Rip Rokken wrote:Lee Strobel's athiest-to-believer story is inspiring, but from what I've read, he wasn't really well versed in either athiesm or Christianity to begin with. He had little knowledge either way. He converted to Christianity when his wife became a believer, and thru the positive change in her life concluded that God had to be behind it.
Actually, his wife's conversion really turned him off even more to the idea of there actually being a God. He wanted to prove it false and, I'm sure according to how he handled his own profession, put a great deal of research into it since he set out to disprove it to his own wife.
Just as I was, I've found every fundamental Christian that I've ever met to be pretty sheltered in their belief. I don't know if you consider yourself "fundamental" or not, but by that term I'm referring to Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant, absolute, and perfect word of God (that they interpret literally, Adam & Eve, Noah's Ark, etc, etc.), that Jesus was God incarnate in human flesh, and that he died for the sins of mankind and physically rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven.
I certainly wouldn't call myself sheltered. I've ventured into these kinds of discussions on many an occasion and find they typically strengthen my faith rather than weaken it. Anyway, yes, I would say that I believe the things you mentioned above. This is really too much to go into in much detail here, so I'm not going to bother at this point but I can elaborate later on, if necessary.
I know in my experience, and much of it was probably subconscious, I would steer straight clear of anything that I thought might allow Satan to confuse or poison me. I had no interest in learning anything scientific that might cause me to question. Why should I take the risk? I knew I was right, and that was enough. I was going to believe what I was going to believe, because I had no choice but to believe.
I've never understood this mentality. I think this is all rather very fascinating.
I would bet if you asked a good percentage of average churchgoing Christians, they would be of the impression that the 4 gospels were eyewitness accounts written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who were all four members of the 12 apostles. They may not realize that realize that each was written anonymously with no attempts to attribute authorship until much later, how long after Jesus' death they were written, or that Paul's letters predated any of them. They probably don't know that the gospels are not 4 freestanding independent accounts, but that all drew from earlier sources, even each other (Mark is the oldest gospel, and most scholars believe that Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily from Mark). Many never give thought to the fact that the only gospel that really pushes the divinity of Jesus was also the last written, the Gospel of John. Mark, the oldest gospel, says very little -- in fact, Jesus appears to deny being God at one point.
Mark 10:18 Jesus answered, "Why do you call me good? No person is good. Only God is good."
There's good evidence to suggest that none of the things you mentioned above are necessarily true. There are still many who believe, for instance, that Matthew, not Mark, was the first gospel written and that at least three of the four gospels we have in the Bible were written by AD 70 and that they actually were penned by eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus. The later gospel, John, could have been written in the 80s to 90s as portions of this gospel were found in Egypt by the year 135 AD, which means that it could have taken quite a while for that gospel to be circulated that far. I don't know much more about the subject than that but it's something I've studied previously, granted a long time ago now, but it's certainly not that controversial to say that the gospels were all penned much earlier than some scholars give them credit for.
As for the verse from 10:18, I don't see that as Jesus denying to be God at all. Could Jesus have been trying to get the man to think a little by asking him a leading question? That seems likely to me considering Jesus often did that. Besides that, if, as you say, the writers of the gospels did borrow heavily from each other (and it hasn't been established that they have), don't you think that's one pretty obvious thing they would have "edited" if they had thought it meant he was denying his divinity?
The earliest manuscript of any New Testament book in possession is almost 100 years after Jesus' death. Of the thousands of complete and fragmentary manuscripts discovered over the centuries, over 400,000 variations have been found. When comparing them chronologically, there is absolutely no way to deny not only the mistakes, but the purposeful changes that were made to the text over time. Some were corrections, like a quote from the Old Testament that incorrectly referenced the wrong book. Some scribe down the road noticed the error and corrected it. Some were deletions, and some were additions -- things that were never present in the earliest documents. One of the biggest that comes to mind is the entire last 12 verses in the Gospel of Mark. Mark originally ended with a cliffhanger, and seemed incomplete. The text that was added didn't carry the same tone, and wasn't written in the same style as the rest of the book, and it seems out of place. Check your study Bible notes on those verses, and most will say that they shouldn't be counted on as reliable.
I can't comment on this entire quote because I certainly don't have the time necessary to research and check my facts on everything. Again, it's all stuff that I've studied up on in the past and come to completely different conclusions about it than you have here. Taken as a whole, though, it's completely amazing how close a vast majority of the extant manuscripts we still have agree with one another almost exactly in most places. The 400,000 variations you quote above may be accurate but we also need to remember just how many manuscript discoveries there have been over the years. The 400,000 number seems huge on its face but it's really rather small considering the amount of manuscripts we have on the NT writings.
Next thing that many people don't consider is church history, or the history of how the Bible was even assembled. How doctrines morphed over time to suit the current political climate, how pagan practices were added to make Christianity palatable to those groups. Read up sometime on the history of the Doctrine of the Trinity that we all accepted one of the primary tenets of belief for salvation. It came down to nothing more than a political pissing contest between two bishops, and one of them even got his face slapped by the real life Santa Claus, Bishop Nicholas (who later became the "Saint Nicholas" of Christmas). All this stuff is documented in the original letters from the time, and can't be disputed.
Well, belief in the trinity isn't a far stretch considering Jesus' claim to be God, that he also called God his "Father" on many occasions and that the New Testement ascribes the attributes of God to the Holy Spirit. Now, I don't claim to fully understand how the concept works but it doesn't seem like a far stretch to me regardless of what these two bishops might have discussed with one another.
I'm not even scratching the surface.... arguments about evolution vs. creationism are fruitless, when there are so many things that flat out disprove much of modern Christian tradition. You have to shut them out completely to be able to keep faith intact.
That's part of the problem, "tradition". Traditions can be helpful but, in the end, if they are just tradition, what use are they?
But... who is going to do it? "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Would you settle for getting "rocked" instead?
