cognac

You're dodging.

What reasons do you have for not believing the TBOM is also the word of God?

How does any believer of any relgion come to believe that religion is true? How do cultists come to believe their beliefs are true?

cognac

I haven't read the TBOM, have you?

I am categorically skeptical of any system of knowledge claiming to be based on revelation. That allows me to dismiss most of the thousands of religions around the world without having to investigate them all to know truth.

OTOH, you accept supernatural systems as a basis of knowledge, therefore, I would expect you'd be reading other religious texts, like TBOM, before asserting any truth claims about them.

Have you read all sacred texts of all religions? If not, why not?

post tenebras lux

Hi again Patriot7. I already asked you about this back in post 154, but perhaps you missed it, so I'll repost my questions again below:Thanks in advance.

pharoah

I noticed that you failed to respond to my post on the very first page that showed that Matthew and Luke ARE in contradiction.

I'll issue you a challenge. If Luke and Matthew are not in contradiction, then somewhere in Luke 24 you should be able to insert an appearance by Jesus to the women that doesn't contradict either Luke or Matthew. I contend that this cannot be done. I further contend that because this cannot be done, this is absolute proof of a contradiction.

Prove me wrong.

Atheos

Inasmuch as you have already agreed that healthy skepticism is in order here, I'd like to point out that the evidence in support of these authorship traditions is extremely weak. In my view they're weak enough to toss out. You may feel otherwise -- that's certainly your choice. Everyone is going to naturally have a different threshold at which the evidence becomes "strong", and it may depend on one's background. Don't assume I was predisposed to be an atheist. I came from a religious background, majored in Biblical Studies in college, was a professional preacher for 16 years and continued studying that whole time. That doesn't prove anything but hopefully it will give creedence to the possibility that I (1) earnestly studied the other viewpoint, and (2) was (am) willing to admit when I'm wrong.
Did you actually read my post or did you just skim it. I used a very appropriate analogy, which I'll repeat here. Please take a moment and read it this time.

Let's take a close look at what we have here. We have four accounts roughly covering the same material (events in the life of one Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary). These accounts disagree strongly with each other about certain key events and thus must be reconciled (harmonised) through creative interpretation just to find them acceptable on the surface. All of these accounts include some very extrordinary claims.

Now in modern times there are people who claim that they were abducted by space aliens. Oftentimes these stories are replete with details, even corrobatory eyewitnesses. It is possible to know with certainty who is making the claim and watch them as they are interviewed. You see the sincerity in their face, and the emotions expressed as they talk of horrors or bliss.

Consider for a moment that while these are extrordinary claims they are not nearly as extrordinary as the claim that a man could give sight to the blind, restore amputated limbs, walk on the surface of the water in the middle of the sea of Galilee during a fierce storm, satisfy the appetites of 5,000 hungry people with barely enough food to feed 10 and raise people from the dead.

Contrarywise, it is quite possible that there is intelligent extraterrestrial life in a universe as vast as we live in. It is possible that such life developed intelligence millions (even billions) of years before our species did. With such a head start it is possible that such lifeforms have had time to develop technologies beyond our comprehension that allow them to travel interstellar distances as easily as we can travel to the next town in our automobiles. Well ... you see where I'm going here. These people's stories are considerably less extrordinary than claims commonly read in the bible. Yet reasonable people refuse to believe these people. It is because of the simple fact that no matter how convincing their stories are, they are too extrordinary to be believed without extrordinary evidence, which they don't have.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The only evidence in favor of believing the extrordinary claims made in the bible is the mass appeal that they have. A lot of people were taught that these stories were true when they were children and they continue to believe them. Through hearing these stories again and again one becomes jaded to just how extrordinary the claims are and just how weak the evidence is.

Sorry about the long tangent, we old preachers do get wordy sometimes. Let's go back to the "Sam Walton" analogy. Is it that extrordinary that Sam Walton would have left me his fortune? No, the fact is that Sam couldn't take it with him, so he had to leave it to someone. Could have been me. No, it's not likely, but it could have happened. It would not have been miraculous.

But in my analogy I show up with an anonymous document, neither signed nor dated. It is written in the third person. The anonymous author doesn't even claim to have met Sam Walton.

You know that this would not be sufficient evidence to support my claim. You know that my claim is nowhere near as extrordinary as even one of the miracles recorded in these "gospels".

Yet you still assert that I honestly find this statement perplexing.

Finally, you said:I find this statement even more perplexing. I do not disagree with the consensus of modern scholars, inasmuch as I am skeptical towards the authorship traditions of the four canonical books commonly referred to as the "gospels".

Best regards...

-Atheos

Kosh

:notworthy: :notworthy: :notworthy:

Very very concise.

Atheos

I'd like to address this further as I've had time to digest what I believe you are saying here.

I am willing to disagree with the consensus of modern scholars. Yes. I am willing to do so if the evidence leads me in that direction.

But the evidence, such as it is, leads me to agree with the skeptics. The evidence for the traditional authorship of the four gospels is weak and the evidence against is pretty strong.

As I understand it, the "for" evidence looks like this:

Internal evidence: None

External Evidence:

Beginning with Mark, the evidence begins with a single claim made by a believer (Papias) near the middle of the 2nd century. This claim is that someone named "Mark" took the sayings of Peter and wrote them down. It does not even claim that the book in question is the one commonly accepted as Mark today, nor does Papias claim to have first-hand of this information, but relies on someone named "John the Presbyter", decidedly not the same individual believed to be an apostle.

Moving on to Matthew, the evidence goes back to the same believer (Papias) and as with Mark Papias does not identify which book Matthew allegedly wrote, only that Matthew wrote the sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew language.

The earliest claim by anyone as to who wrote Luke/Acts comes from Irenaeus and is in the late second century (nearly 100 years after the books were supposedly written).

Irenaeus is also the first known individual to claim that John wrote the gospel credited to him. Again, this claim is made in the late second century.

Evidence "against" the authorship traditions:

Internal Evidence

• All four gospels are completely anonymous. I find this to be incredibly compelling.
• None of the four gospels claim to be eyewitness accounts. Portions of John that appear to make these claims are easily demonstrated to be additions as they do not appear in the older copies of that same gospel.
• Matthew and Luke rely heavily on Mark. Why on earth would Matthew rely on Mark if Matthew was an eyewitness and Mark was not?
• Mark is arguably the most anti-Peter gospel of the four. It strains the boundaries of credibility to imagine that a devoted disciple of Peter (according to the Papias tradition) would have painted him in a worse light than others. Note that Mark is the only gospel where Peter simply denies Jesus and runs away. It never suggests Peter ever saw Jesus again.
• Mark never claims to have met Peter, that he knew him or that any of this information claims to have come from Peter.
• John was (supposedly) an uneducated galilean fisherman. In an age where only a tiny fraction of people had enough education to even read, John supposedly has enough education to write this lengthy document. I don't think so.

External Evidence:

• Those who wanted people to accept these documents would have had good reason to ascribe authorship. Anonymous documents never hold much weight.
• Using names with good "Name recognition" would add artificial weight to the perceived veracity of the documents. If I claimed that my "Sam Walton" document was written by one of Sam's children it would at least pique a bit of interest. Nobody would give it a second thought as a completely anonymous document.
• Waiting until after the alleged authors was dead to ascribe authorship is consistent with ascribing authorship where it is not due. Once the "author" is dead he cannot deny that he wrote it.
• John is demonstrably the product of refined and cumulative redactions. Older documents contain more primitive versions that were later edited into the product commonly found today.

Just some thoughts based on the evidence as I understand it. If you have other evidence you'd like to present we'd all like to take a look.

Regards...

-Atheos

buckshot23

Sorry to have missed it. First to your original post.
I'm not so sure that the gospels are always in chronological order. Anyways they went to anoint the body and guess what? There was no body to anoint. Also the women didn't say they did not see the risen Christ either. Thirdly no where does it say in the gospels that they are a complete record of what happened.
It makes sense internally if Luke does not record an appearance to the women that they do not speak of it when they find the disciples. There cannot be a contradiction because of level of detail. 1. Luke does not mention an appearance. 2. Luke does not state explicitly that the women did NOT see Jesus on the road. 3. If Luke does not state that there was not an appearance then there is no contradiction. The mere fact that Luke does record the women telling the disciples about an appearance is not a contradiction. The problem is is that you think something should have been in the gospels and YOU think that is a contradiction when it is left out.
Just insert the the appearance when they are on the road and have Luke include the extra detail when the women actually meet up with the disciples. All this and they still would be correct in saying that they did not see the body of Jesus when they went to anoint it.

Kosh

From Luke 1:

1. Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us,
2. just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word,
3. it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus;
4. so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.

buckshot23

How does this contradict what I stated?