blkgayatheist

good for a laugh:

http://www.christiancourier.com/arti...ment_documents

especially the part that assumes Paul's knowledge of the gospel details (though he didnt write about them)

Toto

A nice summary of a series of lectures by Rawlinson on “The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records” delivered in 1859. Apologetics has not made much progress since then, it appears.

RAFH

I really like the notion that eyewitness testimony is of the highest caliber. Unfortunately modern testing puts the lie to that. Most people manufacture what they see, especially if there is any amount of time between the event and their retelling of it. Their biases also color their recollections plus any other information regarding the event they obtain later. If they might remember someone relatively tall but then read in the newspaper numerous others describe the person as average height, they will often modify their opinion.

And, this all assumes there is no actual intent to deceive.
It also assumes the authors were who they say they were. It is now accepted that none of the gospels were written contemporaneous with the life of JC and its highly unlikely any were written by the supposed authors.

So much for Rawlinson. He wanted to believe and he did.

Doug Shaver

They already have all the answers. That's about all the progress anyone can ask for.

mountainman

I disagree, because from the logical and historical perspective,
the Apologetics position has a non-trivial list of integrity exceptions
related to the historicity of purported pre-nicene authors and pre-
nicene texts, many representatives of the latter being classified as
forgeries (Letters of Pilate, the TF, Ignatian Epistles, etc, etc).

Progress can be made by non-Apologetics by performing a detailed
analysis of the entire set of these "detailed integrity exceptions".

Or are we assuming that the word "progress" is towards a common
goal shared by both "apologists" and "historians"? If so, excuse me.

Best wishes,


Pete

Roland

The idea that the authors of Matthew and John could both have been eyewitnesses to Jesus' life is absurd on the face of it. Not one single quote of Jesus is the same in either gospel. Wouldn't one expect there to be at least SOME overlap between the two if they were indeed chronicling the life of a man they both knew? Throw Mark in as a supposed recorder of Peter's memories (which somehow dovetail nicely with Matthew's recollection but not at all with John's) and one can see how truly untenable this argument is.

Moreover, if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were known to have written these accounts, why were their names never attached to the works by writers like Justin Martyr, who obviously was familiar with them (though only as "the memoirs of the apostles")? Why do we have to wait till Irenaeus at around 180 A.D. before the names are mentioned in connection with the works?

Gamera

I don't know if the element of the authors being the eyewitnesses is that important. Plato was an eyewitness to Socrates' "dialogs," as well as the author of the mss memorializing them. But it's a rare scholar who really thinks that the dialogs as we have them have much to do with what Socrates said. Rather, they are the tendentious writings of Plato, who has a philosphical point to make, who had his own agenda, and Socrates is a useful narrative device.

So the issue in any text is the agenda. Given what we know of early Christianity, it seems fair to say that stories about Jesus and the meaning of his death circulated orally and in the form of epistles for a while before the authors of the gospels committed them to parchment. By then they were already engrained in the consciousness of Christians. Given that genesis, it seems to me that it's unlikely that the authors took many liberties with the traditions in writing the gospels. Their audience wouldn't have stood for it.

Doug Shaver

No. We were assuming that our sarcasm would be obvious.

Doug Shaver

If the dialogues never really occurred, then Plato could not have been an eyewitness to them. You cannot witness something that does not happen.

Gamera

It's clear the dialogs in some form occurred. Socrates was a teacher. But Plato used them as a frame for his own philosophical agenda. It's hard to say what Socrates actually taught.

The point remains, if being an eyewitness to events is the sine qua non of reliability, we must through out Heroditus, Tacitus, Josephus and virtually every other ancient historian, not to mention most modern ones.