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To: Diamond
Diamond. Many, many thanks. Do you have a source for the Colson quote? He Is Risen! xzins
15 posted on 03/26/2002 7:02:48 AM PST by xzins
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To: xzins
The truly funny thing is that this guy claims that one can't believe anything written about the historical Jesus because he claims that the earliest written thing dates from 150 years after his purported life (though this isn't true). Yet, there are virtually NO other sources of ancient history that are anywhere as close to the events they describe as the New Testament documents but their descriptions of events are taken as reliable history. The clue to this guy's approach is this statement he made: Miracles do not happen. Stories of miracles are untrue. He has made an assumption that he is unable to support. He can only assert. His conclusion that stories about miracles are untrue simply does not follow because his premise is defective. There are many stories about miracles. The question is whether they actually happened or not. To decide this one must judge the character of those who claim to have witnessed them. In Paul's case, he claimed to have talked to the resurrected Jesus. He said that there were also hundreds of others still living at the time whom they could talk to. This author's method of dealing with this? He simply asserts that Paul didn't exist or that if he did, he didn't really know the Jesus people claim he was talking about. After all, Paul didn't talk about Jesus changing water to wine. Of course, he did speak about the central miracle about Jesus and to which all the other miracles he was said to have performed pointed: he rose from the dead. But then since this was a miracle, then it couldn't have happened since miracles cannot happen. The author has started out by determining what he doesn't want to believe and then accepts or rejects whatever he has to in order to preserve his belief system. This isn't rational behavior; it's fideism at its worse.
58 posted on 03/26/2002 3:04:45 PM PST by aruanan
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