Tishrei4

Tishrei:
I am looking for comments on what is below and offer other ideas that I
have not written in response to this person.

Questioner:
I want to quibble with the Paine quote you offer below. The first part
seems entirely true. The second doesn't. It's true in math, not in
human perception. Ask your wife and children to reconstruct the
circumstances of your coming home from work today, supplying as
much detail as each of them can. Will the overlap be perfect? Might
there even be parts that disagree, i.e., "Daddy came home just before I
let the dog outside" or "Daddy came home just after I let the dog
outside"? The Paine premise would say that the story is entirely false
because the parts disagree. I say that the one thing everyone agreed
upon is that you came home from work today. There is still truth in the
story.

Paine:
"I lay it down as a position which cannot be controverted,... first,
that the agreement of all the parts of a story does not prove that story
to be true, because the parts may agree and the whole may be false;
secondly, that the disagreement of the parts of a story proves the whole
cannot be true."

Tishrei:
Paine's quote comes from the Age of Reason regarding the New Testament.

I have written a response but would like more input regarding this
question.

Thanks.

Vorkosigan

The disagreement of parts proves the story as a whole cannot be true. It does not prove that parts of the story are not true.

Tharmas

Your questioner is comparing apples to oranges. The memory of various trivial events surrounding an ordinary, every-day occurrence (letting the dog out before or after you came home from work) hardly compares to the memory of extremely important events surrounding an earth-shattering extraordinary occurrence.

Do you remember what you were doing when you heard about the space shuttle blowing up last year? If you told three completely different stories about it, including what time of day it was, who you were with, and what country you were in when you heard the news, would it make sense for me to shrug and say “who can remember those kinds of details?”

Tishrei4

Yes,
Both of these are these are things that have come to mind. In the next paragraph Paine brings up the assertion of divine authorship and that if such a being were writing a book then why the discrepancy in the reporting of facts?

My thought is that as apologetic is done to explain these problems the divine authorship claim decreases in effectiveness therby allowing divine authorship for any religious text of any religion. Allowing it for the Bible but not allowing it for other religions then sinks to special pleading.

Tishrei

RUmike

I'm pretty sure the resurrection story is what that quote from Paine was primarily referring to, but I could be wrong. Either way, it's quite applicable to the resurrection accounts.

Dan Barker's argument, which I like, goes something like this: When multiple people see a car accident, they usually disagree on minor points, maybe the exact colors of the car, or the exact positions of the cars right before they hit, maybe even whose fault it was. But if one of the witnesses tells you the accident happened in California and the other says New York, you know there's a problem!

Luke and John have Jesus first appearing to the disciples in Jerusalem, while Matthew has Jesus appear to the disciples in Galilee, some 60-100 miles from Jerusalem (as Barker claims the distance is, I'm assuming its accurate). This isn't exactly a "minor" detail. This is equivalent to your kid and wife not being able to agree on which state you came home to. Obviously, both cannot be true, and either your wife, kid, or both is sadly mistaken.

sodium

I think it's important to understand that although there is some agreement between Gospels, especially on the basic frame of the story, a surprising amount falls into either,

1) An example of direct textual copying.
2) An example of different gospels not relating the same events.

As an example of 2, it isn't surprising that Matthew and Mark don't have a disagreement about Jesus's birth, because Mark doesn't mention Jesus's birth.

And some things, I think, are hard to rationalize. Like, for example, the Jesus lineages provided by Luke and Matthew. How to deal with them?

1) They're both right. And yes, the first human was that few generations in the past.
2) One of them is right. The other ignored the correct lineage, and made up his own.
3) Neither are correct. The Gospel writers (or their communities) saw an absence of important information, so they just made it up, including all these names.

I pick #3 in my little trilemma. Are there any other possibilities? Anyway, I think if you believe a story has that kind of invention, you can't really give the author(s) much credibility. That's what Paine is getting at.