Vinnie

I've also seen your "the only way to date a text is externally" nonsense.

Since you are so convinced against ca 70 C.E. of Mark, how about we debate the issue once my section is up?

Keep rolling your eyes or start cracking open them books and roll your fingers on the keyboard. Your choice.


Vinnie

spin

This is called historical method.

I'm not convinced of any such thing, but method requires a certain approach to the problem and that is to start when one can. Internal indications can at best only provide a terminus a quo. But you should know that... and you don't.


I'll wait to see if you can actually start using historical evidence.


spin

rlogan

You can go no further than Aristides.

philowiz

*****

It shows from this that you haven't taken a philosophy class. While there may be reasons to discount the Bible as historical, these aren't it. The miracles, i.e. walking on water, turning water into wine etc., are not self-contradictory; they do not go against the laws of logic. They do go against the laws of nature, which is the definition of a miracle, but this is not an argument against theism because most would hold that God is not restricted by the laws of nature because he created them. The gospels don't say that Jesus made round squares or a married bachleor, these would be absurd. There is a distinction between logically impossible and naturally impossible. Miracles, by definition, defy the latter but not the former, and even atheist philosophers have no problem saying that if God existed, he could violate the latter. What God can never do (and this was held by St. Thomas Aquinas and St, Anselm) are violate the laws of logic, which are self-contradictory. Miracles, however, are not self-contradictory.

Moreover, many historical documents differ about the birth and death of several key figures (which is why they use the abbr. CIRCA), so this doesn't present much of a problem either.

The lineages are not self-contradictory either, and mostly all agree that Jesus was a descendent of Abraham. Also, the accounts of his murder focus on different aspects, true, but none contradict each other. If you have four people witness an accident, they will each give you a different account because it is inevitably tainted by subjectivity. This doesn't mean the accident didn't really happen.

I have my doubts about the historical accuracy of the Bible as well, but these are not good reasons.

CX

A)The genealogies in the Matthean and Lukan narratives are most definitely contracitory in that they cannot both be historically true.

B)There are contradictions in the passion narratives that cannot be attributed to differences in eyewitness observations (ignoring for the moment that the gospels are not generally thought to be eyewitness accounts by scholars).

C)Welcome to II...have fun.

rlogan

I never had a philosophy class. Not sure that is a handicap though.


These would be the absurdities I was referring to.

True. Just absurd.

Sure they are. One in Luke. One in Matthew. One in Chronicles. All different.

One for the Father, one for the son, and one for the wholly ghost?

They all agree that he came from the root of Jesse as specified in the Hebrew Bible, yes.

Accidents leave evidence.


And yes - welcome to IIDB!

jbernier

No doubt. The question becomes "Were Matthew and Luke trying to present a literal, verbatim, genealogy of Jesus?" Or were they more interesting in presenting a theological point (in Matthew's case that Jesus is a Jewish Messiah, of the house of David; in Luke's case that Jesus is the universal saviour of all humanity). Note that these theological points are not necessarily self-contradictory; one could be both a Jewish Messiah and an universal saviour as these roles do not exclude one another in any way. Even if they did, however, that would only concern those who argue that the Biblical text (as a whole) must be perfectly harmonious in order to have something meaningful to say; I would argue that that was not the understanding of the writers of the Biblical text and thus cannot be an assumption which we can force upon the purpose of the text which they wrote.

Again, no doubt. See above observations about the purposes of the writers and the implications for our contemporary exegesis.

dado

they not only contradict each other, they violate the prophetic requirements for HaMashiak.

jbernier

I think that the tendency in Christian theology, almost from the start, has been to read the prophetic texts "forward": To assume that the words of Isaiah, Daniel, etc., are directly referring to Jesus, even if they did not realize it at the time that they were prophesying. I am not sure that this is the best way to understand the relationship between the prophetic and New Testament texts. I think that it is more meaningful, historically and theologically, to read the New Testament texts "backward": Not to ask "How did the prophets predict Jesus?" but to ask "How did early Christians understand the prophetic text in light of the life and ministry of and proclamation about Jesus?" From this perspective what matters is the fact that the early Christians thought that the person of Jesus fundamentally altered the way that they read their sacred texts, that somehow Jesus was a "hermeneutic key" for understanding these scriptures. That is much more important than whether or not he literally fulfilled particularly interpretations of previous prophecies.

philowiz

In this case, not taking philosophy is a handicap, since there you learn that the only "absurd" things are those that are self-contradictory, which miracles are not. You need to be careful what you mean by "absurd", but violations of laws of nature are not absurd, they are not logically contradictory. And, as even well-known atheists would agree to (see William Rowe, Purdue University), God making miracles happen is not absurd if God exists.

As for accidents leaving evidence, what do you mean by this? Why is not eye-witness testimony evidence enough? Case in point: we generally believe that there was a man named Socrates, who lived in Athens, and was put to death by drinking hemlock. What "evidence" do we have of this? Just the testimony of two ancient Greeks: Plato and Xenoaphlis. Yet we teach this to history and philosophy students as fact. So testimony does count for evidence some of the time; why not now?

Again, I am not saying that there aren't good reasons to to reject the Bible as historical documents, but we need to make sure we are presenting genuine problems - these aren't genuine problems.