(July 20, 2012 at 1:14 am)Jeffonthenet Wrote:(July 20, 2012 at 12:57 am)Minimalist Wrote: You do understand that none of your silly gospels depict any such scene, right? The have various people/groups finding a so-called "empty tomb" and various and sundry persons or "angels" hanging around. The one "gospel" which did pretend to have jesus walking out of the tomb - the gospel of "Peter," features a giant, walking, talking cross and was apparently too fucking stupid even for the church fathers who voted it out of the canon in 397 at the Council of Carthage.
The gnostic gospels like the "gospel of Peter" are mostly dated by historians to the second and third centuries, while the Christian gospels (except maybe John) and many of the NT letters are dated by almost every historian from 100 AD and before. And differences in the gospels, though some have found logically possible ways of reconciling them, would not show that there is no historical core anymore than differences in any other historical documents would show that they had no historical core.
Bingo. The earliest gospels were written decades after the death of Jesus, so the writers relied on the memorization of oral stories, each other's gospels, and their respective sects and their own beliefs. The earliest canonical gospel, the Gospel of Mark, is dated around 70 AD, forty years after the death of Christ. Forty years of oral stories is effectively playing a lifelong game of telephone.
If you accept the gospels account of oral stories as factual and all of them actually taking place, you need to accept the Greek myths recorded took place and have a factual basis, or Germanic legends are based on a real event.
