Just thought I’d tell you that I’m a committed Christian and I think it’s OK for you to have doubts, to explore, to think for yourself, and to come to whatever conclusions you think allow you to best follow the example of Jesus. I agree with JanieBelle above that you do not have to buy any particular conception of Jesus’s ultimate status in order to emulate him.

In this sense, the God that I worship transcends concepts like ‘Christian’ and ‘He’, and even leaps beyond false dichotomies like ‘reason’ or ‘belief’. All of our images of God (‘imago Dei’) are ultimately fantasies in the sense that we can not really hope that our individual experience can map onto the totality of all that is, or ever will be, which is to say the ‘Cosmos’ we inhabit. And so, why should we be surprised that our conceptions of God are incoherent, and provoke conflict when compared with what we discover through investigation of the natural world?

Rather than chastising you, I say that you should be commended for recognizing that the conventional religious beliefs you have received from your culture may be incoherent, incomplete or even false. May your search for meaning connect you more fully with yourself and with others.

New Testament
Written: 1st Cent. A.D. (50-100 A.D.
Earliest Copy: 2nd Cent. A.D. (c. 130 A.D. f.) Approx Time Span between original and copy: less than 100 years
Numbers of Copies: 5600
Accuracy of Copies: 99.5%

Check out the chart for yourself. Compare to the other works which we have no problem accepting the dates for or accepting the authorship of and compare.

For the gospel of John alone we’re talking 29 years between our copy and 95 AD (which would be in the ballpark for the disciple that was exiled to Patmos and did not die like the others).

I don’t think that everything you say is wrong, JanieBelle, I just think that you don’t have the best information.

Musicguy, you need to do more than to say that the references to Jesus are unreliable to prove that point rather than “poison the well”. However, the Biblical account does not need extra-biblical references, since the proliferation of the Gospels would have been accounts from eye-witnesses. We’re talking a much different time period with news moving much more slowly.

Again, as Terri mentioned, control of the populace is a laughable reason to fake a story about a person. Especially knowing that said person was killed in a terrifying manner and that the leaders of the day were killing all that believed it.

Put another way, if a person in Iran wanted to create a religion contrary to Islam proclaiming that some rock was a god, would they really want to go there, write works that could be traced to them that they would pass out to all the Imams and everyone and have a prayer of getting control of the people? of Iran itself?

I’m afraid that they would end up beheaded, drawn and quartered, or whatever is their practice over there. They would not stand a chance of gaining over control.

I understand that Mormonism, JW’s and the like have created religions based off Christianity in America for control, for prestige, or to get as many wives as possible, but that was not the environment in the early years A.D.

Again, the idea that they were trying to write for control of something or with some other message than that they actually believed what they were writing about is absurd. You can say they were mislead, but they believed what they were writing.

The texts that we have from the gospels are more numerous and consistent than what we have for other classic Greek and Roman lierature, but we would never suppose that there wasn’t really a guy named Homer who wrote the Odyssey.

That statement (and thus all the following ones based directly on it) is factually incorrect.

The texts we have from the gospels post-date the events in question by in some cases 200 years. They most certainly are not consistent in their various forms. They have been demonstrably edited and re-written as far back as before their canonization.

As far as other contemporary accounts, Amanda and I have had this very conversation on my blog, and as I am sure she can now tell you, five minutes of research will verify my previous statement. Google is your friend.

That kind of poisons the well, doesn’t it?

Not at all, Terri. First, poisoning the well is exactly the argument tactic you are advancing, and it’s a common and well known logical fallacy.

In this case, your argument is that if author X says one thing that is not true, then nothing he says can be true.

That is simply a foolish assertion.

Water is wet.
Water is dry.

One of those statements is provably false. By your logic, the other must also be false because the statement was made by me.

The idea that the worth of everything said in the bible hinges on the historicity of the actual story as presented is equally as foolish.

…we would never suppose that there wasn’t really a guy named Homer who wrote the Odyssey.

Actually, that is exactly the case. There really wasn’t a guy named Homer who wrote the Odyssey. And that fact also has no bearing on the worth of the literature.

Kisses,
JanieBelle

As for an agenda, there certainly was one- control of the populace.

You miss the point that minthegap made.

The authors of the gospels had NO “control.” Christianity wasn’t affiliated with any power until about halfway through the 4th century, well after the gospels were written.

Control can only be exerted by those in power. The gospel writers had no power. If they did, they certainly wouldn’t have been tortured and executed so ruthlessly.

As for an agenda, there certainly was one- control of the populace. So many other books written during/after the time of “Jesus” have been disregarded, including other Gospels that talk about a very different Jesus.

Also, I never meant to say the Bible has truth- rather you can take some items from it and use it to live a good life, just like the hare and tortoise FABLE.

MIntheGap (and Terri too) – I myself have used that argument countless times. It sounds good, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t hold up if your perspective on the Bible as God’s word changes. When you’re really leaning towards thinking of the Bible as written by men with a specific agenda (there’s no such thing as an unbiased history book), then it’s not hard to make the leap that a very real man named Jesus existed, but not necessarily exactly the way he was portrayed in the text.