(October 13, 2013 at 3:26 pm)Drich Wrote: The whole itinerary seems to be based on the idea that all four gospels are trying to recount the same events in the life of Christ. What if the gospels are not meant convey the same set of stories, but to recount the events an author was privy to?But the gospels recount a number of events the author was not privy to, private conversations and meetings they were absent for, and the like. Some of them (Pilate's conversations with Jesus, the conversations and discussions among the pharisees on one or two occasions, etc) don't appear to have been witnessed by anyone who would want to pass the information on.
To me they read like a story where the writer is pretending to be a fly on the wall, and not as genuine eyewitness accounts. The impression is that they're compiled from rumors and stories and used to build a narrative, which would explain why they conform in some details and not others.
"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
