Diogenes the Cynic

Um...no you can't. Just the opposite, in fact. You can prove without question that the gopsels conflict not only with each other but with known history.
Eusebius is by no means considered to be a good recorder of history. He was a credulous true believer who reported all kinds of spurious anectdotes and fantastic tales.
Christians spouting doctrine. Nothing more.
No you don't. Sorry. You don't.
Go ahead and establish it.
There's that fallacy again. We don't know what Jesus said. We only know what other people (who did not know him) alleged that he said....and those individuals were interested in creating myths not history.

Also, nothing has been "validated." If you want to make a case for the historicity of the resurrection, please confine yourself to tangible evidence and logical arguments. Constant restatements of personal belief have no persuasive value.

aChristian

You are wrong. There is eyewitness testimony to Jesus. The NT is eyewitness testimony. Many scholars agree with this and you can read the history yourself to see that it is true.

P.S. I have only glanced through Strobel (5 minutes or less) and I disagreed with several of his points.

aChristian

Prove this statement.

Eusebius is considered a good historian. He compiled many historical documents available to him. He has been called the father of church history.

There is a lot more than doctrine in the writings of the church fathers. There is a large amount of historical evidence.

You need to read the history. From what I have read, (I have lots more to read) there is no way you can explain away the writings of the people who lived at the time. Many good historians agree with me.

aChristian

How do you know that nothing can defy natural law? If the laws that we see are established by God as the normal way he runs the universe, he can step in any time he wants and override them. Now before I believe a miracle has occurred, I want some good evidence, but if the evidence is there, the logical step is to believe it. Cicero was wrong. Miracles are not by definition impossible, they are by definition an unusual occurrence contrary to our normal experience.

Diogenes the Cynic

This is getting silly. Rather than just playing this game of "yes it is....no it isn't," why don't we focus on one "witness" at a tome. Name one person who you believe was a witness and make your case. Remember. you have the burden of proof. Prove to me that anything in the NT was written by an eyewitness.
Name three serious scholars who believe that the NT was written by eyewitnesses. Hell, name one.
Read what history? Point the way. What's the corroboration?
C.S. Lewis then? You got the Trilemma from somewhere.

Diogenes the Cynic

Here's just one example of the gopels conflicting with known history. Matthew says that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great but Luke said that he was born during the census of Quirinius in 7 CE. The problem is that Herod died in 4 BCE, a full decade before Quirinius' census. There are also a huge number of other problems with Luke's census but that one 10 year gap is sufficient to show that at least one of those gospels must be wrong. Matthew has some howlers of his own, though, not the least of which is his utterly fictional "slaughter of the innocents" and a subsequent flight to Egypt (which contradicts Luke, by the way, who says Jesus' family went straight back to Nazareth after the birth).

It would take up a lot of space and time to really enumerate all the contradictions. anachronisms and historical errors in the Gospels. If you search the IIDB for "Bible errors" I'm sure you'll find more than you ever wanted.
Not true. He is considered somewhat important to early church history, mostly because there isn't anyone else. He is NOT considered to be reliable, though, I assure you. Much of his work must be read with a shovelful of salt.
I once did a thesis on Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica. He was quite entertaining but he seemed to have a habit of repeating absolutely anything that he heard as though it were true. His "sources" were simply other Christians and the legends and tall tales that were current at the time. He did not actually have access to any primary accounts or witnesses or documentation or physical evidence of anything. Eusebius pretty much represents a compendium of 4th century Christian folklore collected from a variety of dubious sources. He was not a journalistic historian.
Like what?
I have read the "history." The patristic traditions are not reliable and no good historian thinks otherwise. If they did, they would not be practicing methodological history but simply expressing religious beliefs.

aChristian

Merrill F. Unger for one. You can find lots of them. Check out the scholars at Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, or Dallas Theological Seminary. There are plenty more.

I read Gleason Archer's Old Testament Introduction.

It's not a red herring. They are making up these redactors with no evidence for it. Their claims that different synonyms implying different authors are invalid. Their ideas of similar stories implying a copying of the same story are invalid. Their claims for late words have been refuted. Their claims that they fooled the Jews into believing it was history doesn't make sense to me. You can go point by point through their arguments and show they are wrong. It has been done by conservative scholars such as Green. You can believe it if you want, but they are reaching for straws in my opinion. I'll go with the real manuscripts and the real history, not the history the higher critics want to make up.


Green did it with the new testament story of the good samaritan. Raven mentions that you could do it with Dante's Inferno. Kitchen did it with an Egyptian inscription. Archer says that you could do it with three of Milton's works and get different authors. I can't find the example I am thinking of. It was some 18th century work and I don't remember who did it.

aChristian

Quirinius was probably a legate in Syria twice. The Tibur inscription indicates this.
Just because you do not have a second report of the slaughter by Herod does not mean it did not take place. It is completely in character for Herod to have done this.
Luke does not say that Jesus did not go to Egypt first. You are reading that into the text. Just because two people give different details of the same story doesn't mean that they both didn't know all the details.

Good historians do think the patristic traditions are reliable. You have to read them and compare because they contradict each other at times, but in general you can get good history from them.

Eusebius had access to a lot of sources. We are thankful for the sources he has preserved that we do not have extant anywhere else.

Vorkosigan

aChristian, everyone here has read the history. I suggest you get down a good conservative introduction, such as Udo Schnelle's History and Theology of the New Testament Writings, and read carefully. For example, on pages 219-222 Schnelle discusses the author of Matthew. After noting that the Patristic evidence is worthless, Schnelle spends two pages listing reasons for and against the author of Matthew being a Jewish or Gentile Christian. In other words, scholars cannot even decide whether Matt was a Jew, let alone a follower of Jesus. As Schnelle concludes, the data indicate that "Matthew was an advocate of liberal Hellenistic diaspora Jewish Christianity that had been engaged in the Gentile mission for some time."(p221) Obviously such a person was no "eyewitness" of Jesus. A great introductory work, very low-level, is Bart Ehrman's Introduction to the New Testament. Ehrman, AFAIK a Christian, writes with great accessibility. As Ehrman notes, "it does not appear that the authors of the early Gospels were eyewitnesses to the events that they narrate."

There are many reasons for this.

First, the writers evince knowledge of events that happened much later in time. All of them are aware of persecutions of Christians, although that did not happen until the time of Nero. They know that Jerusalem was destroyed.

Second, they seem to be writing at great remove. For example, Mark speaks of the quadrans, a coin circulated only in the West, but not the east, and thinks synagogues have rulers, plural, although Palestinian synagogues only had a ruler, singular.

Third, they all copied each other. Matthew copied Mark, for example. Yet even in Patristic legend Mark is only the stenographer of Peter. Why would Matthew go around copying a text that someone had written third-hand when he was supposedly with Jesus first-hand? Luke -- also not an eyewitness even in patristic legend -- copied Mark at least, and probably Matthew, and lately some scholars have suggested s/he know John as well.

Fourth, they stories they tell can all be traced back to the Old Testament and other sources. For example, the call of the disciples in Mark 1:16-20 parallels the call of Elisha in the Book of Kings. Similarly, the healing of the man with the withered hand in Mark 3 parallels a similar event in Kings again. Why would the writer choose to make up stories based on the Old Testament, when they had the original material at hand?

Fifth, in addition to using the OT as a skeleton, the Gospels also use the OT to fill in the details. For example, in the Temple Ruckus, the writer of Mark used the Elijah-Elisha cycle in 2 Kings as framework of his story. As Thomas Brodie has shown, the Cleansing of the Temple in Mark occurs as Jehu is cleansing the Ba'al Temple in Kings. The details of the story are traceable to either the style of the writer of Mark, or the Old Testament. Again we must ask why, if the real story was available, the writers went back to the OT to structure and fill out the Jesus narratives.

Sixth, there do not appear to be any sayings that go back to Jesus in the Gospels. Almost every saying in the Gospel collection can be traced back to a similar saying common in the philosophy of the time, usually Cynicism. For example, the comment that Jesus makes in Mark 2 about doctors not being needed for the healthy is a common saying in Cynic philosophy. Not only are Jesus' sayings traceable to Cynic sources, but the style of presentation, called a chreia, is also of the type common in Greek literature of the time, especially among the Cynics. These connections are well known to mainstream scholars. Check out F. Gerald Downings' excellent works on Cynicism and Christianity. Again the question arises -- if Matt and Mark knew real Jesus sayings and stories, why is it that there are so few original sayings in the Jesus collection in the New Testament?

Seventh, are the innumerable inconsistencies, misunderstandings, and implausibilities that arise if we imagine that the Gospel writers followed Jesus. Mark presents the disciples as idiots at every possible turn. Why would a follower of Jesus present himself in such a negative light? And if that was truth, why did Matthew change so many stories and locate them elsewhere, as well as altering details and changing the way the stories depict the disciples?

Anyway, this is just a small taste of the many problems raised by your claims. Steve Carr, a veteran here, has a fabulous website on this very issue and I sure he will be glad to deluge you with even more problems if you ask him. Welcome to visit my website on Mark as well.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Unger does not appear to have an extensive list of publications in peer-reviewed journals, as well as serious scholarly books. Can you point me to his CV and where it shows his list of publications in peer-reviewed journals in the field?

Archer is an apologetic hack, aChristian. Can you get us some scholars who publish regularly in peer-revewed journals?

Why yes, if you create strawman versions of the methodologies, you can use them to do it to any book and get similar results. The problem is that conservative caricatures of scholarly methodology are designed to fool those who are not familiar with what is going on. (not surprising in Dante's case anyway, since the Inferno is a copy of earlier Arab works -- as were so many of the great books of "europe" in the medieval era -- and may well incorporate material from them, as well as the usual problems of interpolations, deletions, and editing that so many manuscripts from antiquity have -- Christians being especially guilty of interpolating things into the ancient manuscripts, and editing and altering them.).

Vorkosigan