Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Truth and fiction


"It's also important to remember that it is anachronistic to attribute to the evangelists the desire to convince 20th and 21st century skeptics. The problems of their time were not the problems of our time. Nobody was doubting that, e.g., the disciples claimed that they personally met Jesus after he rose from the dead. Nobody was trying to argue that these accounts had heavy infusions of legend or 'mutual storytelling.' Modern skeptical criticism was unknown and no author would have tried to counter it by writing non-historical material in realistic style."

Couldn't you take that one step further by noting that, as a matter of fact, apocryphal Gospels, apocryphal Acts of this or that Apostle, &c. were clearly *not* written in a realistic style?
Couldn't you take that one step further by noting that, as a matter of fact, apocryphal Gospels, apocryphal Acts of this or that Apostle, &c. were clearly *not* written in a realistic style?
Absolutely, and an important empirical point. The difference is vast.
And there's more: Notice how many issues that we find cropping up in Acts and the Pauline epistles do _not_ appear in the gospels. They simply are not addressed. Only a few decades after the events of Jesus' life, there were hot topics seething, yet nobody puts it into Jesus' mouth to address these topics! How easy it would have been to have Jesus say something more specific about the inclusion of the Gentiles and what rules they will have to follow, yet all we find are _general_ predictions in Jesus' parables and sayings of the eventual inclusion of the Gentiles. Nothing at all about whether they will have to keep kosher or be circumcised. Other examples could be given. The gospels are almost uncannily time-bound and space-bound in an extremely narrow period--those particular years in 1st century Palestine. This is a strong argument for their faithfulness to what Jesus actually said and what actually happened.

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