(July 27, 2014 at 4:01 am)Purplundy Wrote: If the Gospel writers were liars, wouldn't they have made their stories agree to the letter?If they had decided to conspire to perpetrate a fraud, sure. The stories might be nearly perfect in the details and would agree quite nicely, even allowing for the primitive (and likely expensive) methods of recording them for an audience that was mostly illiterate and thus unlikely to have an opportunity to pore over the works and spotting inconsistencies.
If we're talking about writers with their own agendas and divergent aims writing for relatively small groups of semi-literate people, whose works were then selected for inclusion into a larger work a few centuries later, you might just get a group of accounts that are similar enough to pass as "authentic."
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould