Evidence for God from Science

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:Hey, one of my professors has a chapter for us to read from Jesus and Christianity by L. Michael White, a professor who teaches at my university, and I was wondering if anyone could give me stuff to refute his childish antics...one of them being that Jesus didn't come to start a religion, then he talks about the Q document and talking about similarities between 2nd and 3rd gospels...etc, etc, you can read a review on amazon for more stuff...

The second element of New Testament scholarship on Jesus that I expected to find in the Jesus Seminar was faithful reliance on the criterion of dissimilarity. This criterion was developed by New Testament scholars in the middle of the 20th century, as a response to the hyper-skepticism that dominated studies of Jesus at that time. Whereas many scholars argued that we couldn't really know if Jesus actually said anything attributed to him in the gospels, other critical scholars devised a way to show how certain sayings almost surely came from Jesus himself. This way was the criterion of dissimilarity. It ran something like this: If a saying of Jesus doesn't sound like something in Jesus's Jewish culture or religion, and if it doesn't sound like something that was common in the early Christian church, then it may well have come from Jesus himself.

Let me provide a couple of examples. Today I'll draw from the "Rules of Written Evidence" section. Tomorrow I'll focus on the "Rules of Oral Evidence." The "Rules of Written Evidence" have to do with what the gospel writers did (or supposedly did) with the oral traditions and written sources at their disposal. The "Rules of Oral Evidence" concern the way the sayings of Jesus were passed down by word of mouth before they were written down.

Here are two (of twelve) of the "Rules of Written" evidence that helped the Jesus Seminar to judge the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus:

• Words borrowed from the fund of common lore or the Greek scriptures are often put on the lips of Jesus.

• The evangelists frequently attribute their own statements to Jesus.

Both of these "rules" fall in the general category entitle "False attribution" (pp. 22-23). They explain how the gospel writers attribute certain sayings to Jesus that he did not actually say. The ideas embodied in these "rules" are familiar to anyone who has read much of secular New Testament scholarship. They're not original or, to me, unexpected.

But what astounded me was that these "rules" were established before the examination of the gospels actually took place. These were meant to be rules that guided inquiry. But in fact they look much more like results of inquiry, not the rules of evidence. How, I wonder, did the Fellows know that "the evangelists frequently attribute their own statements to Jesus" before they evaluated the evidence of the gospels? It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or a New Testament scholar, to realize that this is impossible, unless one completely begs the question and makes unproven assumptions about what Jesus said.

Ask yourself: Is it possible to know that "words borrowed from the fund of common lore or the Greek scriptures are often put on the lips of Jesus" before you evaluate the actual evidence of the gospels themselves? Of course not. Can't be done. It is possible, after evaluating the evidence, to conclude that the gospel writers put sayings on the lips of Jesus. But you simply can't know this prior to investigating the text, unless you assume your conclusion at the beginning. And that's exactly what the Jesus Seminar did.

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:Why? Because the members of the Jesus Seminar find what they set out to find. They believe that there is only natural...therefore, they find that the Gospels are in error, which just happens to confirm that Jesus wasn't God (circular reasoning?)...Then, there methodology is so silly. I mean, how do they determine what Jesus said? 1) It can't sound Christian, and 2) it can't sound Jewish...but what kind of test is that? Jesus was Jewish, and Jesus was in fact the founder of Christianity. Then they are the buggers that refer to the non-existant Q document...but it's just cherry picking, they'll show you similarities between the 2nd and 3rd gospels, because they do exist...but they ignore all the verses that aren't mirror images, or even close to, mirror images of each other.

And then to top off the idiocy, they say that the Gospel of Thomas is just as reliable as the other four...even though it was written a century later.

How they determine what Jesus said:

The second element of New Testament scholarship on Jesus that I expected to find in the Jesus Seminar was faithful reliance on the criterion of dissimilarity. This criterion was developed by New Testament scholars in the middle of the 20th century, as a response to the hyper-skepticism that dominated studies of Jesus at that time. Whereas many scholars argued that we couldn't really know if Jesus actually said anything attributed to him in the gospels, other critical scholars devised a way to show how certain sayings almost surely came from Jesus himself. This way was the criterion of dissimilarity. It ran something like this: If a saying of Jesus doesn't sound like something in Jesus's Jewish culture or religion, and if it doesn't sound like something that was common in the early Christian church, then it may well have come from Jesus himself.

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:http://www.westarinstitute.org/Fellows/fellows.html

If any names at the bottom look familiar....