(November 18, 2013 at 7:52 am)Aractus Wrote: Indeed if all four were exactly the same, you'd claim it was invented by one person and then copied verbatim by others.
Of course we would; that would be what anyone would assume if the accounts were identical. The fact that the accounts are similar on many of the main points yet vary on the details does not, to me, strike me as out of the ordinary for the circumstances described. The event that they describe is the issue, and if we were to consider it for any other person than Jesus, it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a plausible explanation that does not involve a resurrection or the appearance of supernatural beings.
I think too much is made of the discrepancies in the details of a group of stories whose most critical points are made third-hand and from memories of events that are at least more than a decade past. It is pretty easy to piece together a more plausible story from what is written. Nor is it difficult to imagine motivations for inventing such a story.
"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
