Johnny Skeptic

What evidence suggests to you that the Gospels and Paul's writings are not a combination of lies, interpolations, innocent but inaccurate revelations, and fiction?

Do you believe that supernatural claims require a good deal more evidence than natural claims do?

Chaucer

I am not an orthodox Christian, but I address some of these questions here:

http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....86#post6358686

Chaucer

Don McIntosh

The unusually high levels (relative to other ancient writings) of manuscript attestation, textual integrity, and independent historical corroboration of the earliest mss of the Gospels and Paul's writings themselves suggest to me that they are not lies, interpolations, etc.




Not necessarily. I believe that God is the universal ground of all that exists and the ultimate cause of all that happens; so for me there would be no distinction to be made between natural and supernatural claims. What we call natural processes would be God's standard operating procedures, so to speak, in managing the universe, and what we call supernatural activities or miracles would be instances of God intentionally deviating from the SOP for a particular purpose, such as a healing or a direct revelation of himself.

Do these latter events require "more evidence"? Only if the proposition that a self-existent God exists is demonstrably less probable than the proposition that a self-existent natural order exists. As both are metaphysical propositions, both would have to import a considerable degree of subjectivity into any probabilistic assessment of claims relative to the evidence cited to support them. After all, if an all-powerful God exists and decides to interrupt the regular course of history with a miracle, the probability of that miracle is 1. No amount or quality of evidence, however, can tell us the a priori probability of miracle claims. "According to your faith let it be to you…"

That being said, I personally believe the evidence at large not only supports the general claim that God exists and the specific claims of Christian theism, but shows naturalism to be incoherent. For example, Christianity openly acknowledges the role of faith along with evidence in its epistemology ("By faith we understand…"), whereas naturalism acknowledges only evidence and purportedly repudiates faith. But as we have just seen, naturalism is basically one large metaphysical assumption—hence an article of faith.

spin

Would you expect unusually high levels of manuscript attestation of any other religion in a christian society? Where did all these manuscripts you refer to come from other than Egypt, where there was a strong body of christians at least from the time of Clement of Alexandria? These texts from Oxyrhynchus and Tebtunis reflect christian communities so what else should there be amongst these texts?? Muslim texts?

As is, popular literature has no interest in the vast assortment of texts that actually came from Egypt, just the christian ones, usually for tendentious purposes such as that espoused by you. Yet, if you have a look at the range of texts, you'd know that your modern christian sources had shaped the data, misrepresenting the reality of those texts through lack of interest in the remaining texts, fragments of much of the important Greek literature of antiquity including previously lost works. You find numerous fragments of Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, but you don't hear about them, because they are of no interest to the fixated christian, so they functionally don't exist. This allows christians to make statements like the one above.

There is nothing unusually high about the distribution of texts given their context.

The claims of historical corroboration would need some explanation as to what you are talking about because it is too vague. The earliest manuscripts are well after the reputed times (even P.52 which is tendentiously dated in the first half of the 2nd c., but arguably much later), so there is no way to connect them with the purported events they deal with.

I'm not a great believer in lies or fiction being the heart of any religion, but beliefs need not reflect reality and yet be neither lies nor fiction. In the Arian conflict would you call the Arians believers of lies and fiction? I should hope not. But I doubt that you would accept their central tenets as reflecting reality. Religious stories grow because believers in their efforts to clarify them expand on them. You can see modern day examples just by looking at apologists defending some of the more complex issues related to the religion by explaining how religious texts can make sense while appearing to be problematical, eg incoherent, contradictory, ahistorical or morally questionable.

Being a committed party doesn't help clear analysis.


spin

show_no_mercy

So "lies" become "truth" because they're written on the most amount of papyrus? What you point out only means that lots of people valued the writings, not that the writings are true.

Cege

Over the past 10 years I've examined the "evidence" of the Bible in a way I never had before. I've come to the conclusion that much in the entire Bible, old and new, is a combination of stories, interpolations, innocent but inaccurate revelations, and fiction. I don't accept that everything I read in those pages is accurate, much less inerrant.

I'm a skeptic about all things, and more so the older I get (I'm 61). I do believe that supernatural claims require a good deal more evidence than natural claims do, yet I see that natural claims are sometimes misguided, innacurate, and even lies.

I believe that the Bible often puts forth supernatural explanations for occurences that were natural (mental illness or seizure conditions instead of demon possession, hyperbole rather than actual events, etc) I believe that people who contributed to biblical writings expressed what they had reasoned out (or what they believed about what they'd been told in stories handed down to generations) rather than what science has provided evidence for over thousands of years (creation, global flood, explanations for evil, etc).

I've been a Christian since I was 12, though, and my heart overrides my head when the question comes to belief in Jesus Christ as the provision for the world's sin. I still believe that, although not in the Southern Baptist way of my upbringing.

Don McIntosh

Good questions. Try to keep in mind that I mentioned manuscript attestation in the context of explaining why the NT writings should not be presumed dishonest fabrications completely corrupted by interpolations and inaccuracies. The sheer quantity of mss available, along with the comparatively small number of substantial disagreements among them, argues particularly against the alleged preponderance of interpolations.




That misrepresentation has been largely overstated by critics, tendentiously I might add. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that pronounced opposition to traditional Christian scholarship somehow represents an unbiased position.




If by "numerous" you mean a tiny fraction of the extant Greek mss of the NT, then you would be correct. Again, the emphasis here is on the multiplicity of texts, not their mere existence. By the same rigorous standards imposed on the biblical mss by textual critics, the quantities and ages of available mss of Plato, Herodotus and Thucydides all fare quite poorly. The earliest extant ms for Plato dates to some 1200-1400 years after composition; yet I don't hear many scholars suggesting that Plato may as well have been an empiricist or an anarchist for all we really know. Christians state confidence in the reliability of the biblical text on the basis of sound textual criticism, not in spite of it.

On that same note it should be pointed out that just about everything the remarkably popular and equally tendentious textual critic Bart Ehrman knows about his craft, he got from his much more traditional-conservative mentor Bruce Metzger. On the other hand, if information is as tightly controlled by "fixated Christians" as you imagine, then how exactly has Ehrman become so popular?




Okay, but I hope we can agree that the promotion of a given tradition should not be taken as evidence of bias or distortion on the part of the promoters. Granted, in this case the dictum that history has been "written by the winners" can scarcely be denied. But why and how should they have been expected to "win" in the first place, having emerged directly from the same religious and political environment in which their leader was crucified and his followers persecuted? It may well be that the early church scribes so effectively promulgated the gospel not because they were liars and charlatans, but because they were convinced (and convinced many others) that the gospel really is "good news."




The earliest ms of Josephus is by comparison much later still, but he manages to describe first century events and reference a number of NT personalities in a mostly well-composed and compelling history. Moreover there is the archaeological evidence: Monuments, coins, and inscriptions tend to last much longer than papyri. Archaeological discoveries have confirmed countless details of the NT text, and therefore given us reason (besides its historical narrative style) to read that text as essentially historical. The authors / editors of John were clearly, intimately familiar with the architecture and topography of first century Jerusalem, for example. Note also that whereas John is by almost all accounts the latest Gospel, it also provides us the earliest fragment (p52) at a region considerably removed from events, arguably pushing the manuscript production enterprise back earlier still.



Appearances can be deceiving. Those apologists who resist the temptation to simply abandon their faith at the first sign of trouble often come across much more satisfying answers in the course of subsequent investigations. Witness the Hittites, a people referenced throughout the OT and long thought to be legendary, but "discovered" by archaeologists in the late nineteenth century; or the discovery of the "House of David" inscription, contradicting the once popular view that King David was a mythical product of the Hebrew theological imagination; or Luke's first century mention of "Lysanius tetrarch of Abilene," thought for years to be an anachronism but later discovered to be in keeping with a temple inscription at Abila naming Lysanius as tetrarch during the time of Tiberius.




Perhaps not, but even less helpful is pretending to be an objective neutral observer while firmly coming down on one side of an issue. Acknowledging your own commitments in your own analyses will accordingly give you more clarity, not less.

Johnny Skeptic

But as many threads at this forums have shown, it is frequently very difficult to determine whether or not a source is independent.

Consider the following:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...y/gospels.html

Where did Mark get his information from?