Douglas J. Bender

I offer Ion's most recent post as evidence that he does not know what he is talking about. To try to argue that "hanged" implies "died" sounds reasonable, but it's absurdity is apparent when one realizes that one could be "hanged" by a mob, yet be saved by the Lone Ranger. Thus, in an account of some innocent victim of a mob's misplaced wrath, it could be truly said that they "hanged" the person, but it would not therefore follow that that person died from the hanging.

And besides all this, I already granted that Matthew's account could be understood as meaning that Judas died from hanging - but I pointed out that there is a reasonable way to reconcile this with the account in Acts, by seeing that death by hanging can occur instantaneously by the breaking of the person's neck, and that a split second later, the branch could have broken off (being broken immediately, but the bark slowing its complete break), and thus Judas' corpse falling "headlong" and bursting open. No one seems to have read that scenario, and certainly no one has offered any reason why that scenario would make no sense, or could not have occurred.

Ion, how old are you, anyway?

In Christ,

Douglas

Liquidrage

Yes, you can go through a bunch of hoops to make both scenarios fit together much like one can use scissors to put a jigsaw puzzle together.

I suggest that the mostly logical and rational view would be that the two slightly different stories are different accounts of the same story.

Trying to force Biblical inerrancy onto rational people is akin to forcing a large square peg into a small round hole.

The Christian texts comprising the New Testament are a collection of texts chosen over time and from a large pool by mortal men. While it is possible that a divine being could will men to choose certain books there is no evidence that this has occurred. It is also possible that a divine being could create humans with freewill but without the ability to kill each other.
Existence of possibility is not evidence of action.

[ November 17, 2002: Message edited by: Liquidrage ]</p>

Douglas J. Bender

Family Man,

You apparently haven't read anything that I've written.

Not true in the least. All I've done is show how Judas' death could have reasonably occurred in a way which could be described by both the Matthew and Acts accounts. And, I also pointed out that the left-out details could only be considered "vital" depending on the context and purpose of the passages the accounts were found in - and I further pointed out that in those contexts, the "purpose" was clearly not to give a detailed description of the manner and circumstances surrounding Judas' death. If all I wanted to mention was that JFK was shot to death, I could say, "JFK was shot to death" - I wouldn't need to say, "JFK died by a bullet wound to his head, which he received while riding in the back seat of a car in Texas". If I wanted to give a more detailed account of his death and its reason, I'd go into more detail than "JFK was shot to death".

Correct - if so-called "vital information" ("vital" only in certain contexts, and not in the context of the accounts under consideration) was left out, then that would, indeed, explain why the apparent contradiction exists. But it would NOT be a "contradiction", only an APPARENT one.

If someone died by somehow getting a rope tied around their neck while in a shallow swimming pool, and they died as a result of being choked by the rope, then someone could, if they were focusing on where the person died, say, "So-and-so died in a swimming pool, and his body was found floating in the water", and someone else, if they were focusing more on the direct cause of death, could say, "So-and-so died by being choked by a rope". Both would be describing the same event, and both would be doing so ACCURATELY, though not thoroughly. Someone else, not given to careful and thoughtful analysis of things, might read the two accounts and sloppily and thoughtlessly say, "Those two accounts are clearly contradictory - in one, So-and-so dies by drowning; in the other, he dies by strangulation". This is EXACTLY the kind of error all you people are guilty of who claim that Matthew and Acts contain contradictory accounts of Judas' death. Sheeeeeesh.

Absolutely wrong. (Man, how many times do I have to explain this, anyway?) In order for someone to rightfully claim that something IS a contradiction, the burden is upon THEM to "demonstrate that it necessarily must" be a contradiction. This means that they must show that any theoretical explanations are either impossible, or incredibly or even very unreasonable. To show that something is not NECESSARILY a contradiction, all one must do is show that there is a REASONABLE explanation which would reconcile the seeming contradiction.

[quote]A far simpler explanation is that one, or both, of the authors were making it up.[Quote]

Actually, it is a far less simple explanation, as I pointed out in my just previous post.

Point out exactly where or why my explanation is "silly" or "unbelievable". Until you do, I will point out that you have not addressed my explanation, but merely danced around it.

Not at all. In what way is my explanation "extremely illogical"? And since when was truth determined by an incredibly subjective determination of "relative likelihood" of what would be a better explanation?

In Christ,

Douglas

Bumble Bee Tuna

Here's the problem with the "they didn't need to go into detail" idea.

They DID go into detail.

While you can maintain all you want that saying someone was hanged doesn't necessarily mean they died. But surely you'll at least concede that saying someone was hanged very strongly implies that they died from it. If someone says "he hanged himself" you immediately assume he died from the hanging unless some other text is added afterwards to say that it didn't kill him.

So, by saying Judas hanged himself, Matthew is implying that Judas died by hanging. If he was a decent writer, he would not be able to leave it like this. He would either eliminate the implication by just saying "Judas killed himself" (if he was interested in conserving space), or, if he felt knowing the actual cause of death was important, he would explain what actually happened by saying that Judas tried to hang himself but fell to his death instead. He does neither, which means he thought it was fine to imply that Judas died by hanging, meaning he thought that's what happened.
Or, if you stop blinding yourself, that's what he made up from his imagination.

-B

Ion

Douglas,

your post has been answered repeatedly, and Bumble Bee Tuna's last post does it one more time.

Now, think how old you became.
Therefore, think ink to data ratio.

[ November 17, 2002: Message edited by: Ion ]</p>

Family Man

On the contrary, I've read everything you've written.

I wouldn't call it reasonable.

Except that vital information is being left out. If the manner of Judas' death wasn't important, then why do we get two contradictory accounts? It's because each author has a point to make through that death. Matthew's Judas is remorseful, rejects the priest's money, and commits suicide to atone for his sin. Luke's (in Acts) Judas is a greedy bastard who is inexplicably struck down (divinely?) where he profited from his ill-gotten gains. Your reconciliation blurs the points the authors were making, making a joke out of the text. The context of the stories, as well as the details, betrays the contradictory and fictional nature of the stories.

As for your JFK example, you're comparing apples to oranges. The biblical examples clearly imply two separate manners of death. Your JFK example merely adds information to the cause of death that everyone agrees upon. Not the same thing at all.

Reading the account in context, as I've shown, the manner of Judas' death was vital to the narrative.

Contradictions can indeed be explained, but you haven't shown that your explanation is the correct one. It is only theoretically possible, and an unlikely scenario it is.

Very good, Douglas. And if they were reporting that event that way I'd say they were incompetent. Is that your defense? That Matthew and Luke were incompetent?

No, the readers aren't being sloppy. They are reading clearly contradictory accounts. The authors are the ones who are being sloppy, if your reconciliation is to be believed.

No, the error being committed here is that you are assuming that Judas' death can not be contradictory. To do this, you end up claiming that Luke and Matthew didn't have their facts straight. Then you have the gall to accuse skeptics of being sloppy because the accounts are contradictory. This is so incredibly illogical I'm amazed you'd even suggest it.

Absolutely right. The burden is always on an author to communicate clearly. Therefore, it is YOUR burden to show that the plain reading of the text is necessarily wrong and that YOUR scenario is the correct one.

Nope. You must show that there was a cliff. You must show that Judas was "slightly overweight." You must show that the branch broke, causing to Judas to die from a fall. And you must show why making the inference that Judas died by hanging, according to Matthew's account, is unreasonable. However, it's not, is it?

No, you must show why your explanation should be accepted in favor of a plain reading of the text.

It is silly and unbelievable because it requires us to ignore both the facts and the context of the text as presented to us in favor of a fanciful reconciliation with no basis in what was written down.

Actually, I think that I've stabbed it right through the heart.

Since always. Historians, especially of ancient times, will always take the more likely explanation over an explanation that requires the addition of material. Unless you can refute my theory that Luke and Matthew made up -- or used made up stories they heard -- your story doesn't deserve any consideration at all.

BTW: I think asking someone what their age is is a sign of immaturity -- of the person doing the asking.

[ November 17, 2002: Message edited by: Family Man ]</p>

Jack the Bodiless

Douglas:

If we follow your "logic" relenlessly, NEITHER account specifically states that Judas DIED from his injuries!

However, from the context of the story, it's rather important that Judas met a gruesome end. If he survived both incidents, he would have "gotten away with it".

And this gruesome end is either suicide by hanging, or some sort of disembowelment (possibly supernatural). That is the plain context of the accounts, and they are plainly contradictory. To argue otherwise, you must argue that at least one of the authors failed to mention that Judas actually died: he betrayed Jesus and got away with it.
According to current theories, Matthew and Luke were both derived from earlier sources: Mark and Q. Hence, Luke would not have copied Matthew. They were presumably independent of each other. Therefore they are both free to invent details that were not in Mark or Q, and these fabrications wouldn't match.

Butters

You guys are so thick headed. Dougie has already proved that Judas was rescued from being hanged by the Lone Ranger. And from that we can reasonably infer that later he was stabbed to death by the invisable man. I find this is a totaly reasonable explaination, so it MUST be true!

Jack the Bodiless

A caveat to my previous post:

I should have mentioned that the gospels of Matthew and Luke are thought to have been derived, independently of each other, from the shared sources of Mark and Q. It's generally agreed that none of the gospels were actually written by the named Apostles, and I'm not sure what evidence (if any) links the actual authorship of Luke and Acts.

If "Matthew" and "Luke" were written independently of each other, and Acts might not even have been written by "Luke": why shouldn't they disagree?

Hence the most obvious conclusion: that the story of Jesus is a myth with multiple authors, a transcription of a somewhat blurry oral tradition.

Family Man

Cut and pasted from different thread. Far more appropriate here

I'm sure it is your honest and amazed opinion. It is my honest and amazed opinion that it was an asinine thing to say, especially since I could, with considerably greater justification, apply the remark to yourself.

Many, yes. All, no. Matthew and Luke? We don't know. And even if they did travel, we don't know if they met each other. We don't know who they are or where they lived, as far as I know. The assumption that they knew each other based on the travels of some of the Church leaders is silly and illogical, to use one of your favorite terms.

As for the "higher-ups", you're ignoring the fact that Christianity spread from Egypt to Turkey, from Jerusalem to Rome. There is no evidence that any central control was applied to what was written about Jesus for a couple of centuries after his death. Otherwise, how do you explain the proliferation of apocryphal gospels that didn't make it into the canon when a little quality control was finally applied? No, Douglas, the facts indicate that Christians were making up stories quite willy-nilly in the first couple of centuries. Central control and "higher-ups" came later.

Impossible, no. Unlikely, yes.


Because there is nothing in the text to indicate that Matthew and Luke knew each other's work. That the two knew Mark is very evident from their text, yet their is no evidence that Luke knew Matthew or vice versa. Your assumption is baseless.

Because scholars agree that 90% of Mark appears either verbatim or in slightly revised form in Matthew, and about 40% appears in Luke.

Hardly. It is well-documented in the scholarly literature. As I mentioned before, Matthew's account of Jesus's baptism merely revises Mark's account to take away some of the implications that Matthew didn't like. I could come up with more examples if you'd like.

And you accuse me of having a reading problem. Matthew's account inserts a speech by John in which he tries to persuade Jesus that he doesn't need to be baptized. This was done because Matthew was a little embarrassed by the implication that John was the initiator of Jesus's career. The speech, undoubtably fiction -- who would remember a speech 50 odd years after the event even if Matthew could find him -- was designed to knock John a peg or two. So, yes, the story was changed to display a different relationship between John and Jesus.

For their time, yes. But a journey from one part of the Empire to another was still quite arduous, probably expensive, and certainly not taken lightly. Furthermore, as noted, we have no evidence that Matthew and Luke were aware of the other, as they clearly were of Mark. The evidence contradicts your assumption.

Actually, I've already supported it above. And I can come with plenty more. I'm just getting warmed up.

I've provided plenty. You are the one who has substituted conjecture for fact.

[ November 18, 2002: Message edited by: Family Man ]</p>