From: johnsone@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu (Erik A. Johnson)
Subject: Re: Proof: God wrote the Bible
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 08:38:11 GMT

nordenga@tc.fluke.COM (Arnold E. Nordeng) writes:
< Prove it.  Let's see some evidence.  You can say and dream all you want, but
< you got to produce the manuscripts.   I've challenged you for evidence Ed.
< I am very willing to look at it.  But you have nothing coming.  Don't you
< care, Ed?

Doug Thompson <doug@uuisis.isis.org> replies:
> Ok, Jesus lived between B.C.  4 and A.D.  29 or so? He taught in
> Palestine from A.D.  27 or so.  About three years.  He spoke and taught
> in Aramaic.  For three years.  The New Testament gospels, which wre
> written in Greek 30 to 100 years AFTER Jesus taught can be read in a few
> hours. Three years of teaching condensed into a hundred pages or so of
> memories and recollections

Doug, that's exactly what the Apostle John wrote:

   Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his
   disciples, which are not recorded in this book.  But these
   are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,
   the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in
   his name.  (John 20:30-31)

It is obvious that Jesus' entire life can not be written in the 20000 words
of the Gospel of John.  But if I were to give you an account of what I did
today, I'm sure it would not include every single little detail, such as
how I picked out what shirt I wore today, or how much salt I put on my dinner.

> memories and recollections (many not directly derived from eye witnesses
> who were all dead by the time it was written)

Common misconception.  Many of the eyewitnesses were still alive when the
Gospels were written.  Witness Luke's explanation in Luke 1:

    Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that
    have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to
    us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants
    of the word.  Therefore, since I myself have carefully invest-
    igated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to
    me to write an orderly account for you ...

Get that?  He was taught by those who were from the first witness of the
Christ.  But also he investigated it.  Luke was in Caesarea during Paul's
imprisonment there and had the time to ask, to investigate.  Many of the
disciples were still alive at that time.  And there were certainly still
people alive in Jerusalem in 58 or 60 AD for Luke to talk to about the
events he writes about.

Some will argue, "but no! the Gospels were written in the 2nd century by
the Church!"  That is an opinion held by many scholars in the 1800's but
has been disproven by the discoveries of ancient New Testament manuscripts
and by the credibility lent to the Gospels and the book of Acts by
archaeologists.  Manuscripts from the first quarter of the 2nd century
have been found half-way across the ancient Roman Empire from where they
were originally written.

> In the best of all possible worlds, assuming no one in any way made any
> conscious or sub-conscious attempt to distort things for any reason, it
> is unreasonable to suppose that translated memories many decades after
> the fact, which have been condensed so much and are so fragmentary could
> be guaranteed to be completely free from any sort of error.
> 
> We would expect to find that if two different witnesses retold the same
> story and didn't compare notes, the stories would diverge in at least
> some details. And Lo and Behold THEY DO DIVERGE! This doesn't mean they
> diverge in vital details necessarily, but one finds what one would
> expect from the history of the NT's creation that we know. That there is
> a lot of difference in remembered details, in the wording, and more
> importantly in the remembered anecdotes that are *included* and in those
> that are *not included* by the various authors.

Two problems here.  If you and I were to each write a paper on, say, the
1992 Presidential Debates, I am sure that I would include some anecdotes
(for example, Perot making the crack about being "all ears", etc.) that
you might not have found useful or interesting.  But that does not mean
that my anecdotes or yours were not said.  Nor does it necessarily imply
that your account or mine is invalid.

The fact that we have multiple witnesses supports the validity of the NT,
rather than denying it.

> The biggest mis-quote is the NON QUOTE of most of what Jesus taught.

This is one of the biggest fallacies in historical study.  Absence of evidence
is not evidence of absence.  Your statement that most of what Jesus taught
was never told is like me saying that the Gospels neglected to tell us that
Jesus was really a little green man from Mars.  I am completely free to make
such a claim, even though there be little evidence to contradict it.  But
there is no evidence to support it.  Besides, I think that if he had been
little and green and from Mars, his disciples would probably have noted that
difference.  Or if not them, then their enemies.

> Go look up the two versions of the Sermon on the Mount and think about
> it. Jesus is quoted. The quotes are different. By definition one has
> gotta be a mis-quote. 

No.  How many times did Jesus preach in the hills around Galilee?  There are
a number of times mentioned in the Gospels.  It is entirely possible that
Matthew may record one of those sermons, while Luke records another similar
sermon.

> Let's take one: "Peter, you are the rock and upon this rock I will build
> my Church". That 'quote' from Jesus is interpreted by Catholicism to
> mean that the Catholic Church is the only true Church. Of course it
> doesn't *say* that does it? But it is interpreted that way.
> 
> First problem: the difference between what it says and what a given
> community of believers has understood it to say over time.
> 
> Second problem: The word "church" was not used in Palestine by
> Christians until after the Jewish war of A.D. 65. Until that time
> Christians worshipped as Jews in Synagogues. So it is really very odd
> that 35 years before the word came into Christian usage in Palestine we
> find the word in Jesus' mouth. It's the only occurence of that word in
> the gospels.

Mt 16:16-18
  Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."
  Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not
  revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.  And I tell you
  that you are Peter [petros=little rock], and on this rock [petra] I
  will build my church [ekklesian].

1. Need I remind you that 2/3s of the Christians in the world disagree
   with the Catholic Church on that point.  Secondly, the terms used
   for "Peter" (which means stone or little rock) and rock ("petra",
   big rock) are different words, and even do not agree in gender.
   The "rock" referred to is the confession Peter had just made, that
   Jesus is "the Christ, the Son of the living God."

2. Actually, ekklesia is used two other times in Matthew.  And as for its
   meaning, it came to mean "church", but had the more general meaning of
   "assembly", "meeting", "congregation", and was used in extra-biblical
   literature to refer to gatherings of religious or political groups.
   So Jesus' use of the term does not support your point.

> Many important gospel stories, like the virgin birth, the wise men, the
> shepards in the fields, etc., show up in only one gospel and not the
> others. This suggests that the other authors either didn't know about
> these events or didn't deem them important enough to mention.

Or they knew that most of the recipients already know of the info they
left out.

> The witness is not God, the witnesses are Matthew,
> Mark, Luke and John, many years after Jesus lived and most of their
> evidence is hearsay. It looks like hearsay, it has inconsistencies of
> the sort one always finds in hearsay, it sounds like hearsay, it's
> erratic, it's fragmentary, it's condensed, it's incomplete

Have you every interviewed various witness in a courtroom?  No, I have
not either, but am basing this info on some of the writings of Simon
Greenleaf, one of the Harvard Law professors that helped put Harvard
Law on the map, and an expert in cross-examination of witnesses.  He
put the Gospels through the same rigors required of testimony in the
courts of our country, reported in his book, _An_Examination_of_the_
_Testimony_of_th_Four_Evangelist_by_the_Rules_of_Evidence_Administered_
_in_the_Courts_of_Justice_ (New York: J. Cockroft & Co., 1874; reprinted
Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1965).  Witnesses are often fragmentary,
especially when describing isolated events that occurred over a three-
year period.  Greenleaf came to the conclusion that the Gospel accounts
meet the same standards of testimony required by United States law.

And again, just because I didn't tell you I put salt on my dinner does
not imply I didn't.

> Ergo, the *manuscripts* we have, which are written by Church copyists,
> and which date at the earliest from about A.D. 400 the work of the
> Church and there is a large distance in time and space between what has
> been preserved and Jesus' 3 years of teaching.

Again, a common myth.  You are quoting scholarly work between one and two
centuries OUT OF DATE!  As of the early 1800's, the earliest extant NT
manuscripts were from centuries after Christ.  But today, the oldest
manuscripts we have date to within 40 or 50 years of when it was originally
written.  The Gospel of John was probably written around 80 or 85 AD.  We
have today, in the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester, a
fragment of the Gospel of John that is dated, by secular and Christian
historians to around 125AD.

We have all but a couple of the Epistles of the Apostle Paul in a codex
that dates from 200AD (half of this codex is in the Chester Beatty Library
in Dublin, the other half in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan).

The above examples are only two of the many extant manuscripts that
originated long before the 400AD date you mention.  We have complete
New Testaments, together in one book, dating from the early 300s -- one
is in the Vatican library, the other in the British Museum in London.

A. N. Sherwin Wright, a professor at Harvard, concluded that it takes
a minimum of 300 years for myth to creep into history.  The 40 or 50
years for the New Testament is far smaller.

> And what we're *arguing* about is an English translation of Greek
> manuscripts

That's why most people who argue about this learn Greek.  Most pastors
today study Greek and Hebrew in seminary.

> And what we're *arguing* about is an English translation of Greek
> manuscripts which were copied centuries after they were written

See above.

> Almost  more importantly, we're not arguing about the text as much as
> what the text means. We pretty much agree on what letters of the
> alphabet are there on the page.
> 
> So what is the value of such an argument? I don't know.  Maybe, just
> maybe you will see that there are other ways of reading the document
> which are just as honest and sincere and possibly valid as your own
> rather simplistic reading of it.  And just maybe you'll recognize that
> your reading of it might not always be the most well-informed, the most
> carefully considered or the most comprehensive understanding of the
> witness. 

Doug, as I read your response to Arnold, I see more of a desire to read
BETWEEN the lines (i.e., the supposed teachings allegedly not given by
the Gospel writers) than to read the text itself.  I don't mean this in
an attacking sort of way, but just an observation.

Erik.


Erik A. Johnson, Graduate Student        \ Internet:  johnsone@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu
Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering  \
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign \ AmericaOnline: ErikAJ
Newsgroups: talk.religion.newage