From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Subject: Re: Proof: God wrote the Bible
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 92 19:08:46 GMT

nordenga@tc.fluke.COM (Arnold E. Nordeng) writes:

> In article <1992Oct8.192429.8343@unislc.uucp> erc@unislc.uucp (Ed Carp) write
> >Arnold E. Nordeng (nordenga@tc.fluke.COM) wrote:
> >
> >: Are you implying Jesus was lying or misquoted?
> >
> >Lying, no.  Misquoted, yup.
> 
> 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?

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 (many not directly derived from eye witnesses
who were all dead by the time it was written) held by True Believers who
has often heard it from someone else and had translated it at least
once.

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.

Therefore the possibility of a mis-quote is very real. It can be the
right words taken in the wrong context, a confusion of the words, an
honest misunderstanding of what was said by the witness whose account is
being used, and all kinds of things. It can be a mis-translation. It can
be an omission of something crucial.

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

In the New Testament we do not have the words of Jesus. What we have is
what the Church felt to be the most important ideas and (inevitably
imperfect) collected stories as remembered and re-told by the believing
community in support of its belief in the latter decades of the First
Century. Of course all this is *based* on Jesus' teaching, and the First
Century Church's understanding is not unimportant or necessarily wrong.
But it is not identical with the actual teaching of Jesus per se.

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. 

The New Testament was written by the Church, not by God, and it is
really completely obvious as soon as you take your blinkers off and look
at the actual bloody text that is actually there.

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.

Of course it is not impossible that Jesus really said that but it is
*enormously* improbable.  What is *very* plausible is that a Roman
believer who knew 'The Church' as the church in Rome, and believed it
was founded by Peter (which it may have been) took somebody's memory of
what Jesus really said in that dialogue with Peter and 'corrected' it
while condensing it to conform with what he knew to be true. 

And I'm not saying that the statement attributed to Jesus is not 'true',
necessarily, and I'm not saying it isn't what Jesus meant, necessarily.
I am saying that it is not at all likely that Jesus actually said that.

It is also possible, I suppose, that Jesus spoke that sentence in Greek
in the midst of his Aramaic discussion with Peter. But that too is
pretty improbable. So we know he didn't use *those words*. At the very
best we have a translation from the Aramaic.

Then there is the problem of Thomas and the Thomist Church of India. It
appears Jesus built another Church (with substantially different
doctrines) on a different Rock, that of Doubting Thomas.

Why is the New Testament so silent on the teachings of Thomas and Andrew
and most of the apostles while putting so much emphasis on Paul and
Peter?

It's simple. Paul and Peter were known to the Roman Church and the
others were far away and contact was lost. Does not God care about what
Thomas taught or the Church he founded? If God wrote the New Testament
why did he leave that out? 

If the Roman Church wrote the New Testament, and we know that by and
large this is the case, then it makes perfect sense. They just didn't
know about Thomas's ministry.

So you see, the New Testament (in the generally accepted text) contains
massive amounts of direct and indirect evidence that what we have is the
creation of one particular Church at one particular time and that it is
vulnerable to errors and omissions.

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. I think
the others didn't know about them because they didn't happen but were
rather invented in particular places. If Mary really was a virgin when
she gave birth to Jesus, this is such a stunning little gem of a fact it
is astonishing that only one author makes any reference to it, and then
only once. Too astonishing to be very credible.

How can you prove that such bizarre events, which are not corroborated
by multiple sources, weren't someone's misunderstanding half a century
after the fact? You cannot. Neither can one prove that they aren't true.

But one can assess probabilities and find patterns within a body of
text. And if you don't question the credibility of your witness you are
bound to be misled. 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, it's
translated at least once and it is produced by an institution, the
Church, which is notorious for imposing deeply held beliefs on actual
objective facts and distorting the actual facts in the process.

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.

And what we're *arguing* about is an English translation of Greek
manuscripts which were copied centuries after they were written and were
written decades after the 'quotes' were uttered in Aramiac.

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. 

I doubt it, but maybe.

I'm asking you to stand back and take a larger view of the grand
tapestry of history out of which the New Testament has come and drop the
childish notion that your simplistic understanding of the text is
necessarily a dictation from God's throne room. There is an awful lot
more to it than you suppose and insisting there isn't will not further
your understanding nor persuade many others.

It will not persuade scholars and it will not persuade skeptics. So what
*are* you trying to prove?

=Doug