(August 30, 2013 at 8:54 pm)FallentoReason Wrote: Newsflash Drich and Tonus: the two events are mutually exclusive. Either Jesus preached on the plain or he preached sitting down on higher ground. Such a difference is enough to question the authors' sources.
I know, which is why I wondered about the discrepancy in my post. I don't see it as a smoking gun type of problem, is all. If we assume that these are third-hand accounts written decades after the death of Christ, the fact that they got a detail like that wrong is not surprising, even if we assume the hand of god at work. Other details, such as the differences in the "judge not" part of the sermon, are more significant because what they include/omit/add makes for very different interpretations.
"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
