Why does science always upstage God?

[Soberman921]

The Gospel of Peter is a very short gospel, probably from 150 AD, although we don't have anything prior to the 8th/9th century. The Gospel of Peter tells a very, very different story that the other gospels. So yes, it didn't make the cut because it isn't consistent with the story told by the other gospel writers. Is that that crazy? Does that make it a clergy conspiracy? I think that's a pretty far leap. In court, don't they frequently hear multiple versions of the same story and when one witness is totally different that the other witnesses we say that probably isn't a reliable witness? I would say that's reasonable and not necessarily a conspiracy.

True, but don't you see how this could just as easily apply to the gospel of John? John's gospel presents Jesus very differently than the synoptic gospels. Where in Mark Jesus never speaks of his divinity, in John that is all he wants to talk about. In the synoptic gospels Jesus goes out of his way to hide his messiahship. In John, he performs great miracles as signs of his messiahship and divinity. John changes the length of Jesus' ministry and the order of events. His account of the passion is inconsistent with that of the synoptics from beginning to end. And as you acknowledge, John was written much later than the other gospels, like the gospel of Peter. So why did John make the cut but not Peter? A skeptic would say because, in the views of those ultimately deciding New Testament canon, his gospel was close enough to the others to merit inclusion. But that is an entirely arbitrary standard and a difficult one to justify. In trials, judges don't exclude witnesses whose testimony is different from that of other witnesses. A witness whose testimony contradicts those of several others will be called by the party who contests the testimony of those others to demonstrate it is their testimony that is unreliable. A jury could reasonably choose to discount all of them, because as a whole the testimony is too unclear to justify believing any particular account of events. What would be unreasonable would be to hear four accounts, make up one's mind, and then reject on principle any account that doesn't accord.