(March 18, 2013 at 5:51 pm)John V Wrote: Regarding the first line on the chart: so what? How do you define contradiction for this purpose, and why should the Christian be concerned about such contradictions?
There are ten lines on the chart. The inclusion of seemingly minor items like the first line is done partly for the sake of completeness, and partly because in context it reinforces the inconsistent nature of the various stories. The gospels read as if they are the second or third-hand retelling of stories passed around by various people. A set of decades-old recollections will tend to have inconsistencies and minor contradictions, but that there are so many and that some are not minor makes it less and less likely that they're the first-hand recollections of people who were there, and more likely that they're the retelling of legends and folk tales, shaped for a particular cultural and political atmosphere.
"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
