If Richard Dawkins Is Right

The Gospel Coalition ^ | 11/7/15 | Bernard N Howard

[SoFloFreeper]

“Nobody knows who the four evangelists were, but they almost certainly never met Jesus personally. Much of what they wrote was in no sense an honest attempt at history. . . . The gospels are ancient fiction.” – Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

---

If Dawkins is correct, one might imagine the following conversation . . .

Luke: Let’s have another round of drinks. I’ve an idea I want to run past you.

John: Sure. What’s on your mind?

Luke: You probably heard about the Nazarene named Jesus who was crucified yesterday. I think he could be the perfect candidate for our fake Messiah project.

Mark: One tiny problem: he’s dead!

Luke: Yes, but that means we’ll control the narrative. We’ll be in charge of his reputation.

Matthew: Who would follow a dead Messiah?

Luke: Nobody, so we’ll begin with a resurrection myth. We’ll hire some thugs to fight off the soldiers guarding his tomb so we can get rid of the corpse.

John: But a missing corpse isn’t the same as a resurrection.

Luke: You’re right, so we’ll have to persuade Jesus’s friends to spend the next 30 years telling everyone he’s risen from the dead, even if sticking to that story means they’ll be imprisoned or killed.

Mark: Okay, then what?

Luke: Well, to make a conspiracy credible you need precise details. So we’ll invent stories where Jesus interacts with people in specific locations.

Matthew: Won’t people just disprove the stories by visiting those places and asking around?

Luke: There’s no need to worry about that. We could invent a story about a synagogue ruler’s terminally ill daughter being healed, give the synagogue ruler a name, set it all in a particular place, and still no one—absolutely no one, not even the people living in that place—would trouble to fact-check. Everyone would simply swallow the story whole!

Mark: It sounds like we’re on safe ground there. But if we want people to follow Jesus, he’ll need a message. People have been waiting for the Messiah for centuries. He’s got to be worth listening to when he finally appears.

John: Good point. I’ll cook up some deep quotes.

Luke: Thanks, John. Mark’s right: you’ll need to put profound wisdom on Jesus’s lips that theological scholars can happily study for their entire careers.

John: Not a problem.

Luke: Guys, it will take us a while to put these documents together. We need to get communities of people worshiping Jesus in the meantime so that when our books come out they’ll get a good reception.

Mark: There’s a guy I know called Saul, he could help with that.

Luke: Saul the Pharisee? I can’t imagine him getting involved with this kind of thing.

Mark: Trust me, he’s our man. I see him leaving behind everything he’s been trained to do and planting congregations of Jesus worshipers throughout the Roman Empire, whatever it costs him personally—beatings, shipwrecks, and the like.

Matthew: Awesome. But Luke, can you just remind me, what’s the point of all this? I mean, what exactly do we get out of this?

Luke: Come on, Matt, it will be so much fun. We’ll watch people being brutally martyred, and we’ll know they’ve been deceived by our dishonest fiction! What’s not to like about that?

John: I agree with Luke. This is definitely worth years of effort on our part. Count me in.

Mark: Me too.

Matthew: I’ll do it if my name comes first in all the promotional material.

Luke: Deal. Let’s get to work.

[tjd1454]

Where are you getting your alleged contradictions? Have you investigated any of them yourself, or are you happy to ignorantly parrot the ramblings of unbelievers?

Good responses re: Jesus on the way to Golgatha and the quote about the light of the world. It appears that the skeptics will accept nothing other than four Gospels that are exactly alike, word for word. They rigidly refuse to concede that the author's individual perspectives brought unique aspects to their accounts. The Gospels are complimentary, not contradictory.

[tjd1454]

So TBP when you say Scholars who doubt that the bible is accurate are objective, this is simply not true- when they have to invent a scenario to claim Jesus never said what he said in order to uphold their hypothesis, then clearly they are not objective and are creating facts to make the puzzle pieces of their hypothesis fit

Good point - the skeptics have to create a scenario that fits with their rejection of the possibility of predictive prophecy, so of course the "prophecy" must have been written after the fact!

[Bob434]

[[Where are you getting your alleged contradictions?]]

Very likely from websites which list 101 contradictions I nthe bible (which incidently are completely refuted on websites which point out that they aren’t actually contradictions, but the skeptics don’t wish for truth, they simply wish for claims that fit the agenda

[Bob434]

There are sites popular with those who attack the infallibility of God’s word such as Skeptics’ Annotated Bible Refuted, and I see the same supposed contradictions come up over and over and over again- however, there are also sites devoted to debunking all these so called contradictions with actual careful examinations of God’s word- and almost without fail, every single supposed contradiction is refuted

Sites like the following tackle a great many of the m ore popular claims of contradictions by those who don’t believe that God’s word is infallible

http://www.british-israel.ca/Contradictions.htm

another popular supposed contradiction often cited by anti-Christians is that Jesus carried His own cross and wasn’t helped

[[49. Jesus did (John 19:17) or did not (Matthew 27:31-32) bear his own cross?

(Category: misread the text or the texts are compatible with a little thought)

John 19:17 states that he went out carrying his own cross to the place of the skull. Matthew 27:31,32 tells us that he was led out to be crucified and that it was only as they were going out to Golgotha that Simon was forced to carry the cross.

Mark 15:20,21 agrees with Matthew and gives us the additional information that Jesus started out from inside the palace (Praetorium). As Simon was on his way in from the country, it is clear that he was passing by in the street. This implies that Jesus carried his cross for some distance, from the palace into the street. Weak from his floggings and torture, it is likely that he either collapsed under the weight of the cross or was going very slowly. In any case, the soldiers forced Simon to carry the cross for him. Luke 23:26 is in agreement, stating that Simon was seized as they led Jesus away.

Thus the contradiction vanishes. Jesus started out carrying the cross and Simon took over at some point during the journey.]]

But like another site that refutes all the supposed contradictions of the bible states, no amount of evidence or correction will cause the skeptic to admit they were mistaken

[Bob434]

[[slanting of the story to a particular audience...transcription errors that affect meaning]]

you know, it’s easy for you to make these claims without providing any evidence that this is actually what happened- IF you were to actually study how careful the scribes were in copying texts, you would know that the bible is NOT full of errors like you claim them to be- These scribes were so careful that whenever they discovered a copying error they began the whole passage over and didn’t just use white out to cover htem istake- After they wrote the word God, they would throw the quill away and start with a new one

There was such a strict disciplined process for copying that not many people had the patience and dedication and skill to be a scribe

You and others like you make it seem like the copies were just so riddled with copying errors that it can’t ever be gtrusted- and nothing could be further from the truth

Here’s a link going over just some of how seriously scribes took their work- and it is apparent that the claim that the bible is full of copying errors is just an ignorant accusation

http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13356-scribes

I would encourage you to do some actual unbiased objective research into just how seriously the scribes took their work- You owe it to them to find out the actual truth since you’ve insulted their intelligence and questioned their integrity and or copying skills- Had you been so careful and taken the efforts that these scribes did to make sure there were no mistakes, I don’t think you’d appreciate that years later people called into question your skills when the evidence actually supports that you did a good job

[Bob434]

sorry that hsoudl have read that when the word ‘God’ was transcribed/copied, the pen must be newly dipped in ink- not thrown out-

[TBP]

By comparing texts, you see the differences. (And yes, a number of them are simple transcription errors, as if you wrote a small h for a small n.) Not everyone has the best handwriting.

And there are insertions and deletions found by comparing the actual texts too.

[Bob434]

like I said, you obviously don't know much about the scribes and how seriously they took their jobs- it behooves you to research their work to discover for yourself that they did not write small h's for n's, nor did they delete or insert anything- They were strictly forbidden from adding or deleting anything and even from commenting on what they were transcribing If you want to make the case that later bible translators made minor mistakes In translating greek and Hebrew etc when putting together the various books of the bible- then that we can agree on however, These came much later and most of those mistakes are so minor as to matter very little to the actual contexts of the word, and those mistakes do nothing to undermine the infallibility of the word of God. I listed a link to a site which refutes many of the skeptic's assertions that the bible is 'riddled with errors'- the fact is that very few errors actually occurred, The earliest copies of the written word were actual word for word copies- - they were done by highly skilled and highly dedicated copiers who devoted their lives to making sure they made no errors

[TBP]

Again, not reconcilable.

[TBP]

Actually, not at all. Looking without the lens of “sola scriptura”, you find lots of thigns that contradict other details. Some are small, some are not as small.