Who do you think wrote the first Gospel?

[Joe_Kelley]

As Chesterton said of the Missing Link, The most important fact is that it is missing.

 

[paul_c]

I wish people would stop saying that all scholars want is to make an name for themselves.
That is an anti-intellectual prejudice. It is insulting. It is wrong.

Scholars study out of passion for their subject and because they want to advance study in their area.

We are Catholics! We are supposed to use our intellects. Now an intellectual can be wrong, but this does not make the intellectual endeavour wrong.

Our Pope is an intellectual, and he is consistently challenging us to use our intellects.

As one of my best theology profs kept telling the seminarians: Christ died to take away our sins, not our brains.

And the intellect is not the natural enemy of Tradition either. Tradition should hand on (tradere) the Truth, and truth is what the intellect seeks.

You are right, that was a cynical view of scholarship. But it should also be said that not all scholarship is equally good, or equally well motivated. Not all scholars are motivated by a simple desire to learn, some clearly have agendas and biases. The Jesus seminar, for example, starts out with the premise that supernatural signs are to be excluded as myth in their search for the historical Jesus and judge the Gospel saying as authentic based on their votes. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to understand the credibility of the scholars in question. To me, those that align themselves opposite the traditions of the church don’t have much inherent credibility. Its hard to understand how they think they are more intelligent or more inspired than the church fathers or absent, some amazingly profound archeological find, can gain more understanding 2000 years removed from the events than those that lived them.

 

[triumphguy]

Well we all have biases: we are biased towards the Catholic Church.

What we need to do is argue from the facts as we know them rather than discredit the other side.

And we should not be afraid to say: while there is no proof of X Y or Z I believe it because… A B or C.

 

[patrick457]

Well we all have biases: we are biased towards the Catholic Church.

What we need to do is argue from the facts as we know them rather than discredit the other side.

And we should not be afraid to say: while there is no proof of X Y or Z I believe it because… A B or C.