Why don't we all admit that the four Gopels that disagree so much when they describe Jesus' life are totally--

Question

unreliable, instead of trying to base a whole religion on a bunch of contradictions?

Answer 1

The standard apologetic answer is that four different people will see four different things and speak to four different audiences, thus the differences. I don't really accept this, and stick to a more historical analysis - the gospels were written at the very least decades, at the very most over a hundred, years after Jesus allegedly died. It is likely that Jesus or a man (or men) like Jesus (for Yeshua, Yehoshua, and Yoshua were very common names, and all could be transcribed as Jesus) lived in died in a similar fashion. There is no historical evidence of Jesus the man, his appearance, no contemporary historical account of his deeds written during his lifetime, and nothing written by him ever even documented to exist.

But let's face it - even with the evidence of mistranslations, scribal errors, political and religious bias, and even outright interpolation (the polite word for written lies) there is no way christians will disown the Bible, contradictions, mistranslations, lies, and all.

Even though it was pagan Greek philosophy that shaped the Bible (four gospels = four elements = four corners of the world, according to Eusebius if I remember correctly), pagan traditions and Roman political concessions that laid the foundation for Christmas, and even works of fiction that formed the medieval conception of h**l (Dante's Inferno was reeeallly popular) you can't get a Christian to say that the Bible is anything other than God's word.

Think about it - because of all those contradictions you get the lattitude to believe a whole spectrum of things (slavery was justified using the Bible, for instance, as well as denying women the right to vote, forgoing vaccinations, and of course stubbornly denying modern science in the form of evolution) and still call yourself a Christian.

It is a good thing that God's word is vague, and many wouldn't have it any other way - the bickering and in-fighting and righteous holier-than-thous give one a sense of purpose, in defending your particular interpretation against some other denomination's interpretation. I mean good for Christians, not the rest of us.

Faith is not logical, and that understanding is the beginning of knowledge. At the core of it is a willful suspension of rational thought - and once rational thought is suspended, then everything becomes equal. If I can believe that people can live after they're dead and that an invisible being can break the laws of physics at will, then of course I can believe that evolution is "just a theory", even though when I get cancer I just might have my life saved by the chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and pharmaceuticals that we've developed using the exact same science as what our understanding of evolution came from.

Face it - if it's a cold night outside and you've got a warm blanket, how willing would you be to give it up? That's the Christian perspective, and many of them are smug about how thick and warm their blankets are. What they don't realize is that the light of day comes for us all - blanket or not.

Saul