aa5874

I think the authors would have been prosecuted for perjury. These guys are awful.

aa5874

Farell Till, have done you any debates on the other Marys' in the Gospels. I think that will make an interesting debate.

Gamera

No, quite the contary. If I have witnesses and they all tell exactly the same story in detail, I know as an attorney that they are lying and have collaborated. Memory simply doesn't work that way. People seeing the exact same event will always, always remember it slightly different. The details will never be the same, since memory is constructed -- it isn't a videotape.

So the fact that the synoptic gospels share the basic narratives, with minor variations, is in fact probative of their veracity, not the other way round. It is what you would expect if the authors got the same stories from different witnesses.

If the stories were totally the same on every detail, we'd know for sure that they were tampered with.

Chili

You spelled Farrell wrong.

Chili

Unless they are not synoptic but given from different perspectives so we look at the story beyond the words. That is what metaphors and allegories are about and here we have 4 gospels presenting this same story using conventional words to describe different reflections of the non-conventional story. Let me add here that the details of metamorphosis are beyond convention.

aa5874

But the Gospels have different versions with eyewitnesses witnessing the same events from hours to years apart.

No Gamera. The stories of the Mary Magdalenes are very different. Read Matthew 27:55 to 28:10 and John 20:1-18. The differences are glaring.

Sven

Please tell me: How would the stories look like if they were not from eyewitnesses but based on oral traditions which (obviously) differed a lot from place to place?
Or how they would look like if they were based on the same written source material, but the authors took some liberties with it (for whatever reasons)?

MiddleMan

Or, it's what we'd expect from a book inspired by an omniscient, omnipotent being and not simply the collection of legends by ordinary folks like you or me.

gregor

Gamera's statements are obviously a generalization and demonstrably false.

However, it is also true that courts do not necessarily always throw out evidence because of differences in details. Most often, it's the differences that make trials necessary.

Vivisector

But if the witnesses stories contained mutually exclusive details, you'd also know that at least one was wrong.

That the gospels share the basic narratives, with minor variations, is also what you would expect if the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark as their basic storyline; the veracity of the derivative gospels would be no more assured than that of Mark. The "minor variations" can't be explained by different witnesses in view of the high proportion of cases in which the author's doctrinal agenda can be clearly inferred.

We already know tampering occurred, whether for purposes of doctrinal conformity, consistency, or other reason. We just don't know how much.

V.