I know some folks who do this with the most fundamental (and profoundly important!) questions of life–like, does God exist? do I love this person enough to marry her?
I don’t expect (and neither do you) anyone to spend much time investigating the credentials of Qantas pilots because they are flying to Bali. And it’s not something I would do myself (and neither would you).
But if something is important to each of us, then indeed it would be odd to treat it lightly. If you are thinking of moving house, or even state or country, or getting a different job, right up to the big ones such as lifetime commitments and children (and a commitment to God), then I would expect anyone contemplating any of these to think very long and hard about them.
But it would be fascinating to examine what you use as your canon for determining the veracity of the particular items.
I suspect that one of your criteria might be: “If it’s found in another text then I might believe it’s true.” Yes? For example, in the Annals of Tacitus, he mentions that a man named Jesus was executed by a man named Pontius Pilate. Does that give credence to what is in the NT, then?
That account sounds quite credible to me, so I tend to believe that there was someone named Jesus. But hopefully not sounding too trite, I’ll go back to the Papillion book where vast chunks of dialogue are written in quotes and you are expected to accept that it is all verbatim. It’s a great story but do you really expect me to believe that it happened exactly as written? Of course not.
In an earlier post, Unioman suggested that John’s report of Jesus was entirely credible. But am I expected to believe that Jesus said exactly that at that time exactly as was written? And that He said it not once or twice, but three times?
If it was meant to be taken as a story about what someone called Jesus probably did or might have done, then it might be acceptable in some way. But it is meant, as Unioman said, to be taken literally. And maybe he didn’t know, but not only is that not credible by any stretch of the imagination, but the authorship of the Gospel itself is far from being certain. In fact, the majority of scholars suggest it was written by more than one person decades after the events described.
I can’t recall who I was talking to last month, let alone what was said, let alone be in a position to accurately quote it.
So taking perhaps one of the more important canonical gospels and reaching, for me, the conclusion that it cannot be trusted as even a reasonably accurate record of what happened and it’s downhill all the way from there.
I’m reading ‘What It Takes - The Way To The White House’ about the '88 presidential campaign. This is a story of what really are ordinary men aiming for an extraordinary position. And the process they and their families have to go through. What might be surprising, although not so much for a cynic like me, is how these men need to be portrayed to the public to even get close to being in the race, let alone get their eyes on the prize.
A brief encounter with a racist café owner becomes a young life spent fighting for equal rights (‘I remember one time in this restaurant…’). Years spent shortchanging farmers for oil rich lands and pocketing millions becomes a fight for America’s independence from the Middle East. Joining the marines being one of the vary few options open save a lifetime working the land becomes doing your part to protect American Values.
The point being, if you want to put someone in a good light, because you think he’s a good man, or you think others should think it or someone else thinks it, then the truth takes a back seat. Hyperbole is the order of the day. Third hand ‘He might have’ becomes first hand ‘I did’. A few interested passersby become crowds of supporters. Polite applause becomes a standing ovation. A rambling speech becomes wide ranging. One to half a dozen uninterested people becomes intimate. Over excited becomes passionate.
And all this in recent memory. All that spin. All that fluff. All those reporters and cameras and tapes, newspapers and magazine articles and most people still had no idea of the person behind the hype.
Now find some scraps of parchment about what happened in an illiterate part of the world two thousand years ago and tell me that what I have in my KJV is an accurate account of those times.
