Alf

Ok, mixed up which one of them had Joseph's father as Jacob and which one of them had it as Heli - no biggie.

There should be. Ancient texts did not have parenthesis or periods or commas. Such typographical marks was invented later and gradually. Hey, ancient jewish texts didn't even have wovels and only had consonants in the texts - only here and there was a vowel mark placed to indicate what wovel to use.

I can assure you - original luke had no parenthesis. They didn't even have quotation marks!

This is only in your fantasy along with some other fundies who also try to make this claim. There is nothing in the original greek nor in most translations that support such an interprettation. True, I don't know greek but there are people who do and I think we can state very firmly that the greek text do not support such an interpretation.

I think the confusion is more due to the fact that it was politically and practically impossible for Augustus to decree a census to be held in a "friendly" and "sovereign" nation ruled by a king who was not under Augustus' command - at least not formally.

If he had done so, all other similar states that surrounded the roman empire would revolt, wondering when Augustus would interfere with their rule as well - The roman empire would crumble. Augustus knew this full well and left all those nations to rule their own without his interference. In short, if Augustus decreed the census it was not affecting Judea and if it was in Judea it was not decreed by Augustus. Either way, Luke got it wrong if your explanation above is correct. However, this is not in accordance with history. History actually says Luke got this particular part right - there WAS a census in Judea decreed by Augustus - however, it was in 6 AD and not in 6 BC. The reason was that in 6 AD Judea was no longer a soverein state but was made part of the roman empire. The census was to get an idea of how many people living there so they could estimate how much tax they could expect to get from Judea.

However, if Luke got this part right then Matthew must have gotten his part wrong.

No, your "explanation" didn't resolve anything at all - it was just a rehash of things I have heard before and which did not impress me then and neither does it impress me now.

Alf

rhutchin

OK. WHY do you think Luke did the genealogy in the manner that he did? WHY do you think Luke introduced the qualifier and WHAT do you take that qualifier to do? WHAT is your credible argument to explain these things?

Fair enough. Maybe someone with a knowledge of the Greek can address the translation of the verse.

rhutchin

The point, I believe, is that everyone telling the exact same story sounds fishy. If you have multiple accounts of an event, then each account would have some common elements and some that are not. The blind men describing an elephant are all giving true accounts, but you have to put them together to get the whole story. The NT includes historical documents written by differnet people who each presumably wrote that which they saw or heard from others and each writes of the same overall events while supplying different information about those events.

rhutchin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius

Provides a decent start to investigating this issue. Not as clear cut as some might think.

[I see on reading further that mdarus already provided this and other info.]

rhutchin

The context clearly does not allow for Joseph to begat Mary.

rhutchin

Luke begins his historical acocunt by stating "Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed." This seems to say that Luke talked to the people involved and got his information directly from those who witnessed the events of which he wrote. Sketchy set of traditions does not do Luke justice and does not seem justified to me. Given Luke's association with Paul and interaction with the Apostles, it would have been easy for him to question those who claimed to have been eyewitnesses of Christ.

Matthew was an apostle and would have written of those things that he witnessed and in particular of those things revealed to him and the other apostles by Christ. The conclusion of a tall tale is not warranted.

jeremyp

According to Luke, Jesus was the son of God, but people at the time would have thought he was the son of Mary's husband, Joseph.

I think that explains the qualifier credibly.

The Evil One

rhutchin, I won't respond to your comment on that Wiki page, because I already said everything I would say in my respionse to mdarus, but I will comment on this post:

Are we reading the same passage? The author does not mention talking to anyone in that passage. Nor does he mention getting information from anyone. Instead, he seems to claim that *he himself* was an eyewitness: "us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses" and "me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first". IE he knew it all along, which is why he's telling Theophilus.

But regardless of whether he claims to have been an eyewitness or to have gotten information from eyewitness it's still just that - a claim. Making a claim does not mean the claim is true, and we have independent reason to believe this claim is false (i.e. the GLuke author's use of Q and Mark).

Oh come on. You must know that the gosepls are all anonymous, that the attributions to "Luke" and "Matthew" are late Church traditions. There is absolutely no evidence that the GLuke author had interracted with Paul or the apostles, or that the GMatt author was the same as the character of Matthew.

I describe the Herod narrative as a tall tale because (1) it is clearly untrue - the slaughter of the children could not possibly have escaped the notice of every single ancient author except the Matthew author(*); and (2) it is clearly a lift from the exodus myth. The Matthew author is telling the reader, in a figurative way, Jesus Is Like Moses.


(*) Indeed, going back to the argument that the Gospel discrepancies are a result of different eyewitnesses happening to mention different details which they thought were important, if the Luke author knew about the slaughter of the children, and considered it insufficiently important to mention when giving an account of Jesus' birth, then one could only conclude that he was a sick individual with twisted priorities. Furthermore, there comes a point at which "failure to mention a detail" becomes "falsehood by omission", and when the detail is as significant as the state-sanctioned murder of hundreds of children, I consider that point to have been reached. Of course, I personally don't conclude that Luke is lying by omission, or that he is a twisted sociopath, because I think the Matt author made the whole thing up. But I don't see how these conclusions can be avoided, if the GLuke author is assumed to have known about the Herodian slaughter.

There are discrepancies and discrepancies. The kinds of discrepancies that you get from multiple eyewitnesses are vaguenesses of wording, differences arising from their different standpoints relative to the action, and different minor details omitted or not included. This is not the kind of discrepancies that are found between the Gospels. Instead we see that in some points they are almost word-for-word identical (suggesting collusion or, in this case, copying) and in other places direct contradictions (as discussed: Herod/Quirinius, Jacob/Heli).

A short thought experiment. Let us imagine that the authors of Matthew and Luke were alive today and were telling the police about a car crash.

Luke says, "I was on my way home from handing in my tax return for this year when I saw three cars in a pile-up. The red car was at fault."

Matthew says, "A couple of cars all crashed together about three hundred yards from the exit. Moments later, five buses loaded with schoolchildren ploughed one by one into the wreckage, they all instantly exploded in massive fireballs killing everyone aboard."

This would be analagous to what we have in the two nativity stories. Would you accept the discrepancy between these two accounts as merely due to eyewitneses happening to mention different details of the same event? Because I sure as hell wouldn't - I would conclude that either Luke was lying by omission, or Matthew was a fantasist, or that they weren't actually eyewitnesses.

The Evil One

Just to add quickly, once we've put poor old Quirinius and Herod to bed, we should take a look at where Joseph and Mary went when they left Bethlehem (Luke says Jerusalem and then Nazareth, Matt says Egypt), whether they had lived in Nazareth before Jesus' birth (Matt strongly implies no, Luke says yes), and other fun and frolic-filled undeniable contradictions.

Alf

The point is that the gospel narratives are so different it is impossible to reconcile them as telling the story about one and the same individual.

At least one of them must be making things up. My bet is that they all are.

Which is exactly why I do not have vonfidence in the bible telling us about the One True God as rhutchin claims.

Alf