The Tension of Faith

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Matthew took nothing out of context

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Obviously wrong. You should try actually studying the Bible sometime, if you are capable of it. (And let's not forget that you were aggressively wrong about Isaiah 7 for some time, before you call that a personal attack)

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The New Testament is all God's word

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According to your idols. The actual books of the New Testament make no claim to be "all God's word". Not one of them.

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You don't get a vote.

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The truth isn't decided by voting either.

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GDR, the first rule of Bible understanding is to assume if it seems to be contradictory the fault is your own. I'm serious

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More accurately the first rule of the Biblical Inerrancy doctrine is that the Bible must be forced to fit the doctrine.

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That's the only reasonable way one could possibly treat a communication understood to be God's own inspired Word.

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Please explain how twisting the text to fit your beliefs is even a reasonable way of treating a communication understood to be God's own inspired Word

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OK so I can say my piece again too. "Inspired by God" means it conveys what God wants conveyed, and what God wants conveyed cannot be in error, or who do you think God is anyway?

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Which leaves wide open the question of what God wanted conveyed. And there are major differences in views about that. The idea that the whole story - read literally - is only one idea, and one that leads to obvious problems.To a Biblical Inerrantist torturing the text to extract the message they want is the correct way to read the Bible. The strange stories they invent trying to reconcile the two accounts of Judas’ death, for instance, are supposedly the message God wanted conveyed. Which really raises the question of why God would communicate so poorly - and which of these invented stories is the one He really wanted to convey?

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Sure, but that does not have anything to say about whether or not the fantastic is historical or not. It is only saying that the mundane is easier to believe.

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By ignoring the context, you miss the point. Which is that no documents are automatically trusted any more than those that make up the Bible.(And yes, I know that Christian apologists are known to claim otherwise, bu5 it is still untrue and something they should know to be untrue)

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Actually I disagree. The Gospels do not paint the disciples in a positive way, and they present the people who have the influence and the power to have them killed, very negatively. They discredit much of what was important to the Jews in their Scriptures. In the 1st chapter of Luke he says that what he has written is a collection of the accounts of the eye witnesses and others who had contact with the eye witnesses.

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This is based on assumptions, and questionable ones at that. While the Gospels can be critical of the disciples it is often to build up Jesus, or to explain doctrinal changes or perhaps even to reduce the influence of the disciples in favour of other leaders or teachers (such as Paul).The negative depiction of the Jews and Jewish belief reflects the split between Christian and Jewish communities. And the Gospels are surprisingly uncritical of the Romans in Judaea. In both cases there are inaccuracies in the Gospels indicating anti-Jewish and pro-Roman bias.That they are trying to persuade people of a message a little different from the one you apparently expect hardly shows that they are not trying to persuade people more than present what happened accurately.The assertion at the start of Luke may or may not be true. At least one writer has claimed that it is essentially boilerplate, different in style from the main body of the Gospel. The main body itself contains nothing to support the claim, no attribution of sources or witnesses. We only know of the (very heavy)use of Mark through literary examination and comparison.

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Certainly there are points of contradictions as we would expect to see in any such account. Look at the variations we get in the witnesses of a car accident. However just as they all agree that an accident actually happened, all of those involved in writing the Gospels, and for that matter the Epistles, agree that the resurrection was historical.

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If we look at the descriptions of the post-resurrection appearances the differences are far, far greater than we would expect. Witnesses to a car accident rarely have major disagreements over where it happened.

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Sure but would you really expect an account from Herod or Pilate to include something about Jesus, and to the best of my knowledge we have nothing written by them about anything. About the only account we have from that era is Josephus who mentions Jesus a couple of times but that tells us nothing either.

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I note that you ignore much of what was said. Modulus was not speaking of Jesus specifically but major events in the Gospels. Now certainly we might expect Pilate or Herod or their chroniclers to say something about those.

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If I had only two witnesses and they disagreed with who was driving a car - both accounts would be thrown out. With three - all accounts are suspect, but we'd side with the two that do agree normally.

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And what if the accounts disagreed on the location ? By a long way ? What if one said that the accident happened in London, and another said that it was in Bristol ? (UK cities).GDRs attempts to brush off the differences is - to my mind - another of his desperate rationalisations.

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John clearly says he intentionally wrote about Jesus' doings in order to persuade people to believe in Him, in His fulfillment of the prophecies of the Messiah, in his nature as God, etc. etc.

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That someone wrote something is not very good evidence. (I say someone because we don’t know who wrote John - and we do know that there were some additions by another writer). Especially when there are good reasons to doubt it’s reliability in a number of areas (and there are).It certainly shouldn’t be sufficient evidence.Then again, writing to persuade is rather different than writing to provide evidence. Someone writing to provide evidence would tell us how they know the things they claim.

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...but if Christ tells us He is going to prepare a place for us in heaven those who trust Christ based on what the Bible reveals about Him believe that He is preparing a place for us. If you don't believe in Christ's trustworthiness you won't believe He's preparing a place for us either, but the first is necessary to believing the second.

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But you don’t have Christ saying that. You have someone saying that Christ said that.You need to place an awful lot of trust in the Bible before you can get to what you wrote. And the evidence is very much against THAT.

While I don’t entirely agree with Percy a story written by a credulous and biased unknown using unidentified sources - or sources which aren’t any better - decades after the events is never going to be good evidence. Even without additional evidence of unreliability - which we have.

Faith, a story from a unknown and heavily biased person, written in a credulous age is not good evidence for a miracle. We don’t accept miracle stories from far more reliable books than the Gospels.And although the courts accept witness evidence the witness should be available for cross-examination. When that is not available a formal deposition is required.And if you want to talk about stupidity we might point to your trust in Infowars, even knowing that Alex Jones will promote obvious nonsense you still fell for Pizzagate and for the guy who claimed to have invented email.

It’s funny that you forget to mention that according to Paul’s own account he was converted by a visionary experience and not by evidence.Moreover presuming that the first Christians had good evidence rather than being convinced for other reasons is hardly warranted. That they were convinced cannot tells us what convinced them. After all, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are still going despite the continued failure of their end-of-the-world predictions (already more than a century late), the Mormons survived some pretty serious problems, Scientology - an even bigger fraud than the Mormons - somehow goes on.Why assume that the early Christians were more rational than the followers of those failures ?

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Paul's "visionary experience" was an actual encounter with the real living risen Christ from heaven, and even a visionary experience alone can be evidence a person might base conversion on.

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Or it can be hallucination and delusion. But certainly it is not evidence in the sense that GDR meant.

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As for Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, lots of people join religions for all kinds of reasons, but they don't have to put their lives on the line for their belief. Chrsitians do. When it comes to that we'll find out how many of us REALLY believe in Christ's salvation.

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That may be true of modern Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses - at least those living in the West. Just as it is true for Christians living in the same countries. On the other hand the early Mormons were persecuted, and Jehovah’s Witnesses suffered persecution in Nazi Germany.

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And the gospels are clearly written records, description of actual events, and your calling them "religious works," whatever that is, makes discussion with you impossible.

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Of course the Gospels were written to promote religious belief, and it is pretty clear that objectively determining the actual events - as a good historian would - was not part of the agenda.The Gospel of John has already been quoted as saying that it was written to promote religious beliefs. (And I do not see how anyone could read John:1 1-3 and not see those verses as religious in nature).And if Percy knowing that is fatal to your arguments then your arguments are deceptions. And I am reminded of how you don’t like unbelievers knowing about Christianity (even the unbelievers who are Christian).

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I'm treating the word "evidence" the same way the dictionary treats it. There isn't an ounce of difference between us. Here's the Corinthians passage GDR gave as providing supporting evidence for the Gospel accounts:

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15:3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. ⁶After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born,...

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Where do you see evidence in this passage?

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I see evidence that Jesus was not physically resurrected.The passage tells us that at the time of Paul - still quite early - the main line of argument for the resurrection was that various people claimed to have - in some sense - seen Jesus after his death, at various times. While the claims may have been (and likely were) exaggerated by the time of writing down, it seems likely that there was some basis for it.Since one of these sightings was a visionary experience the qualifier in some sense is certainly needed. The passage gives no real details of any of them, so we can’t be sure what any of the other appearances actually were.Also, it is certainly odd that if Jesus were physically resurrected his followers would only know of it through scattered sightings.It is also of interest that we could say much the same concerning Elvis Presley - without the qualification in some sense.Supposing that the appearances were only dreams, hallucinations, mistaken identity or even examples of pareidolia fits with the text, explains why there were only scattered sightings and requires no assumptions as unlikely as an actual resurrection. This is clearly a better explanation of why the passage presents the evidence it does.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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John would not have said that he wrote what he hoped would persuade readers to Christ if he wasn't writing the straight truth about Christ.

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Obviously the author of John could do exactly that. And he almost certainly didn’t write the straight truth about Christ.

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You can't put your trust in a fictional character in a fictional "religious writing," obviously he wrote what he witnessed and expected that the truth of the miracles would show the reader the true nature of Christ.

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Of course you can be fooled into doing exactly that. So long as you don’t know it’s fiction. (And you have been fooled into believing fictions - some rather obvious).Even if the story is not complete fiction, a biased author will likely be wrong on some things to start with and may well add spin on top of that.And let us not forget that the Gospel includes things that John did not witness.

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It's so obvious it's clear that the opposition here refuses to see the truth, they just don't like it so they say ridiculously false things to support their bias.

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It is obviously a ridiculous falsehood invented to support your bias. Adding a massive dose of projection to such foolishness hardly helps you.

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John's writing proves that Jesus is God incarnate, that He died so that those who believe in Him could have eternal life. But what inconvenient ideas those are for people who just don't like them.

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Oh look, Faith is trying to make Christianity look like a stupid lie.

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Christian theology for two thousand years fully affirms the actual historical reality of Christ and the actual historical reality of His miraculous acts as intended for evidence of His deity,

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Then what Christian theology says and what a rational person would conclude are very different things. Which I guess speaks very much to the point that Faith goes way, way beyond the evidence.

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and John is one of the many honest authors of scripture inspired by God.

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The author of John was not a historian, likely not a witness to any of it and his story is clearly influenced by his theology - to its detriment as an account of the actual events.

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Only an anti-supernatural bias explains all the lying debunkery on this thread.

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It doesn’t take an anti-supernatural bias to be sceptical of an ancient document. Especially one written by an unknown but obviously biased individual who doesn’t cite any sources (added to by another equally biased and unknown individual). It’s simple common sense. The fact that you tell obvious falsehoods in a bid to make it seem unreasonable doesn’t change that. Nor is disagreeing with those falsehoods lying debunkery

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Okay, I think you're saying you see evidence of a spiritual rather than physical resurrection. You contintue

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If I had meant that I would have said it. I said and I meant evidence against a physical resurrection. In fact the reason I didn’t mention a spiritual resurrection is because the case against it is necessarily weaker than the case against a physical resurrection since it predicts far less. (I might have argued for evidence of a belief in a spiritual rather than physical resurrection but again that is a different thing).

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So would I be correct in summarizing this as that you see words about claims of seeing Jesus after his death (whether spiritually or physically) as some kind of basis of evidence that such things actually took place?

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I take it as evidence that some people thought that they saw Jesus after he died. Not necessarily the exact list as given here (the 500, for instance is very likely an exaggerated number, even if that part is original, which is not certain)

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I'm glad you noted that Paul's experience was visionary, because in that Corinthiians 15:3-8 passage Paul makes no distinction between the way Jesus appeared to everyone else and the way Jesus appeared to him, not to mention that it occurred after the ascension.

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The Ascension is only significant in the context of Christian belief (I don’t believe it had been invented at the time 1 Corinthians was written). But yes, we know that the appearances don’t have to be physical - although cases of mistaken identity would be and it would hardly be surprising if there were some in there.