Dark Jedi

Sojourner:

I do not follow the reason for this post in this thread. Please explain it's relevance, or remove it and take it to the political forum.

NOGO

Bad analogy. The murder of Kenedy happened within seconds and people present did not know what was going on.

Compare. Jesus told his disciples that he was going to resurrect. The women went to see. They took a nice Sunday morning stroll.

Since this is the most important event in Christianity then the question should be this ...

Why would anybody feel a need to create or modify this all important account?

All four Gospels give an account of Jesus' trial and death yet they do not contradict as much as the resurrection account. Why?

Simply put the differences in the resurrection accounts pose the problem of credibility. John's account is so different than the other three that errors in retelling and even embellishments over time cannot account for.

Vorkosigan

What are the key details of John's account that tell against its authenticity?

Marduk

"Why would anybody feel a need to create or modify this all important account?"

Just a guess, the people who wrote the story were not there themselves, they knew there was a resurrection and someone was there, they fill in the details themselves to tell the story.
Historical accuracy was never a strong point of ancient writers, as long as they made their point everyone was happy.
The same for any Bible story, no one in those days cared if Sodom was a real life city with actual people. They understood the warning or moral of the story. If we believe this Jesus guy, we get to live forever, OK.

NOGO

I did not mean it that way.
I just gave an example. You can assume that John's account is the true one then my comment would relate to any of the other three.

There is absolutely nothing in John's account which make it less credible than the others.

Sorry for the confusion.

Of course there is also the possibility that all accounts are fiction. The contradictions surely entertain such a conclusion even if they are but icing on the cake to a story which is already increadible as it is even without them.

[ December 24, 2002: Message edited by: NOGO ]</p>

NOGO

Even if that is so when they did write something historical the probability of corroborating other written accounts is higher than if the story is fictitious.

So if all four Gospels say that Jesus died under Pintius Pilate and Pilate was indeed a Roman procurator of Judea at that very time
THEN
you get that much more confidence that this could be an historical item.

Things that don't corroborate destroy this very confidence of historicity.

Benjamin Franklin

Can you elaborate ? What are your reasons for doubting the ressurection other than the acccounts in gospels don't match up.

Thanks

BF

Benjamin Franklin

I don't agree. If two people are trying to frame a person for murder, then their fabricated accounts would agree on the fact that he committed the murder but disagree on almost every other detail, which is what you see with the resurrection accounts.

I enlcose a quote by Archbisop Carnley from an article by Peter Kirby

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...ependence.html

"The presence of discrepancies might be a sign of historicity if we had four clearly independent but slightly different versions of the story, if only for the reason that four witnesses are better than one. But, of course, it is now impossible to argue that what we have in the four gospel accounts of the empty tomb are four contemporaneous but independent accounts of the one event. Modern redactional studies of the traditions account for the discrepancies as literary developments at the hand of later redactors of what was originally one report of the empty tomb. . . There is no suggestion that the tomb was discovered by different witnesses on four different occasions, so it is in fact impossible to argue that the discrepancies were introduced by different witnesses of the one event; rather, they can be explained as four different redactions for apologetic and kerygmatic reasons of a single story originating from one source."


The key point is if the verisons are slightly different, then the discrepancies are not significant. But they are not slightly different. They are grossly different, which is evidence that at least one is entirely fabricated.


BF

Vorkosigan

Well, human resurrection, so long after death, is physically impossible....probably that's enough for starters.

Peter Kirby

I have an essay in the SecWeb library that discusses the evidence regarding the empty tomb story, the sine qua non of a physical resurrection.

Historicity of the Empty Tomb Evaluated

I haven't gotten any substantial responses since I wrote that essay (monograph?) two years ago. So I would be interested in comments.

best,
Peter Kirby