(March 9, 2014 at 5:02 pm)Jacob(smooth) Wrote: but purely for the sake of keeping the debate in the more interesting areas, I'm happy to concede that the gospels we have are verbatim copies of the original texts.
So what do you want to debate on?
"Does the N.T. pass the internal test for reliability?"
This is the second basic principle of historiography enumerated by Sanders in his work.
Or do you want to go with:
"Are the gospels reliable biographies of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth?"