the new new testament???

Allow me to translate:

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All bullshit is bullshit, but some bullshit is more bullshit than other bullshit.

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I think that quite handily sums it up.Or, if I were to be more polite about it:

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All inaccurate beliefs are inaccurate beliefs, but some inaccurate beliefs are even more inaccurate than others.

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Or, if I wanted to mimic Phat and try to sound profound over nonsense:

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All truth is true, but some Truth is more True than other truth.

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I think I like the "bullshit" version the best.

The question was "how do we tell what is Gospel and what is even more Gospel."Or, since it would be better to quote directly: "How, without interpretation, can we differentiate "Gospel" from "more Gospel" from within the set of "Gospel.""The entire question is nonsense.The definition of "Gospel" is:

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gospel
[gos-puhl] Show IPA
noun
1.
the teachings of Jesus and the apostles; the Christian revelation.
2.
the story of Christ's life and teachings, especially as contained in the first four books of the new testament, namely Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
3.
( usually initial capital letter ) any of these four books.
4.
something regarded as true and implicitly believed: to take his report for gospel.
5.
a doctrine regarded as of prime importance: political gospel.

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1+2+3 are essentially the same thing; the question posed would then be "Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all Gospel, but some are more Gospel than others; how, without human interpretation, are we to tell the difference?"If we use definition 4 or 5 (again, basically the same thing), we can either combine it with the above to get "Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all true and implicitly believed, but some are more true and implicitly believed than others; how, without human interpretation, are we to tell the difference?"Or, we can exclusively use 4/5, we get "Truth is all true, but some truth is more True than others; how, without human interpretation, are we to tell the difference?"Which, I'll note, was almost precisely one of the options I provided in my "translation" response.The second option here is the one that makes the most "sense" as a question - that is, it invokes the smallest amount of undefined or "fuzzy" terms like "Gospel" and "Truth." The other options all expound upon the great mystery of the "Gospel" without actually trying to find any answers - they, in effect, are worshiping a sacred mystery, which is altogether the wrong response to a mysterious question.So, let's go with the second option:"Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and perhaps other books that may be identified as "Gospel") are all true and implicitly believed, but some are more true and implicitly believed than others; how, without human interpretation, are we to tell the difference?"This isn't much better than the other options, really. The question only makes sense if you use a "fuzzy" definition of "true," that is, not pertaining to actual accuracy in the real world, but rather containing some deep subjective "meaning" that holds no objective relevance. This is supported by the fact that "Gospel truth" typically refers to that which is "implicitly believed," as in the definition - it is an article of faith, in other words, and is not affected by real-world accuracy.What's basically being said, simply by posing the question, is that some form of prioritization must be done to reconcile what is identified as "Gospel," and yet that prioritization will not be determined by "human interpretation" or indeed even tests for accuracy against objective reality. Regardless of this prioritization, all of that which is identified as "Gospel" is to be implicitly believed - it is true because it is "Gospel" (and I strongly suspect that the identification of a text as "Gospel" would be some variation of "it is Gospel because it is true." As nobody has actually made that claim as yet, I'll refrain from the obvious accusations of circular reasoning and stick to analysis of the question posed)."Truth" can have two meanings - it can refer to factual accuracy, or it can refer to an emotional significance that has no relationship with external reality. For instance, I can say that "the Theory of Evolution is true," and what I'm actually saying is that the Theory of Evolution has demonstrated great accuracy when tested against real-world evidence. Or, I can say "Love is one of the great truths of human life," whereby what I am really saying is simply that "Love is good," or at least "it is good to believe in love." Note that such a statement has nothing whatsoever to do with the factual, objective basis for the emotion "love;" the statement would not be changed regardless of any findings in neuroscience or psychiatry regarding the objective nature of "love."It is the latter, "fuzzy" meaning that is implied by the question, and indeed jar's typical posting style, intended to sound wise and perhaps slightly cryptic and full of hidden meaning - a style quite akin to (and perhaps more successful than) that of Phat.But you can see from the terms used and the question posed that you're actually talking about some form of wishy-washy fuzzy nonsense. You're navel-gazing. You're identifying a mystery, a subject of curiosity - and rather than attempting to devise actual tests that might help you determine which (is any) "Gospel" has a factual basis in reality, instead of trying to determine which of several possible world you actually live in, you're resorting to a higher abstraction level through a recursive statement that essentially boils down to nonsense.My simple word replacement may have been personally distasteful to you, RAZD, but it was a genuine analysis of the question posed. Perhaps you'll find this more verbose answer more to your liking - I suspect not.But the relevant fact is not that the question was dismissed. The important factor is why it was dismissed; and the answer to that question is easy indeed.The question is nonsensical. You are, in effect, asking the wrong question, unless you for some reason feel a need to continue with the trend of defective reasoning and find yet more reasons to be impressed by your own ignorance, instead of using that feeling of mystery and curiosity as a prompt to investigate and find an answer.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

The alternative is so absurd as to be unworthy of consideration.Every time you read or even hear words, human interpretation is happening. Without human interpretation, symbolic language is nothing but sounds in the air or marks on a page.Even our understanding of our own direct sensory input is interpreted by our human brains. We don;t actually see the keyboard on our desks; our brain recognizes the pattern of a keyboard when the visual cortex processes data from the optic nerve which was stimulated by retinal cells that were int turn stimulated by a small fraction of the photons that entered our eyes.That chain of events contains multiple levels of human interpretation - from the fact that the retina is in effect filtering out such data as the entirety of the infrared or x-ray spectra, to the fact that the visual cortex processes the image, to the pattern-recognition in the neo-cortex that attaches the symbolic label "keyboard" to the recognized pattern.It's trivially easy to find examples of interpretation errors, from hallucinations to simple mistaken images ("I thought that was an "e"" or "I could have sworn I saw a man out of the corner of my eye"). And that's just the simple subset of visual phenomenon.It is fundamentally impossible to remove "human interpretation" from any aspect of human experience. In which sense? In the observations that were captured (or made up) and written down (and translated and added to and subtracted from)? The observations, the inferences from those observations, the translating of those observations and inferences into symbolic written language, the reading of the resulting texts, and the translation and rereading and re-translation and so on are each cases of human interpretation.So is the identification of a text as a "gospel." A "gospel" is a human invention, a word used to describe an abstract idea, a label applied to some objects but not others. Every time we apply a label we are using human interpretation to identify the object as appropriate for that label...whether we're determining whether a given text is a "gospel" or we're simply interpreting visual input and identifying a discrete subset of the total image as a "keyboard." And that's a blatant appeal to authority, so you shouldn't bother listening to such an argument when it's trivially shown to be logically fallacious.Now, if Dawn were to show the reasoning those previous people used to classify some texts as "gospel" and some not, we would be able to examine those arguments on their own merits.But "other people said so" by itself is no reason to do anything at all. Neither. You're still asking the wrong questions.Any candidate "gospel" is a text containing various claims. What's important is not at all whether each "gospel" candidate is consistent with others or even accepted "gospel;" after all, the Harry Potter novels are all consistent with each other, and are also consistent with accepted facts like WWII and the Blitz.What's important is whether or not each "gospel" candidate makes testable predictions. Every testable claim can be tested and verified.When you notice that you are confused or curious, the correct response is to analyze the source of that confusion and curiosity, generate hypotheses, and test each to see which one most accurately describes the world you actually live in.What you (and others, extant and historical) are doing is simply trying to establish which books are canon - in exactly the same way that some aficionados of fiction establish a hierarchy of canon within their favored fictional universe.You're comparing maps to other maps, imagining that the most consistent maps should match to some real territory, and suggesting that the most consistent maps are the best.But what you should be doing is looking at the territory, and selecting whichever maps most closely emulate it.Because every last one of the most consistent maps could correspond to no actual territory at all. Every last "gospel" could be consistent with every other "gospel," and yet still be works of absolute (or partial) fiction.

I think you missed the point.A single individual in the middle of, say, the American Revolution, would not necessarily know more about the American Revolution than a modern historian.This is especially true farther back in the past, where the individual may not have been literate, but also when the individual would not have access to the phenomenal flow of information we take for granted today.Remember that there have been recent discoveries of WWII veterans who didn't realize the war was over. I'm talking in the last decade or two - literate individuals who had far less awareness of the "big picture" than even a contemporary historian had at the time.Eyewitness accounts can be very helpful in helping us see the trees, but they are often ignorant of the forest. A single eyewitness can only witness so much with a single pair of eyes. A single person can only obtain so much information without any form of communication more advanced than hand-delivered letters and word-of-mouth.

I was responding only to the criticism of ringo's valid point, not necessarily commenting on its specific application for the gospels, or trying to introduce a comparison between a soldier in the middle of a war and the supposedly first-hand account of a follower who had daily direct access to the subject. I agree that those circumstances are different.More relevant would be applying ringo's point to those who first established the "church" in a recognizable way - not the apostles, but those who established the traditional canon for their particular tradition (since we know there are several accepted canons out there, many with longer historical roots thant hte modern Protestant tradition and its canon). Indeed, we have many, many manuscripts. We have many, many copies of each of the accepted and unaccepted gospels. So many, in fact, with such variances between them in terms of changed translations and even sections removed or added hundreds of years later, that it's impossible to even say "the Gospel of Luke" without following that up by specifying which one.Do we? Educated int he gospels, sure...but can they really tell a "true report from a false one?" What tests do they use? Does "true report" actually mean "verified in reality, this actually happened as described?" Or does it mean "we're pretty confident that the author believed that this happened as reported?" Or does it mean "this is the closest to the original text we've been able to assemble?"Those are all very, very different options, Faith. In order to believe that a given text accurately reflects real events, you have to trust the original author to have made accurate recordings (as opposed to inferences from observation, which are quite different, or obviously fabrications), you have to trust all of the copiers who wrote copies of that manuscript between the time of the original author and the time of the writing of the copy we currently have, you have to trust all of the translators between the original and modern English, and you have to trust the "educated men" in their ability to determine fact from fiction.That's a lot of trust, and it requires a commensurate amount of evidence. Extraordinary claims requires still more extraordinary evidence.You can;t simply appeal to the authority of "hundreds of men educated in the gospels." It's a logical fallacy. Nothing is true because some authority on the subject said a thing. Instead, you have to show what the claim is, and the argument and evidence supporting that claim, along with arguments and evidence falsifying alternative hypotheses.Which leads us back to the distinction between what we are to believe: does the hypothesis actually claim that the contents of the manuscript are "verified in reality, this actually happened as described?" Or does it claim "we're pretty confident that the author believed that this happened as reported?" Or does it claim that "this is the closest to the original text we've been able to assemble?"If your "educated men" are saying Option 3 and you take it to mean Option 1, there's a disconnect. I'm curious as to your allegedly "easy" methodology in differentiating truth from fiction. I have a strong suspicion that "easy" means that you follow no rational or indeed logically valid methodology to make such distinctions.