fact that these writers MEANT EXACTLY WHAT THEY SAID when they wrote it. I guess if we had four versions of the Sodom and Gomorrah story or Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac or the Exodus from Egypt etc., the single accounts we have now would not literally mean what they say either.

When Matthew says an angel told Mary Magdalene that Jesus had risen, Matthew meant that an angel had told her Jesus had risen. And when John said that Jesus himself told her the news, he meant that Jesus himself told her the news. All this clumsy attempt at "harmonization" does is make mincemeat out of the original texts. Frankly, it's an insult not only to the writers themselves but to the intelligence of anyone reading them.

Amaleq13

I am always willing to acknowledge a rational conclusion based on the evidence but I don't tend to characterize it as a "concession".

I would have to assume that Matthew was a pretty sloppy writer to accept that he intended his story to be understood in the way you interpret it and even more so if he intended it to complement Mark.

Atheos

I'd like to open the floor for discussion again on this issue by addressing the whole of the problem rather than just the one bone of contention Amaleq13 and Buckshot23 have been wearing out (Did M&M witness the earthquake/stone rolling).

When first prodded for an answer, Patriot7 offered the following:
The first link points to an article by James Patrick Holding. Intriguingly, the title of the article is "Can't We All Just Get Along?". The first sentence of the article answers that question with a resounding "No" as he distainfully refers to Barker's Easter Challenge as a call to "Fill Danny's Wastebasket". A hostile tone is noted from the beginning, implying that Holding doesn't take the challenge seriously and doesn't believe that Barker does either (i.e., Barker will simply toss any answer into his wastebasket). Not much of an attempt at reconciliation.

Holding's first statement in the form of an argument is as follows:
If Holding is thereby admitting that the revered authors of the four canonical gospels are mere humans, subject to make the same kinds of errors any other human might make, then the challenge can end right there. It's a simple admission that the contradictions do, indeed, exist, and that they are consistent with what one might expect from any four individuals with different agendas or source material. Nobody was necessarily lying, each was doing the best they could with the limited material available.

Before delving into an attempt at resolving the contradictions, Holding goes on to list four apologies for the problems. They summarize as follows:

• Ink and paper were scarce so at the end of the narratives each writer got parsimonious and just couldn't write everything they knew down.
• Ancient East tradition did not necessarily include precision writing. He appeals to Abraham Rihbany, claiming that the discrepancies were due to indifference rather than deliberate purpose to deceive. For example, "It does not matter whether a conversation took place on the housetop or in the house".
• He makes the incredible claim that variations in oral traditions do not contradict the idea of inerrancy. So in other words the content can still be inerrant even if it is contradictory because it was handed down orally for decades first. :huh:
• He claims that John's gospel was written as something of a supplement to Marks, deducing that one would John to report things purposefully that Mark does not, in order to fill gaps.

Before dealing with the rest of Holding's apology I think it's important to note several critical facts about the above list:

1 - He has already admitted that there are going to be contradictions, but asserts that these are only minor and do not effect the veracity of the story being told. As far as I'm concerned the apology should end here. Once you admit that there are contradictions you've conceded the challenge.
2 - I find it laughably absurd to envision an omniscient god inspiring these folks to write these biographies about Jesus and having them include such useless points as incomplete and useless lists of unverifiable names (geneaologies), two separate copies of the "loaves and fishes" miracle, assorted other ramblings and meanderings, then short change the single most important and foundational part of the narrative (the resurrection) because that same source of omniscient inspiration didn't know the writer was going to run low on paper just when things got interesting.
3 - I'm interested in how one defines "inerrant" if it doesn't mean that every word, every phrase is absolutely true and trustworthy. If the writer chose to include a detail then that detail is part of the narrative and subject to scruitiny. If that detail can be shown to be false then the narrative is not inerrant. Period. Stop claiming that it is.
4 - When folks make assertions such as "John's gospel was written to supplement Mark" but do not offer any reason to accept such a proposition I get even more skeptical.
5 - The scarcity of ink and paper might explain ommissions and silence. They do not explain outright contradictions.

Moving on into the substance of Holding's apology, he summarily dismisses I Cor 15, claiming that it's a "creedal statement" and is not meant to be an inerrant statement. Fine. Another contradiction explained by baseless assertion. I wish someone would explain what "inerrancy" means.

He begins by claiming that the differences in the list of women coming to visit the tomb is one of those "it doesn't matter" issues. Riiiiiight... He even goes so far as to say that Matthew is so worried about running out of room (Guess those 14+14+14 genealogies and two separate accounts of the loaves and fishes story are catching up with him) that he doesn't have room to list more than Mary and Mary Magdelene. Makes one wonder why he didn't just say "Mary and others". Every writer could have done that and we wouldn't be asking these questions. Maybe Satan made him do it.

Holding makes the unfounded assertion that the earthquake/stone rolling portion was "clearly dischronologized, a matter of topical arrangement". He vaguely alludes to the unsupported claim that "we know" this technique was used in ancient literature. He offers no proof, no evidence, no explanation for his assertion. This is a major contradiction and glossing over it as he does is not an explanation.

He also then attempts to gloss over Matthew's report of an angel immediately visible to the women that is not reported in any other gospel as an example of "silence", providing a link to a different webpage, which not surprisingly doesn't even exist. One is left to assume that a rational explanation exists there, so one can just fuhgedaboudit. Riiiiiight.

He explains the fact that in two gospels there are two angels and in the others there is only one angel with the following:Okay, so what he's saying is that since we don't have a problem with the contradiction in the story about the healing of the demoniac we shouldn't have a problem with this contradiction either. Riiiiiight.

He wanders off into some kind of a black hole trying to get away from Mark's assertion that when the women left the tomb, "neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid" and the contradictory claim made by Matthew that they ran straight to the disciples to bring them word. When are these people going to get a clue that this is a contradiction? Would they allow the same latitude of interpretative license to such a contradiction found in the Koran? The book of Mormon? :banghead:

When the women leave the sepulchre and return to the disciples the following contradictory claims are made:

Matthew: As they ran back Jesus appeared to them, they hugged his feet. He sent them on their way to the disciples.

Luke: They returned from the sepulchre and told these things to to the eleven, and to all the rest.

John: Mary Magdelene ran straight to Peter, told him and the BD that "they have taken away the LORD out of the sepulchre and we know not where they have laid him."

Incredibly, Holding attempts to reconcile these outright contradictions with the following:Back to Matthew's gluttonous waste of pen and paper on trivial things, complete with a new twist: The women split up and managed to accomplish all the contradictory things. This absurd rationalization does not account for the fact that Mary Magdalene is explicitely listed in each of the disparate sequences, nor does it even begin to treat the fact that she outright lied to Peter and the BD by saying she had no idea where Jesus was when she had (according to Matthew) ran smack into him and held him by his feet on her way there.

Just when my Irony Meter had busted, Holding has the gall to address the most blatant example of Matthew's mastery of wasting paper and ink. Here he is, desperate to conserve unnecessary detail and he wastes five verses telling us about a conspiracy to keep the guards silent (who saw all these things). Yet he didn't have enough paper left to keep his tale harmonious with Mark and Luke's accounts. Riiiiiiight.

Holding doesn't even bother to address the blatant and unresolvable contradiction that in John's version Mary Magdalene doesn't learn anything from any angel until after Peter and the BD had investigated the sepulchre, but that in the other accounts she learns it before ever going leaving the sepulchre. Like a magician he attempts to distract attention from this glaring hole in his resolution with a discussion of "why doesn't Jesus give everyone the same answer?", which he baselessly claims is because they had different questions.

Barker's challenge (once again) is as follows:
Instead, Holding cherry picks a few of the contradictions in the chronologies and attempts to offer apologies. This is not "meeting" the challenge, which specifically requires the respondent to "write a simple, chronological narrative of the events between the resurrection and the ascention" without omitting a single detail. Holding did not do this.

Holding never even addresses what to me is the most blatant and irreconcileable contradiction in the whole story, the fact that Matthew and Mark's version has Jesus commanding the diciples to go to Galilee to see him and Luke has very specific instructions for them not to leave Jerusalem until they've been endued with power from on high.

Instead he offers vague and unsupported assertions that the stories are mere unsequenced references to events from within a 40 day period, highly compressed.

-Atheos

Amaleq13

I think it is clear that those who view these stories through faith-colored glasses refuse to accept the details given by each account as an independent account but consistently and relentlessly harmonize them even as they interpret them "individually". That this is obviously circular reasoning apparently does not matter to them.

Clearly, the challenge cannot be met if each story is first understood on its own and then an attempt is made to reconcile them. Unfortunately for those who wish to meet the challenge, that is precisely what is required. That the challenge simply represents a rational approach to multiple accounts claiming to tell the same story also apparently does not matter to them. That is precisely how a rational person would go about conducting a critical examination of multiple biographies of Lincoln but I have no doubt that, using the same harmonizing "techniques" they apply to the Gospels, any apparent contradiction between the stories could be similarly "reconciled".

Atheos

I hereby repeat my assertion, based on Barker's challenge: A comprehensive narrative that includes every "Easter Sunday" detail (just from the four gospels) cannot be assembled without exposing impossible contradictions and absurdities.

If anyone knows of such a narrative or can compose one, please provide a link or post it here. Otherwise please be so gracious as to concede defeat.

-Atheos

Kosh

SCENE 254: [DRAMATIC PAUSE WHILE EVERYONE BACKS AWAY FROM THE GAUNTLET... QUEUE OPENING TO BETHOVEN'S FIFTH]

Atheos

... and don't forget to cue the crickets! Where's that damn foley operator when you need him?

-Atheos

Atheos

I hereby declare victory for the EAC!



-Atheos