Posted on 12/10/2004 5:37:56 AM PST by OESY
The newsweeklies discovered long ago that Jesus Christ sells magazines. So it is not surprising to find him on the covers of Time and Newsweek a few weeks before Christmas....
What are we to make of the Gospel accounts of the Nativity? For a Christian, of course, they are true, an article of faith. But faith does not preclude looking at them as historical and literary documents....
Since the late 18th century, there has been a scholarly assault on the four Gospels, and some of the "experts' quoted by Time and Newsweek are simply bringing up the rear of this cultural offensive. Enlightenment intellectuals like Voltaire and Diderot could not accept Christ as a divine person. But since he is clearly presented as such in the Gospels, the idea was to deconstruct the texts themselves. Scholars accordingly came up with a storyline that goes something like this:
There was this charismatic religious teacher -- an itinerant rabbi, a political revolutionary -- who wandered about first-century Palestine saying some wonderful things but who certainly was not God. After he died, his followers took the sayings of Jesus and put them in a book. Later, the so-called Gospel writers took this document (which we don't have) and added a lot of mythological material about miracles and claims of Christ's divinity. The role of the scholar, then, is to strip away these mythological elements to get to the "historical Jesus' -- who ends up bearing a curious resemblance to the scholar writing the book.
Needless to say, these critics pare down the Nativity story until there is nothing left. If you read the Gospels with the assumption that miracles do not happen, then the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth and the angels' appearance to the shepherds will end up on the cutting-room floor....
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Wonder when these brave news organization will look to put Islam to "the test" right before Ramadan...
If Christianity still issued death sentences for heresy, these "brave" news organizations wouldn't put it to the test either..
The NYT WYTs won't devolve Islam, the Islamofascists are their AL LIES......
Time & Newsweek talking about religion is like Laurel & Hardy talking about philosophy. Consider the secular sources. No axes to grind, no sir. Certainly not linked arm-to-arm with the the aclu (hey, does the ac in aclu stand for "anti-Christ?).
(1) This pseudointellectual deconstruction of the New Testament has been going on for four centuries now - it didn't start with Voltaire.
(2) Since the initiation of this critique archaeologists and historians have discovered mountains of fascinating data about the first century of which the people of the 1600s/1700s had no knowledge.
(3) Despite centuries of criticism and the discovery of so much new, hard data the deconstructionists have actually lost ground.
Did after dig, ancient document after ancient document, the hard research either corroborates or does not contradict the New Testament accounts. Yet hard research has discredited theory after deconstructionist theory.
(5) And so the deconstructionists have had to abandon any sewrious, scholarly analysis and have resorted to the methods of the Jesus Seminar: i.e. deconstructionists vote among themselves as to what they think really happened. Imagine this happening in any other discipline - it's preposterous.
The theories of the deconstructionist critics are indefensible and that is why they continue to wax shriller and more offensive.
The future of Scripture scholarship belongs to the orthodox.
Is someone able to verify this for me. I once heard that these people who are part of this "Jesus Seminar" who the MSM use all the time when they want to discredit the Bible have a consensus that only one thing in the entire New Testament is reliable that Jesus actually said. The verse? "Render unto Ceasar the things that are Ceasars".
I didn't hear that from some email, it was a few years ago in a class with a college professor saying it. It came up as a side issue but I don't know if it was verified. Has anyone else heard this?
I guess the way this "seminar" works is some members might believe Jesus actually said 5 things reflected in the Bible, others 1 thing, a few might believe all of it, etc. However, after voting one year that was the only verse they all could agree was accurate.
Long ago I concluded that a magazine calling itself "Time" was constutionally unable to deal with matters that are Timeless and Eternal. My only regret is that I had but one subscription to enjoy cancelling.
"Read the eternities, not the (T)imes."
You are so right. When I stopped reading (buying on Sunday) the nyt and Philly Inquirer, it didn't seem like a big enough action on my part. I still want to somehow say FU to them in bigger print - like putting a bag of poop at their door and lighting it on fire (no, I wouldn't actually do it).
TV, though, is different. I now occasionally watch Dan Rather just to laugh at him. Yea Dan, I'm sure that story is factually correct, I will yell at my tv. Or Katie Couric. Or Wolf Blitzer. Or ...
Nineteenth century writer H.L. Hastings once forcibly illustrated the unique way in which the Bible has withstood the attacks of skepticism:
"Infidels of eighteen hundred years have been refuting and overthrowing this book, and yet it stands today as solid rock. Its circulation increases, and it is more loved and cherished and read today than ever before. Infidels, with all their assaults, make about as much impression on this book as a man with a tack hammer would on the Pyramids of Egypt.
"When the French monarch proposed the persecution of Christians in his dominion, an old statesman and warrior said to him, 'Sire, the church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.' So the hammers of infidels have been pecking away at this book for ages, but the hammers are worn out, and the anvil still endures. If this book had not been the book of God, men would have destroyed it long ago. Emperors and popes, kings and priests, princes and rulers have all tried their hand at it; they die and the book still lives."
"No other book has been so chopped, knived, sifted, scrutinized, and vilified. What book on philosophy or religion or psychology or belles lettres of classical or modern times has been subject to such a mass attack as the Bible? With such venom and skepticism? With such thoroughness and erudition? Upon every chapter, line and tenet? The Bible is still loved by millions, and studied by millions.
Ollie: You know Stanley, the Dali Lama is very deep.
Stanley: He certainly is.
"As for the Magi, who arrive on the scene a few days late: I rather like the prayer that Evelyn Waugh writes about them for the heroine of his novel "Helena": "You are my especial patrons," she says, ". . . and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation. . . . For his sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom."
May we not include among the learned and oblique a few biblical scholars?"
Amen
Hastings was conflating the Bible with the Church. But "The Church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers." is a superb quote.
Good post.
We need go no further than the scripture, since some accept portions of the OLD. Any Bible scholar worth his/her salt could very easily take the OLD and give veracity to what is written in the NEW.
So I've got that going for me.
Don't you just love it when jerky liberals tell us the Gospels are fake and God doesn't exist?
Puleeeeeeze!!!!!
I wonder how they explain way the ongoing miracles of Jesus today?
How do you deal with millions of changed lives; those literally rescued from darknes and death through the centuries?
And the miracles of healings taking place daily in the energized church and on the battelfield of Gospel missions worldwide??
I did not believe because I did not see....
Since I have believed.... I now see...
Some see... and then believe...
Some believe... and then are able to see
Some people can't see....
Others refuse to see....(Pharisees...et als)
How shall we answer Him on the great day of the Lord?
Christmas blessings...
The Newsweek article was the usual joke. The only experts they consulted were the Jesus Seminar, and the rest of the article was just fluff.
Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!!!!!!!!
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