Illiterate men.
April 19, 2012 at 5:08 am
(This post was last modified: April 19, 2012 at 5:09 am by FallentoReason.)
I met up with a Christian friend today at university. Long story short, I took us on a tangent to what we were discussing about the Bible and I decided to see what his responses would be with some of the 'inconsistencies I happened to stumble upon'.
I told him that Jesus and his disciples were all illiterate, which explains why Jesus never wrote anything. For the disciples this meant that we could confidently say that, yes, Church tradition did infact label the Gospels and we don't actually know who wrote them, but we can speculate that the 4 disciples passed on their accounts to people who could write. I didn't want to go all out and state that the disciples never took part in the writing of Gospels because of what we know historically about the writings.
Anyways;
1) he says that Jesus could actually read because it says in the NT that he read scripture.
2) he talked about this: John 21:20,24,25 Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved...This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true. Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
So;
Q1) Is this credible within the pages of the NT? Jesus is meant to come from the lowest of the low. How does he gain the resources to get an education?
Q2) The implication is that the author mentions that John wrote down everything else except this ending, because the author refers to himself as someone apart from John. What can we say historically about the Gospel of John and how it came to be? Is the anonymous author giving credit to John for his own work, by making it seem like he only added the last portion that says John wrote everything?
I told him that Jesus and his disciples were all illiterate, which explains why Jesus never wrote anything. For the disciples this meant that we could confidently say that, yes, Church tradition did infact label the Gospels and we don't actually know who wrote them, but we can speculate that the 4 disciples passed on their accounts to people who could write. I didn't want to go all out and state that the disciples never took part in the writing of Gospels because of what we know historically about the writings.
Anyways;
1) he says that Jesus could actually read because it says in the NT that he read scripture.
2) he talked about this: John 21:20,24,25 Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved...This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true. Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
So;
Q1) Is this credible within the pages of the NT? Jesus is meant to come from the lowest of the low. How does he gain the resources to get an education?
Q2) The implication is that the author mentions that John wrote down everything else except this ending, because the author refers to himself as someone apart from John. What can we say historically about the Gospel of John and how it came to be? Is the anonymous author giving credit to John for his own work, by making it seem like he only added the last portion that says John wrote everything?
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" ~ Aristotle
