Kindle Notes & Highlights
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October 30 - December 1, 2024
Perhaps oral traditions could be acceptable for ethnic folklore or epic poems — where an embellishment here or there wouldn’t matter as much — being handed down. But the Word of God, the once for all message from the Creator to the created?
We must also consider that if there were large crowds with no means of amplification, who could hear what? And was it possible that even someone who was present “heard” something different than what Jesus said.
The traditional Gospel titles were assigned to them in the second century, and we have no idea — no contemporaneous documentation — to help us understand when, how, and why copyists somewhere along the way came up with the names, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This has not stopped conservative scholars from leaping to conclusions.
It is troubling that honesty is a virtue that conservative Christian scholars sometimes fail to achieve.
Yes only sometimes, definitely not almost alway
Louis Ruprecht makes the case that John’s Gospel “explicitly intends to replace the Synoptic Gospels,” and refers to “the howling conflict between Mark and John.”
Peter Brancazio, who has written a massive book recapping the entire Bible, declares that John’s Gospel “will come as an astonishing surprise. Here the reader will encounter a radically different portrait of Jesus, both in terms of his message and his person.”
The curious reader should ask: If eyewitnesses preserved the words of Jesus in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, how did they miss all these too-important-to-leave-out things that Jesus supposedly said in John’s Gospel?
It’s hard to escape the possibility that John’s Jesus is a figure of the author’s own invention. We can’t have it both ways — that the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke is real, and that the Jesus of John is real, too.
We don’t have to admit that Jesus was the son of God based on John’s portrayal of him. We can simply admit that John created a version of Jesus based on his own theology. John is yet another example of a theologian who excelled at making things up. Imagination, not revelation.
When the day comes that New Testament scholarship is less in the grip of the church lobby, the Mythicist case — especially Carrier’s formidable assault — may finally be considered on its merits. In the meantime, it should come as no surprise that Mythicists have been ridiculed.
how would Matthew, writing decades after the events he describes, know what Joseph dreamed about — and what went on in the bedroom?
Christian scholar Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer speaks with refreshing candor when he says, “The Gospels offer competing, incompatible, and irreconcilable portraits of Jesus. We have no good choice but to choose between them.”
whether you acknowledge the need to choose which New Testament Jesus you will follow or choose to deny the very need for such a choice, you still face the task of building your own Jesus. This task cannot be avoided because there is more than one Jesus in the New Testament — regardless of whether you acknowledge this fact. And it is so easy for these choices to come down to what you want Jesus to be like.
The message of Christianity is that the God of the Universe came to Earth as a man with a message for all of humanity. But 2,000 years later, his followers cannot agree on exactly who he was, what he wanted his followers to believe, and what he wanted his followers to do.
How could a deity competent enough to create this Universe — if he/she/it has any interest of being known or listened to — be such a massively poor communicator that we are left GUESSING ABOUT GOD.
a common question family and friends ask each other is, “How is your walk with the Lord going today?” The companionship of the Lord, it seems, is sought throughout every waking hour, and many people excel at this “God is your pal” brand of Christianity. I never once heard my mother ask anyone this “walk with the Lord” question.
That would have been amazing
But I was never an obnoxious evangelical asking people if they had been saved, or if they knew Jesus. It would never have occurred to me to ask anyone, “How is your walk with the Lord going today?”
In liberal Protestant scholarship, it just wouldn’t do to accept the simplistic view that all of the words of Jesus in the Gospels are authentic. Scholars — at least the ones I was familiar with — were honest enough to admit that it was a real challenge to isolate the words that could credibly be traced back to Jesus.
“No one knows 8,000 pages about God — not even in German.” My professor’s comment provoked a light-bulb moment. The sources of God-knowledge are problematic, and if it is possible to joke that no one knows 8,000 pages about God, on what basis do we claim that anyone knows even one page about God? Don’t we have to explain exactly why and how it is possible to know anything about God? Otherwise, isn’t it all smoke and mirrors?
The ascension is theology, not history—just as the resurrection is theology, not history.
But our theological systems have been formulated within the confines of one small planet. Until we have greatly widened our experience of the universe — and this might be centuries away — it would seem to be folly to make pronouncements about the nature of God.
Then and now I wonder, how can it possibly be — stuck on one planet, not even in the middle of nowhere — that we are entitled to make the oh-so-confident claims for which theology is so famous? Why doesn’t it bother Christians that their theologians embrace, and are forever polishing and apologizing for Bronze Age ideas about God?
I came to see the absurdity of people abandoning their mental faculties to religious sentimentality every Sunday morning. In the warm glow of stained-glass windows, coddled by organ music and forced congeniality that ignored the ever-present factions in the congregation, they imagined that they were channeling God. They seemed confident they could connect with God by closing their eyes, earnestly thinking pious thoughts, and repeating formulaic statements. I silently wondered, “What do you people think you’re doing?” Had they given even one moment of critical thought to such piety and
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When I was in the parish ministry, helping people was the good part. Encouraging their religious fantasies was the bad part.
