The Bible: Is the Author God, Man or Both?

Obviously we must realise that the Gospel writers had strong biases and that their source material was little better. They may well have believed what they wrote - but it is also very likely that that belief often lacked an adequate rational foundation.Indeed, given the marked disagreements between Matthew and Luke how could we possibly consider the Gospels reliable ? And if they are not reliable, on what basis can we conclude that God had any role in their writing ?

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The differences between Matthew and Luke are in the details not the primary point which is the resurrection of Jesus.

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Of course the differences are too marked to be so lightly dismissed. Especially given the amount of copied material found in those two Gospels.

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In what way did their beliefs lack a rational foundation? The sense is that the authors, likely based on previously written source material, are saying that although this sounds incredible this is what was observed. They were aware that this event was something well out of the ordinary.

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If they can hardly be expected to get anything right - as you insist - how can they have a rational foundation for much of the text ? What foundation could they have for their divergent Nativity stories, for instance ?Let me ask my question again. If the Gospel stories cannot be trusted as history - as you clearly agree in your attempts to sweep the discrepancies under the carpet - then it seems obvious that any intention God might have had for them did not include historical accuracy. In that case surely you would be wrong to say the the Gospels are correctly understood as histories, since God's purpose for them - if there is one - must be something else.

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Well obviously, we have come to different conclusions about that.

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I don't know about that. Going to the point of declaring practically everything in the Gospels as mere "details" that you expect to be wrong would seem a pretty drastic step.

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Which divergent parts of the stories are you referring to?

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Shall we start with the hugely different Nativity stories ? Set about ten years apart with completely different explanations for Joseph and Mary being in Bethlehem and Nazareth it seems pretty clear that at least one of the authors had no real knowledge of the actual events. In fact it looks to me as if they knew the names of Jesus' parents, that Jesus grew up in Nazareth and that they wanted to have him born in Bethlehem - and nothing else.

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Josephus is considered an historian of that era. If you found that he had made an error in some of the details of what he wrote would you just discard his whole body of work?

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Of course not. I wouldn't start pretending that points important to Josephus were mere details, throwing out most of his work either.But with Josephus we have a good idea of who he was, and his sources and his biases. I would for instance, throw out much of what he wrote about Moses because we know that it is very unlikely that he had good sources and because of his religious bias. On the other hand he was one of the leaders of the Jewish revolt, so his writing on that can be considered more reliable - once we subtract his own pro-Roman, pro-Jewish and especially pro-Josephus biases.Now we don't know who the Gospel writers were, all we know of their agenda and sources (save for Matthew and Luke's use of Mark) is what we can reconstruct from the Gospel texts - itself a very uncertain exercise and one that can tell us very little about the reliability or provenance of those sources. The differences are quite large and require us to consider that the accounts are quite inaccurate even when dealing with important events that a participant would have got right - not mere inconsequential details.Josephus is reliable when he has good sources and where his biases don't come into play. But there is nowhere that we can say that the Gospel writers definitely had good sources and almost nowhere where their bias does not come into play.

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It is a very long way from practically everything.

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I think everything but the Resurrection is close enough to practically everything.

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Luke says that Joseph took his family to Bethlehem because of a census. Matthew just said that He was born in Bethlehem with no explanation. Where's the conflict.

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Matthew has Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem and only leaving for Nazareth after they return from Egypt.Luke as Mary and Joseph as residents of Nazareth, only visiting Bethlehem for the census (and doesn't even give a valid reason for residents of Galilee to have to go to Judaea for a census anyway).

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What are you basing the 10 years on?

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The fact that Matthew has Jesus born in the reign of Herod the Great, and Luke has Jesus born in the census of Quirinius, taken after the deposition of Herod's successor, Archelaus. Archelaus was deposed in the 10th year of his reign...

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Frankly even if there is a conflict so what? Details around the birth of Jesus likely would have varied by the time the Gospels were written.

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The point is that the stories differ so much that one of them must be badly wrong. So wrong that we should take it as a fiction, at most loosely based on fact. (And thus we can conclude that if there was any "Divine Inspiration" it did not make the Gospels historically reliable, at all.)

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Actually we don't know what Josephus' sources were. Yes we know his biases, but even knowing his biases isn't going to give us certainty about where his biases caused him to get it wrong.

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That's untrue. We know that he had personal experience of the Jewish War. We know a number of the sources that he used such as Nicolaus of Damascus.And of course, knowing his biases allows us to anticipate where he may be inaccurate - it's a lot better than simply assuming that he is unquestionably correct in every claim that he makes.

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I agree that the Gospels can't be verified from non-Biblical sources. However they were written by 4 different authors with the epistles supporting the resurrection and the message. Once again, I don't agree that the details that vary make any real difference unless you are trying to prove that God dictated it word for word.

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But since you obviously don't know what the differences are - or even care - how can you say that they are just details ?And it's obvious that we aren't just talking about the sort of minor details that an eyewitness could get wrong. We are talking about things that nobody who was there could possibly have got wrong.

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That is an opinion. You have yours and I have mine. I agree that I can't say that the Gospel writers definitely had good sources, but you can't say that they didn't. The Gospels were written some time after the resurrection so it isn't surprising that there are differences in the details. Frankly if there weren't differences I think that there would be a great deal more reason to be suspicious.

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By which you mean that I have the Bible as it actually is, and you have your opinion of what the Bible ought to be. It seems obvious which is the sounder basis for evaluating the text.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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There is also a consistent message of what Jesus did and had to say. I agree that there are some confusing bits but these books were written in a different era and context than anything we know today.

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I was only reporting what you had said. But is true that you dismiss all the actual events in the Gospels as mere details, save for the Resurrection, is it not ?

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So where's the conflict. Both those statements can be true.

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That is simply not true. Joseph and Mary cannot both be residents of Nazareth prior to Jesus birth, and never have lived there until some time after his birth.

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I would add that these events happened 30 years prior to the Jesus' ministry and there is no particular reason for anyone to record these events and so I would expect that there would be discrepancies anyway.

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Again we're not talking about simple discrepancies we're talking about very different stories with only details in common.

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I wouldn’t take it as fiction but it is about the writers reporting on events that happened years earlier and that their sources for the information themselves would not have had first hand knowledge. I suppose the only source would have been Mary as there is no further mention of Joseph in the Gospels we can only assume that he was deceased by the time Jesus was 30.

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And Mary wouldn't know when she gave birth to her first child ? She'd give dates about ten years apart ?Come on ! One of the stories - at least - is so badly wrong that it seems only fair to call it fiction. (In fact with the obvious legendary elements of Matthew and the problems with Luke I'd personally say that BOTH were fiction !)

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AS far as Divine Inspiration is concerned it is contention that the Gospel writers were inspired to write down what they knew, not that they were told what to write.

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Which means that Divine Inspiration - in your usage - is no guarantee of truth or even usefulness of any particular point.

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I’m not denigrating what Josephus wrote but, as you agree, he would have had sources for what he wrote in The Jewish War. Certainly he had some first hand knowledge but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. The sources that he used to write about the war where he had no first hand knowledge would have had their biases as well. Also of course Josephus was very concerned about looking after his own hide. He was extremely political.

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And as I pointed out, we know of other sources he used, too. In contrast to the Gospels where, excepting Gospel writers copying from each other, the sources are all conjectural and our only knowledge of them comes from analysis of the Gospel texts.

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No I’m not. I’m attempting to understand the Bible as an historical document.

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No, you aren't. Someone attempting to understand the Bible as a historical document wouldn't make up lame excuses to dismiss the disagreements in the text without even bothering to find out what the disagreements are !

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Of course not.

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There's no "of course" about it. Certainly you dismiss a good number of them as mere details.

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Luke has them in Nazareth both before and after the birth. Matthew has them in Bethlehem for the birth. Matthew talks about Herod sending the magi to Bethlehem but it doesn’t say that that is where the Magi actually found Him. I can’t see where you get the idea that they had never lived in Nazareth until some time after His birth. Yes they moved there after Herod dies but it doesn’t unless I’m missing something which is always possible.

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Luke has them as residents of Nazareth before and after the birth. Matthew makes it clear that they were not residents of Nazareth until after the return of Egypt by having them move there. That seems simple enough.

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I do agree that there is a legendary feel in the narrative of the birth of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew which would make sense as there would have been nothing written at the time and as Mary would very likely have been dead by the time the Gospel was written. Some of the sources might have had something on the birth of Jesus in them but who knows. As I said this all happened at least 33 years before there would have been and recording or even discussion around the details of the birth. It isn’t surprising that the stories have variations.

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In addition the narratives concerning the birth are only in 2 Gospels and not even mentioned in the rest of the NT.

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Again, we are not talking about variations we are talking about different stories. Please deal with the facts rather than trying to sweep them under the carpet.

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I have certainly never claimed that I could guarantee the truth of what I believe. Neither of us can do that. It is as useful as we choose to make it.

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I was not talking about your beliefs, I was talking about your view of Divine Inspiration. According to you a Divinely Inspired text may well contain passages that are hopelessly inaccurate or even completely useless.

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The narratives about time and location would not have been as important and there would have been people who remembered things differently, and it would make sense there would have been some legendary stories around Jesus and particularly about His birth.

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Of course you are playing down the differences as usual. The problem is that the location is a major part of Luke's text and it's important to Matthew, too. Nobody who was actually there is likely to confuse Galilee with Jerusalem, or forget Jesus commanding them to remain in Jerusalem. The stories are clearly badly confused. And we come to the question of why that would be if the post-resurrection appearances were really the impressive events we see in the Gospels...

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Well actually Matthew doesn’t make it clear that they weren’t residents of Nazareth before the birth. It says Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Herod asks where the messiah was to be born and was told that it was to happen in Bethlehem by quoting the prophet Micah. Herod sent the Magi to Bethlehem but it doesn’t say that is where they found Him. When they returned from Egypt it was safer to return Nazareth in lieu of Judea as they believed it was safer. In the end it says nothing about where they lived prior to the birth or even after the birth.

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Where does Matthew mention a return to Nazareth ? According to Matthew the only reason for going to Nazareth at all is fear of Herod's successor, Archelaus. Which is a bit unlikely if Nazareth was their home ! Can you find anything in Matthew at all that contradicts the straightforward reading that Joseph and Mary were residents of Bethlehem up until the Flight to Egypt ?

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They are telling different stories that overlap. Together they give a more complete picture. However, even if there were contradictions it wouldn’t bother me.

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No, they are telling stories that you mash together without caring about the fact that they don't fit.I mean aside from the whole business of the census in Luke which puts Jesus' birth AFTER the reign of Archelaus instead of before it, the stories have very little in common.Luke has no Wise Men (and why would a man seeking to appeal to Gentile readers leave THAT out ?), no Massacre of the Innocents, no Flight to Egypt. None of the major narrative elements.Matthew has no census (and no reason to expect one), no journey to Bethlehem, no need to find an inn, no shepherds, no presentation at the Temple - and Luke has Joseph and Mary return to Nazareth directly after that.Indeed we have to ask where would you put Matthew's story within Luke's. Would you put the whole of it between Jesus' birth and the return to Nazareth ? That's a bit of a tight squeeze !

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You’re arguing that if there are inaccuracies in the historical details of time and location etc that there is no reason to trust the historical nature of the resurrection.

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That is a misrepresentation In fact I argue that the accounts of the post-resurrection appearances are so different that they must represent considerable elaboration in different directions - and that this is implausible if the real events were anything like as impressive.
From this I go on to conclude that we have no basis for thinking that the actual events were beyond the range of natural human experience - and thus they provide no support for a literal resurrection at all.

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I believe that it is highly implausible that the movement would never have gotten off the ground if the bodily resurrection wasn’t factual.

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That is your opinion, but I see no reason why a genuine belief in some sort of resurrection would not serve as well. I would add that the whole doctrine of the Second Coming was likely as important since it saved their belief system from the problem that Jesus died without fulfilling the Messianic prophecies. It's a known way in which cults handle failure.

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Paul is very clear that if it isn’t factual then they are essentially wasting their lives.

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And that works against your point since Paul did NOT have any personal experience of a bodily resurrection. If he did not need that, how can you know that the Disciples needed it ?

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I agree but Matthew doesn’t mention at all where they were before the birth. Luke talks about why they went to Bethlehem in the first place.

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More accurately, Matthew gives no hint that they had ever lived anywhere but Bethlehem, and Luke gives a dodgy reason for their being in Bethlehem - due to an event that occurred around ten years after Matthew's story.

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The Gospel writers are not writing an historical account in the way that Josephus did. The Gospels weren’t much concerned about the narrative around the time of the birth. It only talks about the birth in two of the Gospels and not even mentioned in the other two Gospels or in any of the Epistles

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In the sense that they weren't writing histories, yes. Which means taking them as historically reliable - even by the standards of ancient writers - is dubious. And let's not forget that the point is that we have two DIFFERENT stories... NOT two views of the same story.

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There are many others like Crossan etc who have come to the same conclusion. It is a reasonable conclusion with which I disagree. There was no expectation amongst His followers that Jesus would be resurrected in the manner that the Gospels describe. Even if there had been an expectation of resurrection they either would have talked about a resurrection in a heavenly sense or that Jesus would have come back in a form as we see with the prophets in the transfiguration.

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And yet the stories we have do not fit a simple physical resurrection. Jesus doesn't just come back and keep on going as he was. He comes and goes mysteriously. Even appearing in a closed room without opening the door (John 20:26).Indeed talking about previous expectations doesn't address my point of view at all. My point is that the resurrection stories came about as a reaction to normal events which were interpreted as a resurrection, and the original stories would fit in with that - and the need to resolve the cognitive dissonance. THe stories we have actually fit better with that, than with a simple physical resurrection.

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I’ve gone through this before but I disagree again. (There’s a surprise. ) There were other messianic movements that had a much greater impact on the society such as the Maccabean revolt, or the bar Kohkba rebellion etc. The Maccabes even said that they would be resurrected but after their death.... nothing.

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The Maccabees are a poor parallel, as has already been pointed out. Bar Kochba is closer but I suspect that his very success made his failure more credible. And let us not forget that we certainly don't know everything that everyone believed back there...

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The Gospels tell of a dispirited group of disciples that with only one exception avoided witnessing the crucifixion. They had given up on the movement. If they were trying to generate some new movement by creating false legends around the event why would they have been so critical of the man, (Peter) who was to be one of their chief organizers and evangelists?

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Of course there are reasons why they might be critical of Peter. Pauline influence, and wanting to minimise Peter's distinctive teachings. Magnifying Jesus. And of course the despair was likely to be exaggerated (we see the same phenomenon today). But again I don't require that they didn't despair - that's a part of the cognitive dissonance ! My point is that some of them found a resolution to that dissonance...
(Personally I see hints that Judas real "betrayal" was simply giving up on the movement. And even that he might have been murdered by Peter. But that's just speculative opinion).

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Paul had a spiritual experience of God which obviously seems to have gotten his attention. He witnessed the stoning of Stephen which likely made an impression on him and he had the accounts of those that would have been eye-witnesses to the resurrected Jesus. The disciples hadn’t had any of that.

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On the other hand the Disciples were Jesus' loyal followers, convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. Paul was hostile to Jesus and his followers. You can't ignore that.

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Well it is possible to put the two accounts together to make a more complete narrative in my view but frankly I agree that there is a sense of legend in the accounts so I’m not frankly concerned one way or the other. The narrative of the birth of Jesus is certainly not a focus of the early church.

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Provided you ignore the whole problem of the dates you can mush them together. But really all they have in common is details. The stories are completely different.

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Exactly my point. He was resurrected in a new body that maintained some of the characteristics of the old but was different.

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I don't think the fact that the Gospel stories call the idea of a physical resurrection into question was your point...

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My point is though, that although the idea of Jesus disappearing and showing up somewhere else would be consistent with that belief.

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And the idea of Jesus returning to Heaven by being levitated into the sky would seem to fit poorly with that idea. But it's there in Luke.

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But that previous expectations are hugely important. How and why would they write a narrative that tells of something for which there was no expectation?

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You're seriously asking that ?You're seriously asking why the Christian Gospel authors would write down what they believed rather than what people living decades earlier had expected ?I don't believe that any rational person would even consider that question.

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There have always been those that tell of meeting loved ones after their death. Nobody has then ever talked about them coming back physically and having a meal with them. They knew the difference of what happened to them and cognitive dissonance.

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Obviously you don't understand what you are talking about...

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We know a lot more now than we used to thanks to all the material including the Dead Sea Scrolls universally available. I only mentioned two movements. There was also the movement of Judas the Galilean when Jesus would have been about 10. After the Romans put him to death they jsut started looking for a messianic replacement starting with his relatives.

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Which still doesn't mean that we know of even a tenth of the smaller groups that existed...And I need to point out that human nature isn't as simple and deterministic as you are making out. Some groups fade away when their prophecies fail. Others go on and on (the Jehovah's Witnesses have been through a number of failures to name just one example.)

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I was thinking about the despair for the movement . If that is correct the way that seemed to be the norm was to find another messiah to lead the movement as in the case I just mentioned above.

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And maybe some of Jesus' followers did just that. Indeed, maybe James was offered the role and refused it. You just don't know.SO let us point out that your arguments require detailed knowledge that you don't have and assume that human behaviour can easily be predicted - find out what the majority did in a situation and you know what everyone would do in any broadly similar situation. And that isn't true.

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I don’t see it as Judas giving up on the movement. I see it as Judas rejecting the movement.

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I don't think that those who remained in the movement would have seen a difference. So I don't think that you can hope to derive it from the Gospel stories which demonise Judas further. (But note that Acts and Matthew contradict on the nature of Judas' death - and the account in Acts is pretty suspicious).

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Absolutely, but then something happened to turn your namesake completely around so that he himself became a completely loyal follower. That was my point.

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No. Your point was that such a powerful experience WOUDN'T have worked on the disciples....

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Luke has Him carried up into heaven in hid Gospel and lifted into a cloud is how he put it in Acts. The term cloud in the Bible, (the pillar of cloud to the ancient Jews wandering around in the desert for example), was used to represent the presence of Yahweh. It would be more specifically in reference to Daniel 7.

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Which is still Jesus rising into the sky to return to Heaven...

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In other words it has nothing to do with levitation to some other location in our 4d universe. It is about leaving this worldly dimension for God’s heavenly dimension.

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Well you ASSUME that that is what it means, but it doesn't actually say that. (The passage you quote isn't even about LEAVING our world at all - it's about COMING TO our world)

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Well seeing as how I lack your superior rationality I’ll try it another way. If the writers were going to come up with a narrative from invention they would obviously write it in a way that would fit with their cultural and personal expectations of what it might look like and what it would mean if they were to want to keep the movement going.

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If the Gospel writers were making up the stories from scratch that might make sense. But that isn't my position, so your argument is irrelevant.

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Clever rebuttal.

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I'm sorry if you didn't like it, but it seemed more polite than "that is so obviously stupid it doesn't deserve an answer".

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I don’t claim to know. It is my belief and obviously one we don’t share. All I’m saying is that we do have recorded some parallel situations and I’m pointing out that in those situations the outcome was dramatically different.

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And in those cases we have relevant differences in the circumstances so that a differing outcome is not surprising. The more so since we have no survey of the complete range of effects in ANY of the cases.And in fact you DID implicitly claim to know. It is certain that you intended that I should accept it as factually true, even though we have no good basis to come to a conclusion on the matter.

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Not that I think it matters but I would assume that the disciples being cognizant of the politics of the time would be aware of the motivation of Judas. As far as the difference in the texts on the death of Judas is concerned you are obviously correct.

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I haven't spoke as to the motivation of Judas - my parenthetical point was that I personally suspected that Judas as unfairly demonised as Jesus' betrayer for actions taken after Jesus' death. The formation of the Gospel stories is something we know little about - we have almost nothing about Jesus' life on Earth from any useful non-Christian sources, or even from Christian sources that predate the Gospels.

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My point was that Paul had an experience of God that as far as I know unique to him. The disciples tell a story of a personal experience of the bodily resurrected Jesus. I agree that if you take Paul’s story on its own then cognitive dissonance makes sense. If however if what the disciples experience was a simple case of cognitive dissonance, it would seem very likely that they would have described their experience in similar terms to the story that they tell about Paul. The account for the disciples is very different than the one for Paul.

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On the basis of this I have to say that you don't understand the concept of cognitive dissonance at all. In fact Paul's experience in itself is not explainable as purely due to cognitive dissonance.But even more than that, we don't have the disciples stories. We have the Gospel stories which are obviously greatly elaborated.Again we come to the point which you have yet to answer. THe stories in Matthew and Luke are clearly the product of elaboration in two quite different directions. If we assume that the original events were impressive and strongly memorable in themselves how could this happen ? It simply isn't credible that an important and dramatic part of the story would be so throughly lost by at least one community of believers.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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No. It isn’t meant to be understood that way.

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Let me know if you have any support for that other than your own personal ideas of what was happening. There is not doubt that read literally it describes Jesus rising into the sky, for instance...

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Wrong again. Here is the quote plus a couple of verses from Daniel 7.

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Except that it isn't the quote you produced before and none of it contradicts what I said... In fact, isn't it true that this is a symbolic vision ? And it never mentions where the "one like a Son of Man" had come FROM ? Or where the court was set up ?Perhaps you should look at Matthew 24:30 So I apologise for not checking and confusing Matthew's interpretation with the actual text, but I still have more support - weak as it is - for my reading than you have for yours...

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OK fair enough, but what is your position?

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The one I've been describing all along ? Where the Gospel stories of the post-resurrection appearances are greatly elaborated stories, developing over time, built on mundane events ?

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That certainly helps move the discussion along.

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It would help even more if you made more of an effort to get things right instead of just assuming that the truth was whatever would be convenient for you...

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It could be but I think the betrayal itself is likely accurate as it makes sense when taken in the context of the politics of the time.

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Not really - the whole question of the motive for Judas' betrayal is something that is argued over again and again. Now my speculation makes a lot more sense. Judas abandons the movement after Jesus' death, accepting that it has failed. As a former leading figure he is condemned as a traitor (almost inevitable). The story gets elaborated into a personal betrayal of Jesus before Jesus' death. Of course we can never know because we simply have no sources we can trust to provide us with the information that we need.

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I agree, but it does make sense. It is only natural that the ones who would write about Jesus would be His followers. I’ll add this though.

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If Jesus was as successful as the Gospels claim then we would expect more notice from non-Christian sources. And it's pretty odd that we have so little from pre-Gospel Christian sources. If Jesus left a body of teachings, for instance, then Paul had little knowledge of it or interest in it.

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Luke does say that he is drawing on many sources and presumably this would be the same for the other gospels as well.

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I would suggest that that is a very big assumption, and one that cannot be supported by any evidence at all. Even the author of Luke does not identify his sources.

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Incidentally, this verse by Luke does make me somewhat sceptical of the existence of Q as I understand Q to be one primary source as opposed to the multiple sources that Luke writes about. However, who knows?

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That isn't in fact a good reason. Q is only the hypothetical source for the material common to Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark. Luke is also held to have used Mark and other sources. The real question is whether Luke used Q or in fact had access to a copy of Matthew. I would think that you would find Q more palatable than the idea of Luke rejecting large chunks of Matthew.

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I didn’t say that what Paul experienced could be described as cognitive dissonance. I said that if the disciples had written of having a road to Damascus experience that could be explained away as cognitive dissonance as they were close to Jesus, whereas Paul wasn’t.

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Again you aren't making much sense. There's nothing in Paul's experience that speaks of cognitive dissonance especially. But the Disciples are prime candidates for it. They've seen deeply held beliefs appear to fail. They come to a new "understanding" that lets them reconcile their beliefs with the reality that faces them. It fits all too well.

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We have no way of knowing how many original writings and/or oral accounts of what happened went into the writing of the Gospels, nor who wrote them or when they were written. As the Gospels were compiled decades after the event some of the stories would have evolved and some accuracy would have been lost. I don’t find it surprising that some of the accounts would vary as to time and location.

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All of which ignores the point that in this case the location is held to be an important feature of the story. In fact it looks as if Luke is intentionally DENYING the tradition represented in Matthew. And none of the three Gospels dealing with the appearances have a single appearance story in common.Simply writing off important points as mere details is nothing more than an attempt to sweep awkward truths under the rug.

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However, there had to be a reason for any of the accounts to have existed in the first place. I realize that you disagree, but if Jesus, (a man who was essentially a pacifist with no earthly political ambition), had been simply executed buried and remained rotting in the grave, there would be IMHO, no plausible explanation for numerous people writing the accounts that were eventually used to write the Gospels.

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Of course there needs to be no reason more than the beliefs held by the Gospel writers. Moreover, I consider my ow explanation to be more plausible than yours - and you haven't even bothered to pay attention to it when I described it - an opinion based on wilful ignorance isn't worth much. And as we have seen my view better explains the Gospels as we have them.

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Here is Stephen P Davis’s view as a Christian scholar: The Meaning of the Asension

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...who claims that Jesus rose literally into the sky... Which rather undermines any claim that the text does not mean that....

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In that light it is obvious that the Son of Man has come into the presence of the Ancient of Days in this heavenly, not earthly, setting. The end of the passage is talks about the Kingdom that was established at that time which would be for all peoples and that would never pass away.

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In other wordes the court which condemns the Earthly and metaphorical beasts and which talks about a Kingdom to be established on Earth must be referring to literal events in heaven? That's hardly something that's clearly established...The rest is just a long winded way of it ignoring the inconvenient point that in Matthew the Son of Man's arrival is seen by the people of the Earth. So obviously it must be an arrival on Earth, not Heaven.

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OK. My position is that if they were just mundane events then there would be no motivation for them to bother recording anything about the events in the first place.

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Of course we have no direct records of the events, just greatly elaborated accounts, so to a very large degree you are agreeing with me.

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This is pretty much beside the main point we are discussing, but it is really interesting. He obviously abandoned the movement but I think it goes deeper than that. I see Judas as likely being something of a zealot and as a result would have seen Jesus as a threat to his revolutionary goals There were so many factions in the Jewish world at that time and it would have taken a huge change in the outlet of pretty much any Jew at that time to accept Jesus’ message of love, particularly when applied to the Romans. Personally I have some sympathy for his POV and could even see that he believed that he was acting like a patriot. Of course the whole issue of being paid for the betrayal muddies the whole situation.

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And that is even more speculative than my ideas. For a start as far as I know the only link between Judas and the zealots is the idea that Iscariot is a corruption of sicarius. And Jesus message, even in the Gospels is rather mixed (telling his Disciples to arm themselves, for instance). And if he had a known zealot as a lieutenant then the whole idea of Jesus' pacifism becomes even more questionable.

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As we have no record of the earliest Christian writings except for Luke’s reference to them at the beginning of his Gospel we will never know for sure about what Paul had access to. Paul doesn’t reference them but it seems to me that if he thought that some of what did exist was in error then he likely would have felt a need to correct any errors. As he didn’t reference them they maybe we can conclude that he accepted them and felt no need to reference them.

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Of course Paul would be highly likely to reference teachings of Jesus relating to any subject that he was talking about of he DID agree with them.... And if there was a significant body of teachings circulating I find it hard to believe that Paul would have objected to NONE of them. So it seems that the evidence suggests that there wasn't much at that time.

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Frankly, I feel particularly unqualified to discuss the existence or non-existence of the Q document. I am an avid reader of N T Wright and he is sceptical of the existence of Q although he isn’t adamant about that position. That is about as far as I can go.

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My position is a little skeptical too, because I don't find the argument that Luke would NOT have gone against Matthew entirely convincing any more. Not since I found that Luke's version of the Olivet Discourse disagrees quite sharply with Mark.However it is clear that replacing Q with Matthew does not INCREASE the number of sources used by Luke, so your argument really misses the issue.

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I agree, as I thought that I’d made clear, that There's nothing in Paul's experience that speaks of cognitive dissonance especially. I’d even go further and say that his desire would have been for Jesus to be dead and remain that way.

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I would say that that is an oversimplification. However I think it concedes the point at issue. Paul had a highly convincing experience that did not rely on a physical resurrection.

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I think that is valid point, but I just disagree that a Gospel accounts that is put together of various sources decades after the event are going to have variations in things like timing and locations. I would be much more suspicious of accounts written under those circumstances that lined up completely.

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I agree with the point but not the application. Luke seems quite determined to deny that there were any appearances in Galilee, while Matthew doesn't even hint at any post-resurrection appearances in Jerusalem at all (and Mark also implies that the appearances will be in Galilee). Galilee would be about a week's journey away, and I can't believe that if Jesus had appeared to the Disciples before they could leave and told them to remain in the vicinity of Jerusalem it would have been completely forgotten by the community that produced Matthew.

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I think I have responded to all of your points, but if I missed something then let me know. I’m also not sure where the wilful ignorance comes, but I am of the opinion that once we accept the argument for theism that I outlined in the OP then I find my view the more plausible of the two, Having said that though our views are coloured by our positions prior to our having this dialogue.

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The argument for theism is pretty poor, and doesn't give any credence to the idea that impressive events would be so poorly remembered. So I'd say that you've got three bad arguments there.

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Only in a very loose sense. Here is the pertinent section.

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In fact a large part of the article is dedicated to arguing that the event occurred as Luke describes it. Davis doesn't argue that the text is symbolic - he argues that the event was symbolic. You cannot have read the article without realising that. So not in a "loose sense" at all. Davis directly claims that Luke's account must be taken as literally true.The next point concerning Daniel goes nowhere, making no point to be answered.

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Matthew did not IMHO mean it to be understood that way. Verse 30 starts off with saying that the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky which is Jewish apocalyptic and symbolic language for Jesus’ vindication as seen in His resurrection nd ascension.

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I think that you are confusing Jewish and Christian thought here. And I note that you offer nothing to support your opinion either.

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Not really. In the first place we have direct records in the Gospels which we can accept or reject and I don’t agree that they are greatly elaborated accounts.

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Since it is well-known that all the Gospels were written decades after the fact and only the last written, John, is even plausibly written by someone who was there, to call them "direct accounts" seems extremely dubious. And your argument against elaboration seems to be that none of the actual appearances were anything more than unimportant details anyway....

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Jesus’ choice for disciples was a rather mixed bag which included a tax collector who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. I see no reason for Him not to include a zealot. The idea was that hearts were to be changed and it looks as though Judas’ wasn’t.

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A tax collector (especially in the Roman system where they were freelance contractors) need not have a strong commitment to maintaining the system (in fact, so long as he could afford it, he could have done a lot to mitigate the worse parts of the system). This does not compare to someone with a strong religious devotion to expelling the Romans...

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Presumably different churches would have different documents and Paul seems like the kinda guy who would like to have the message delivered in his words not someone else’s. He did, as we can see in my discussion with Jazzns correct correspondence in his 2nd letter to the Thessalonians but that didn’t seem to have anything directly to do with the teachings of Jesus. It is however a valid point.

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Referring to documents to back up his words wouldn't stop him using his own words. So this argument doesn't make much of a case.

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To be frank, I really didn’t have much of a point, but Luke does say that he has drawn on many sources.

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Unles you wish to count Matthew as more sources than Q, Luke's claim has no relevance to the existence of Q at all.

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Sure, but even Paul writes that all that he is saying and doing is a waste of time if Jesus wasn’t resurrected.

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Which tells us at most that Paul believed in some resurrection.

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I get that and it is a good point. I just on balance find the evidence for the bodily resurrection as I have outlined it more compelling.

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If all the evidence can be better explained without invoking miracles - and it can - how can you have compelling evidence for a miracle?

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If Jesus literally moved from an existing from this universe or dimension into another one it is something that they would have had no language for. They go back to Daniel to come up with words that would give meaning to what happened. They have Jesus literally moving up into the cloud which represents the presence of the Glory of God so that it has both literal and symbolic meaning.

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Which really doesn't change the fact that your source argued that the event literally happened as described. Think on that while you wonder how it is possible for two people to look at the same evidence and come to differing conclusions. Sometimes it's the case that one of them only thinks he's looking at the evidence, and is missing something quite obvious,

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Of course not. Jesus was Jewish who lived and taught while understanding His life and teachings in a Jewish context. The language in the NT is lifted right out of the OT.

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Of course we aren't talking about Jesus or simple copying language - we're talking about the interpretation of that language by Christians writing decades after Jesus died. I hope that you can concede that the Jews in general would not have been thinking of Jesus specifically!

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I should just have said records rather than direct records. My point though that we do have records of the events that would have been taken from earlier accounts as Luke mentions that would have been from eye witnesses. As I said we can choose what it is that we will believe about the records we have.

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Of course the absence of direct records was the point, so really you should just have agreed. And since we don't know the sources of Luke other than Mark and maybe Q or Matthew it's questionable whether any of them were first hand (Mark and Matthew are almost certainly not). In fact what we are told in Luke makes it seem as if the documents he refers to are other attempts to compile the story, and it could easily be that all were second hand, or further removed from the events.

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Matthew would have had a strong financial interest in maintain the status quo.

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If this "Matthew" even existed and if he cared about money that much he probably wouldn't be among Jesus' followers at all. Whiuch rather proves my point.

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With Judas I don’t see it being a religious devotion but a nationalistic devotion. One point of the message of Jesus is that He was reaching out to everyone and it would be consistent with what He taught that He would have a revolutionary amongst His disciples.

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I would be very surprised if there were many dedicated Jewish nationalists in those days who did NOT have a religious devotion to it. The Judaic religion is strongly nationalistic, even today. Moreover it does seem odd that if Jesus was opposed to the zealots that he would have one as a trusted lieutenant - more than a mere follower. Or that the Gospels don't make more of it - the Gospels are far more pro-Roman so showing Jesus opposing Judas belief in violent revolution would have been very much in keeping with their agenda. Instead we can't even be sure that Judas was a zealot at all. It looks to me far more as if the Gospels are downplaying the violent side of Jesus' ministry.

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The NT is clear that they were talking about a bodily resurrection. NT Wright is considered by many to be the finest NT scholar we have today. Here is what he has to say on the subject.

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As I've already pointed out, Paul is not at all clear that the post-resurrection experiences are anything more than visions and the Gospels don't present a straightforward bodily resurrection either.

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I disagree with your premise.

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And yet you cannot refute my argument. Indeed your approach accounts for the evidence by making excuses to discount the bulk of it ! Clearly it is true that I can explain the evidence better than you.

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. I have read the debates between N T Wright and the people like Crossan and Borg and the Crossan/Borg position, (although not completely the same), is basically based on the idea that we know from human experience that once people die they stay dead. In other words we know at the outset that a physical resurrection is impossible so then any other explanation has to be better.

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However, my explanation is better than yours EVEN WITHOUT THIS CONSIDERATION. I can explain why we see such strong differences between the accounts of the post-resurrection appearances we see in the Gospels. Why Paul says so little about the post-resurrection appearances. Why Jesus mysteriously comes and goes all the time in those stories. All you can do is try to explain these points away. None of them are expected given your view - and in the first case especially you don't even have a good excuse.

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If we accept the possibility that it is possible for God to intervene in this way then the bodily resurrection of Jesus fits much more plausibly into the accounts that we have than any other explanation IMHO.

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Since your argument relies on effectively ignoring a very large part of those accounts it seems rather clear that your opinion is untrue.

And this article shows you what cognitive dissonance is really like and how people suffering from it rewrite the past in their minds.