Febble

But it's easy with an errant-eye-witness account:


(With apologies to Monsters Inc)

KnightWhoSaysNi

The formal debate is now complete. llamaluvr and Toby Beau may post here now if they wish to.

KWSN, FD Moderator

Toby Beau

So, did this debate accomplish anything?

The Evil One

I don't think so. Llamaluvr's case was feeble, but Toby, I don't think you really went for the throat as much as you could have.

Toby Beau

How so?

Cygnusx1

I would like to personally thank both Toby and llamaluvr for their efforts. I found the debate a good read.

While I admit I am biased, I was particularly was fond of Toby's direction in this exchange. In my opinion He attacked the subject matter from many different angles.

I think the subject is important, not only because the resurrection often is cited as being the foundation of Christianity, but it goes to a greater point of.. "when the Bible doesn't make sense, what does one conclude?"

Maybe the authors didn't have the whole story and reported on what they knew. But ultimately, as all Christians say, this is God's book. Not Matthew's book or Mark's book or Luke's book. That means God is the editor and has the final say on what goes in. And I just can't believe that God would allow his book to go into print with so many contradicting stories and misleading information.

It would appear that llama is saying they're not contradicting. Or does he?

So llama admits that these are contradictions we see intuitively. Exactly. My point is that no editor (God in this case) worth his salt is going to let obvious contradictions go into his book. Not on such an important topic. If the resurrection story doesn't hold up, everything else falls flat.

But that's my point. In a well-written book/passage you shouldn't need to harmonize. If you have to go to any significant lengths to "harmonize", then maybe your goal is to harmonize, rather than arrive at the truth. If we concede that the books in question are not well-written, why would God allow them to be published, knowing that they are misleading and full of holes?

I don't think I can make the case better than Toby, this is just my angle on things.

Cygnus

llamaluvr

Thanks for the comments. Regarding my point about seeing contradictions intuitively, in a different venue, I may have noted the relation of this approach to fundamentalism. Both rely on the notion that what we read and understand from the Bible today is what we actually have, and always have had. Often, the argument against a Biblical contradiction is based solely on modern interpretation, just as, say, the argument against the necessity of baptism is argued by fundamentalists solely on modern interpretation. Both groups understand that the Bible is (at least according to the adherent) God's book, the sole rule of faith, and contains timeless truth. So, it makes sense to conclude on many levels that whatever we understand from reading the book today must be the proper understanding. Of course, where this doesn't make sense is when we see the dozens of fundamenalist-like groups come up with wildly different interpretations- then we see the premise is false.

When we take that approach in claiming contradictions, we might make some sense given a limited amount of evidence (ie, the views of the person making the claim and the scriptures in question), but we hit a wall when we consider history. The folks who declared these books to be canon, or even informally acknowledged their inspiration prior to that declaration, disagree. Even if the story was completely made up, they disagree that the accounts are contradictory. And it's not even that they disagree that they contradict each other; they disagree that they contradict what the disciples and their contemporaries said happened, book or no book. When you see a church father explain a gospel, like St. Papias does with Mark, he doesn't appeal like a modern apologist does, comparing verbiage- he appeals to history, explaining Mark's methodology.

This is particularly important to the contention as to whether or not the need to harmonize invalidates inspiration. The viewpoint that it does does not account for the (very real) possibility that the ancient church had no problem harmonizing them, not because they were particularly persuasive or good at doublethink, but because they lived and understood these events extrabiblically and saw the harmonization intuitively. Invariably, this brings us to the other problem with this contention: it assumes sola scriptura, a belief we know was not held by the ancient Christians.

aa5874

The resurrection stories in the NT are all completely flawed. None of the so-called witnesses saw anyone come to life after being dead. All the witnesses, according to NT, can only report a missing body.

In gMatthew, gMark, gLuke and gJohn, Mary Magdalene, the other Marys and the disiples saw an empty tomb, they had no idea if the body was removed before their visits. These so-called witnesses saw nothing.

EmpiricalGod

Can you please help me understand. Why there appears to be contradictions in the post-resurrection stories in Mark , Matthew and Luke, but alot of scholars believe that MAtthew and Luke were written with the use of the gospel of Mark.
The many exact lines in those texts would tell us that some copying had to go on, (excluding the divine origin of simularities), but how can contradictions arise, if the two writters copies from other texts.? Surely they would not make a contradiction if they copy a text.

Minimalist

Read Misquoting Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Bart Ehrman. At the end he explains the different versions of the gospel texts and some of the reasons for the changes made by Luke and Matthew.

The "inerrant" bible is full of "errants."