Originally Posted by Tock
My "Haley's Bible Handbook" (a standard reference book for fundamentalists) says the gospels were written in:
68 AD for Matthew
60-70 AD for Mark
60 AD for Luke
90 AD for John
Considering that the event is reputed to have happened in 30 AD, you can see that by the most charitable assessments, the gospels were written some 30 to 60 years after the actual events. Considering how most people were illiterate back then, and how people are prone to "pump up" stories about celebrities, given the length of time until things were written down, and given the lack of the sorts of verification and double-checking methods used in modern journalism, my guess is that there is a significant difference between what actually happened and what got written down.
What is fun is to ask a fundamentalist who wrote the first 5 books of the Bible, and who wrote them. Moses is supposed to have written them, or at least, this is the "traditional" view.
A note from Halley's Handbook:
"The modern critical view is that it is a composite work of various schools of priests, made about the 8th century BC, for partisan purposes, based on oral traditions, the principal redactors of which are called "J", "E," and "P." And although the critics differ widely among themselves as to just which sections to assign to these respective editors, the theory is put forth under the specious claim that it is the "assured result" of "modern scholarship." According to theis view, it is not real history, but only a "patchwork picked out of a rag bag of scattered legends."
Yah, they don't think too much of "modern scholarship," and go on to explain how Moses could very well have written the books in question. Only thing is, "modern scholarship" is based on the best fragments of the oldest documents in existance, and the Halley's Handbook authors are clinging to nothing more than "tradition."
Moses supposedly wrote the account of his leading over half the population out of Egypt and the subsequent decimation of the Egyption pharaoh's army. But, there is no corroborating mention of these cataclysmic events in any of the then-contemporary writings, and they are plentiful. The only place this story occurrs is in the Old Testament of the Hebrews.
So . . . if the "Exodus" account in the Old Testament is nothing more than myth, can other parts of the Bible be "fiction" as well?
To anyone with a lick of common sense, the answer would be yes, of course. But . . . to anyone taught that the Bible is 100% inerrant, 100% true, 100% accurate, and 100% the Word of God, such an admission would be heresy, and would amount to them saying that the entire Bible was NOT the Inerrant Word Of God, and because of this attachment to the "Inerrancy Doctrine," you will find many fundamentalists clinging to the certainty of the Bible's account of the Exodus fable even though there is a conspicuous absence of evidence that such a thing ever happened.
Ya, I can explain why the Noah's Ark story is only a fable, but you will find fundamentalists clinging to the fiction with so much certitude that they not only beleive Noah existed 6000 years ago, but that he had dinosaurs on the ark with all the other animals (Institute for Creation Research) . . .
And then these fundamentalists, so wedded to their Bible fictions, insist that young school children be taught this stuff as fact in public schools. Imagine what would happn to American Education if they suceed. Kids grow up thinking the Earth is only 6500 years old, that dinosaurs lived 6000 years ago, that evolution is "the devil's doctrine." Now, put a generation of minds thusly trained against a generation of Chinese, Korean, Indian, and European minds trained in mathematics, modern biology, geology, languages, etc. Which cultures would you think would be better prepared to compete in technological endeavors?
Hah . . .
Anyway, back to the topic at hand . . .
The bible is not a reliable text for much of anything.
Yah, that about sums it up . . .
-Tock
