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[Phys-L] Re: god friendly science



At 14:36 -0400 5/20/05, Aaron Titus wrote:

My point was to define a Christian (and the way that I'm using
the term) and lay out the fact that the educated Christian believes
in the credibility of the eyewitness testimony and that this is
different than "blind faith."

But do we really have "eyewitness testimony" of Jesus? I am not a
biblical scholar, but I read that the consensus of those learned
types is that the earliest accounts of Jesus' life were not written
until at least 70 years after his death, making it unlikely that
those writers were even born at the time Jesus walked the Earth. In
fact I am also told that there are not even any documented Roman
records of Jesus' existence. If the above are true then what evidence
we have of Jesus' life is at best hearsay evidence. Hardly an
"eyewitness account."

If the evidence for Jesus is in fact hearsay, then the faith of the
believer, while perhaps not quite "blind," is hardly evidence-based.

That such a myth could grow up in only a generation or two is not
surprising given the times. The society of the day was apparently
pretty corrupt, both the Roman rulers and the Jewish leadership,
which had made an accommodation with the Romans. The religions of the
day were pretty much limited to the elites, but this new sect,
attributed to the man Jesus, was open to all, even the humblest of
the humble, and as such became attractive, and gained adherents. Many
of these people were illiterate and so the word was not passed by
written documents but by word of mouth, by people who would have had
good reason to embellish their tales in order to attract new
adherents from among the poor and uneducated--precisely those most
likely to accept the stories told them more or less uncritically,
especially if the stories promised them a life better than the one
they were living at the time, even if they had to die to experience
it.

So I am hard-pressed to see that there is evidence of the life and
works of Jesus than can stand up to careful scrutiny.

But faith does not require evidence.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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