millionman said:
Kraft, the gospels do agree with the lineage of Jesus. What would you suppose they do not agree on? He is of the House of David born to the virgin Mary, as was prophecied about.
Read Matthew 1:1-17, then check Luke 3: 23-38 These geneologies do not match up. Given both include David so as to fulfill that prophecy, very few other decendents match.
You would not include this in your story as it does not emanate power or authority.
That's questionable, I might like to make my characters have emotions. So that they may be scared or betray friends. I think this is just a lot of speculation. My main point here is that with the verse carry over from the OT, many times verbatim, the likelyhood of it just being a retelling to fulfill prophesy goes up.
I would record a dead saint's visit, but that's just me. That the gospels make no mention of who the saints were and what became of them makes it suspicious.
I was under the impression that the gospels were written ~60-120 AD, not 33-65. The connection to John the baptist,
Hydromax, I'll have to look into that.
The Gospels are to be accepted as accurate by the historical standards set by academics world wide because the biography of Alexander the great is accepted as 66% accurate by the current standard although there is one complete copy and about 1500 partial copies.
Comparing Alexander the Great and Jesus doesn't really work. Claims of AtG are that he was man, who conquered much land, did battle and later died. These are things that men do, so I can accept that he likely did such things and the historic AtG at least resembles the one written about. As for Jesus, curing the blind and lepers w/o medicine, virgin birth, walking on water and rising from the dead among other things are not what men can do. So accepting a historical version of that is much harder. If you want to prove that a man named Jesus was alive, that shouldn't be hard, there were many with the name at the time, but to say the bible Jesus existed takes a stretch of the imagination.
As for standards in history, it is not my area of study, so I'm unaware of their subtleties.
Why did you find Strobel's work to be poor?
I didn't like his playing naive on things, interviewing people to mine for quotes then forming ad hoc conclusions. His whole, 'if evolution is false, God wins by default' thing doesn't go over. A 'theory' such as ID or creationism, can't stand on evidence against a theory, it must have positive evidence of its own. If you want to send the book to me, if you think it's good I'd read it (send a PM). As for him being an atheist, I kind of doubt it. The way he approached case for a creator, it seemed more like he was someone who had drifted from the faith, but was still a theist.
I could not conclude that He did not exist but that He in fact existed, but it was another issue altogether to accept Him as Lord, and that is individual and personal.
I agree here, accepting that a miracle worker named Jesus existed v. him being the son of god, and the Christian God existing are another matter.
How would you explain the Apostle Paul's transition from being a Jewish Pharisee and persecuting Christians, then to being the greatest advocate of Jesus Christ?
I don't know, I haven't thought much about it.
To be honest, I just started getting into theology in the passed 6 months, so I'm still quite lacking in knowledge. Raised a Christian, currently an agnostic atheist (lack of knowledge, no belief) to most god concepts, while positive atheist to many others (such as say, Zeus).
