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Professor Reza Aslan, who holds a master’s in theological studies and a Ph.D. in sociology focusing on religion, has bad news for biblical literalists: The Gospels are “replete with historical errors and with contradictions,” and for over a thousand years, religious leaders did not take the Bible as literal fact.
“Let me just say that one more time,” Aslan continued. “In the 2,000 year history in which the Gospels have existed, the idea that what you are reading in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is literal and inerrant is a little more than 100 years old. It was the result of a very interesting movement, a backlash to Christian liberalism and the Scientific Revolution at the end of the 19th century … by a group of American Protestants who began a movement that was launched by a series of tracts that were written called ‘The Fundamentals’ and that is where we get the term ‘fundamentalism’ from. It’s a very new phenomenon.”
There is a youtube video on the bottom of the article.
I should also add that this man is not an atheist, he DOES believe in God (if that makes any difference to anyone).
He is a Muslim who writes about Jesus... It strikes me that he thinks the Church Fathers (top Bishops) "were not as interested in the facts of Jesus’ life as they were in the truth revealed by Jesus’ life,"...
The common Muslim line is that the many dozens of Gospels were people re-inventing Jesus to their own liking, and thus dismissing Jesus' teaching of "true Islam" for preferred prophet-deification blasphemy (I agree, and it was probably because many pagans liked human-personality worship rather than trying unsuccessfully to focus on some vague formless and mysterious impersonal being).
The other bias revealing factoid is that for Muslims, Jesus was a prophet and not a "messenger." Meaning that Jesus was meant to teach Islam but not reveal scripture. So if the focus is not facts but a prophet's life and works, then we lower the authoritative weight of the scriptures about said prophet.
What Reza Aslan fails to reveal, is that even if many of the authors meant their gospels to be venerational myth, many gospels were still individually taken seriously as literal fact and history by the less critical and less perceptive early followers, not the 12 disciples... So the Bishops wanted to establish some order in the Christian beliefs, that would require facts.
Of course the Church Fathers knew that the many Gospels contradicted in key facts, but they chose the magical 4 that as a whole portrayed the character they wanted (a largely blank canvas for any teaching they would like to give, since using lines out of context was common practice even back then) including the "facts" they needed.
The Church Fathers still had a heavy interest in pretending/believing that the Gospels were History, since Jesus' recorded life needed to match up to Jewish prophecy (or even just to Jewish non-prophetic scripture that was mistaken/understood as prophecy). It is very doubtful that the Bishops believed that the 4 Gospels they chose were "made up myth whose facts didn't matter," since many of the "stories" would be the only thing that would tie in Jesus as being the true Last Messiah.
I believe in God, but I have no idea what religion I am, haha!
I was raised Catholic, but stopped going to church after my confirmation.
Oh, okay. My mistake. I had you confused with another member, obviously, of the more radical fringe group.
I'm reading about Aslan now. The article links to an embarrassing interview with a stupid new anchor (aren't they all on cable) and a very intelligent, articulate Aslan who is a Muslim converted to Christianity converted back to Muslim. Along the way he got a clear look at the inner workings of Christianity. My only disagreement is his dating of when literalism entered into the scriptures. Historians will tell you than interpretation of Christ's life was largely allegorical in the first two centuries; it read and was interpreted like we'd interpret the Iliad & Odyssey--myth from which we should learn great wisdom and truth.
Literalism entered into the interpretation around the 4th-5th centuries with guys like Augustine and Eusebius, who, on orders of Constantine, insisted that everything in the gospels was to be interpreted literally down to the letter. Here's where all the errors and contradictions so readily on display in the scriptures become a real problem for these newly-minted literalists. With allegory, they could have just dismissed them; with literalism Jesus literally has to ride into Jerusalem on an adult AND a baby donkey---two animals at the same time. So literalists made their bed, now they have to sleep in it now that all this new scholarship is available from the likes of Aslan and Robert Price and Richard Carrier and Acharya S also known as D.M. Murdock, who wrote a devastating critique against Christian Fundamentalism, The Christ Conspiracy; The Greatest Story Ever Sold.
My readings led me to this debate between Aslan and Sam Harris .I doubt anyone would sit all the way through it, but it is interesting if one wants to see two basically anti-literalist Bible advocates debating each other.
Oh, okay. My mistake. I had you confused with another member, obviously, of the more radical fringe group.
I'm reading about Aslan now. The article links to an embarrassing interview with a stupid new anchor (aren't they all on cable) and a very intelligent, articulate Aslan who is a Muslim converted to Christianity converted back to Muslim. Along the way he got a clear look at the inner workings of Christianity. My only disagreement is his dating of when literalism entered into the scriptures. Historians will tell you than interpretation of Christ's life was largely allegorical in the first two centuries; it read and was interpreted like we'd interpret the Iliad & Odyssey--myth from which we should learn great wisdom and truth.
Literalism entered into the interpretation around the 4th-5th centuries with guys like Augustine and Eusebius, who, on orders of Constantine, insisted that everything in the gospels was to be interpreted literally down to the letter. Here's where all the errors and contradictions so readily on display in the scriptures become a real problem for these newly-minted literalists. With allegory, they could have just dismissed them; with literalism Jesus literally has to ride into Jerusalem on an adult AND a baby donkey---two animals at the same time. So literalists made their bed, now they have to sleep in it now that all this new scholarship is available from the likes of Aslan and Robert Price and Richard Carrier and Acharya S also known as D.M. Murdock, who wrote a devastating critique against Christian Fundamentalism, The Christ Conspiracy; The Greatest Story Ever Sold.
My readings led me to this debate between Aslan and Sam Harris .I doubt anyone would sit all the way through it, but it is interesting if one wants to see two basically anti-literalist Bible advocates debating each other.
I'm going to have to disagree with your disagreement, Thrill . Inerrancy as we have it today is only about a century old. Here is a quote from an article by a retired Old Testament professor whom I've found to have a quite settled and sane view of scripture. The title of the short piece is The Modern Inerrancy Debate:
Quote:
Beyond the problem of communication, one of the main problems with the argument for inerrancy of Scripture, or even the companion argument for near total historical reliability of Scripture, is that it is based on a very modern and quite rationalistic premise. The modern debate arose between 1900 and the 1920s, and was developed into the 1970s, as a defense against historical skeptics who were launching some very scathing attacks against the authority of Scripture from the perspective of historical positivism and scientific naturalism. However, in the zeal to defend Scripture, many simply capitulated to the rationalistic mind set and tried to defend the Bible on that alien turf by ground rules set by the critics. The ensuing "battle for the Bible" is thus a battle largely fought in an area far removed from Scripture itself, and by the premises and logic of very rationalistic categories.
The scientific premise that forms the basis for modern historiography, and the basis for challenge by skeptics, is that only empirically verifiable events can be accepted as true. They contended that since many biblical events could not be verified by external documents or records or empirical data to have happened, then they never happened. Therefore, the accounts were not true and were therefore in error (I won’t address at this point the problem in equating the concepts of "true" and "without error," which are not necessarily synonymous).
The defenders, on quite different grounds than empirical evidence, assumed that the Bible was true as a starting point. No problem there, at least from the perspective of faith confession. But the defense took shape as a logical syllogism that worked backward toward the rationalists.Since the Bible is true as an assumption, and since only verifiable historical events can be true (thus accepting the premise of the rationalists), then the Bible must contain only actual and verifiable historical events and can contain no error. Thus inerrancy as a very rationalistic response to the rationalists was born.
A similar line of reasoning developed against those who assumed historical positivism as the only way of explaining human history. Historical positivism is an outgrowth of the empirical model. It assumes that truth consists only of that which can be empirically verified. It also rejects any metaphysical aspect of reality and assumes a closed world in which historical event [sic] can be explained in terms of preceding historical events and the relation of events to their cause in those preceding events.
To counter this, in addition to the above assertions about the inerrancy of Scripture, the defenders also adopted a near total metaphysical explanation of history in which God was the prime cause of all human history. He was "in control" of all human events, and there needed to be no other explanation for human history than God. Scripture, then, was just the writing down of that history, both past and future, and so was inerrant because it simply recorded what God was causing to unfold. This could lead, for example, to the often quoted definition of prophecy from that perspective as "prewritten history."
Again, the logic behind this line of defense rests on the defenders of Scripture actually accepting the premises of the rationalists, and then trying to define Scripture in such a way that it could then answer them on their own grounds. But it seems that many never asked whether or not Scripture could even fit within those rationalistic categories; that is, whether Scripture was ever intended to be provable by the canons of scientific empiricism.
One other factor came into play in the development of the inerrancy debate. Most of the "defenders" in the early stages were from the Reformed tradition, especially fundamentalist Southern Baptists (nothing at all here against Baptists; it is just a historical fact). That simply meant that the debate was cast nearly from the beginning in terms of narrowly focused theological concerns and agendas. Two closely related theological ideas from that tradition affected how the debate took shape: the emphasis on
the total sovereignty of God, which works out into predestination in some circles; and the total depravity of humanity.
What Professor Bratcher is stating is that religious people actually BELIEVED what non-religious people were saying--that truth required empirical evidence. And they lost the war from the start despite the battle that continues to be waged.
Truth for a Christian cannot be contained in purely verifiable historical and scientific events. Our faith gives us a view of metaphysical truth as well. To argue rationalists on their own ground is giving them the high ground and setting up people of faith to be cannon fodder in the charge of the light brigade.
I've exchanged several e-mails with Professor Bratcher and he has been very forthcoming on faith outside of fundamentalism and on aspects of textual criticism regarding the Old Testament.
I end with another post from the same source above (not in quotes as that is a time-consuming formatting job for me)--one that is an inspiration to me and I hope to others also. Professor Bratcher so eloquently puts into play the fact that inspiration was never a one time event by the writers of the Bible. It was always intended to be an open window for fresh air to be brought into the room of believers:
--------
That is why I think that any reading or study of Scripture should begin with the prayer, "Lord, help me understand." It is an acknowledgment of that dynamic quality of inspiration, and a confession that finally, after we have done all we can do to understand the human dimension of Scripture, it is God who brings the testimony alive, and makes it a living and active word!
And yet, the form, the vehicle of that message is dependent upon the people themselves. So, there are cultural oddities. There are personal idiosyncrasies. There are discrepancies of fact, of science, of grammar, of spelling, of data. There are different perspectives from different people from different cultures on different continents over a span of 1,800 years. There are inconsistencies in historical data, in the use of symbols, in views about future events. Sometimes prophets were wrong in how they translated their understanding about God into their interpretation of historical events. Sometimes they even had to change their prophecies (See Ezekiel and the Oracles Against Tyre).
Sometimes leaders had to go far beyond the old law codes, and sometimes had to invent new responses to ethical challenges (Nehemiah; "Applied Torah" in Torah as Holiness). Sometimes new understandings challenged old orthodoxies (Job, Jonah). Sometimes in one historical situation one view was valid, and in another historical situation the opposite perspective was valid (Deuteronomy, Jeremiah). Sometimes they emphasized one aspect and sometimes another, and sometimes those are not directly reconcilable (Proverbs, Leviticus). As Walter Brueggemann put it, there are voices and counter voices, as very human people living in a very real world try to live and apply what they have come to understand about God in radically different and constantly changing contexts. After all, the story is in human words.
But it is God’s story! Or perhaps better, it is a story of God! For me, affirming a dynamic view of inspiration allows the truth about Himself that God has revealed to us to be faithfully and accurately preserved by the community of Faith. This takes seriously the faith confession that God is active in the world, that He reveals Himself to humanity, and that there is a dimension to God that cannot be accessed by human reason or experience. In this sense, the Bible is God’s word. However, a dynamic model that sees inspiration of Scripture as a process operating within the community of faith rather than a one time revelation of absolute truth also allows us to examine all the evidence within Scripture honestly without need for apology or rationalization.
Just looking at the first coupla paras, there is nothing original. The 10 years' discrepancy between Matthew's nativity and Luke's is answered if you insist that Luke is talking about an earlier secret census carried out in Herod's time. And the genealogies are a discrepancy in the content, not a history, and the 'Mary' explanation (though it doesn't work unless you rewrite God's word) is usually trotted out. There are errors in that Acts puts the revolt of Theuds after the revolt of Judas the galilean, though again an Unknown earlier Theudas doing exactly the same as the later one is produced in order to explain away this error.
It is in this way Theist apologists can claim that there are no errors, mistakes or contradictions, because any unjustified, absurd or demonstrably false explanation must be true if it explains the problem away,
He is a Muslim who writes about Jesus... It strikes me that he thinks the Church Fathers (top Bishops) "were not as interested in the facts of Jesus’ life as they were in the truth revealed by Jesus’ life,"...
The common Muslim line is that the many dozens of Gospels were people re-inventing Jesus to their own liking, and thus dismissing Jesus' teaching of "true Islam" for preferred prophet-deification blasphemy (I agree, and it was probably because many pagans liked human-personality worship rather than trying unsuccessfully to focus on some vague formless and mysterious impersonal being).
The other bias revealing factoid is that for Muslims, Jesus was a prophet and not a "messenger." Meaning that Jesus was meant to teach Islam but not reveal scripture. So if the focus is not facts but a prophet's life and works, then we lower the authoritative weight of the scriptures about said prophet.
What Reza Aslan fails to reveal, is that even if many of the authors meant their gospels to be venerational myth, many gospels were still individually taken seriously as literal fact and history by the less critical and less perceptive early followers, not the 12 disciples... So the Bishops wanted to establish some order in the Christian beliefs, that would require facts.
Of course the Church Fathers knew that the many Gospels contradicted in key facts, but they chose the magical 4 that as a whole portrayed the character they wanted (a largely blank canvas for any teaching they would like to give, since using lines out of context was common practice even back then) including the "facts" they needed.
The Church Fathers still had a heavy interest in pretending/believing that the Gospels were History, since Jesus' recorded life needed to match up to Jewish prophecy (or even just to Jewish non-prophetic scripture that was mistaken/understood as prophecy). It is very doubtful that the Bishops believed that the 4 Gospels they chose were "made up myth whose facts didn't matter," since many of the "stories" would be the only thing that would tie in Jesus as being the true Last Messiah.
Yea, and not only that but Mohammed invented his religion much like Joseph Smith invented his.
None of the four "gospels" contradict each other. What they do is paint a complete picture of Christ from four perspectives. It's not really that difficult to grasp.
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I had you confused with another member, obviously, of the more radical fringe group. 
and a very intelligent, articulate Aslan who is a Muslim converted to Christianity converted back to Muslim. Along the way he got a clear look at the inner workings of Christianity. My only disagreement is his dating of when literalism entered into the scriptures. Historians will tell you than interpretation of Christ's life was largely allegorical in the first two centuries; it read and was interpreted like we'd interpret the Iliad & Odyssey--myth from which we should learn great wisdom and truth. 
. Inerrancy as we have it today is only about a century old. Here is a quote from an article by a retired Old Testament professor whom I've found to have a quite settled and sane view of scripture. The title of the short piece is The Modern Inerrancy Debate:
