John Dominic Crossan, co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, which is an organization residing on the theological left, has claimed that the Gospel of Peter was the product of a complex evolution. The earliest layer of the Gospel was a hypothetical source called the “Cross Gospel.” Crossan argued that this early layer served as the only written source for the narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. After the production of the NT Gospels, a later editor inserted material from the four Gospels into the Cross Gospel. An even later editor noticed tensions between the original and newer material in this patchwork gospel and polished up the document.
Although Crossan’s theory has convinced few in the scholarly community, one scholar recently claimed “one can expect that all future research on Gos. Pet. will need to begin with a serious consideration of Crossan’s work” (Paul A. Mirecki, “Gospel of Peter,” ABD 5:278-81, esp. 280). If true, Crossan’s theory would have a devastating effect on confidence in the historical reliability of the accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection in the four Gospels. According to Crossan’s theory, the sole source for the accounts of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection in the four Gospels was a document that was already so laced with legend as to be wholly unreliable even before it reached the hands of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The four Gospels would be unreliable adaptations of an unreliable tradition replete with talking floating crosses and a super-sized Jesus whose head bumped the heavens when he walked out of the tomb!
Thomas, or Gnosticism more generally, can at first glance appear more "enlightened" from a modern (or postmodern) perspective than parts of the New Testament. But if one is going to accept a Gnostic world view, one has to take all of it. And the final saying of this enigmatic Gospel has Peter telling Jesus and the other disciples, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus replies, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Modern appropriations of Thomas seldom incorporate this perspective! Indeed, Thomas can appear superior to the canonical Gospels only by highly selective usage of its teachings. Despite what some may claim, it does not open any significant window into first-century Christian history and origins, only into its later corruption.
It is true that God's law and God's word last forever.
Indeed, three criteria prevailed for sifting the canonical from the non-canonical. First and foremost was apostolicity—authorship by an apostle or a close associate of an apostle—which thus, for all practical purposes, limited the works to the first hundred years or so of Christian history. Second was orthodoxy or non-contradiction with previously revealed Scripture, beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians came to call the Old Testament. Finally, the early church used the criterion of catholicity—universal (or at least extremely widespread) usage and relevance throughout the church. This excluded, for example, the Gnostic writings, which were accepted only in the sects from which they emanated.
While Catholics and Protestants to this day disagree on the canon of the Old Testament, both branches of Christianity along with Eastern Orthodoxy agree on the contents of the New. For sixteen centuries there has been no significant controversy within Christianity regarding the extent of the New Testament canon. Christians are on solid ground in affirming that these twenty-seven books belong in the New Testament and that other ancient writings were excluded for good reason.
Can the major contours of the portraits of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels be trusted? Many critics would argue not. The Jesus Seminar became the best-known collection of such critics during the 1990s as they alleged that only 18 percent of the sayings ascribed to Jesus and 16 percent of his deeds as found in the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, plus the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, bore any close relationship to what he actually said and did. At the same time, a much more representative cross-section of scholars from about 1980 to the present has inaugurated what has come to be called the Third Quest of the Historical Jesus, in which a greater optimism is emerging about how much we can know, from the Gospels, read in light of other historical cultural developments of the day.
But first-century Judaism was an oral culture, steeped in the educational practice of memorization. Some rabbis had the entire Hebrew Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) committed to memory. Memorizing and preserving intact the amount of information contained in one Gospel would not have been hard for someone raised in this kind of culture who valued the memories of Jesus' life and teaching as sacred.
The Bible is a collection of many kinds of documents written over a period of about fifteen hundred years. Beginning with the composition of the first five books (the Pentateuch), the sixty-six total documents were completed by the end of the first century A.D. They were composed in the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages in various geographical settings and different historical periods. Archaeological discoveries relating to these settings and periods have enlightened the cultural context in which many of the recorded events occurred and enhanced the credibility of the Biblical record, both the Old and New Testament periods. For example, many events recorded in the last one hundred years of this period of biblical history, during which the New Testament documents were written, have been illuminated through significant archaeological discoveries. Following are some of these impressive finds. Space limitations will not allow discussion of the fourteen hundred years of Old Testament sites.
Which evangelical would not like a clean harmony between the two records of Judas’ demise, uniform parallel accounts of Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus, or an outright excision of the census by Quirinius? And who would not prefer that in Mark 2.26 Jesus did not speak of David’s violation of the temple as occurring during the days of “Abiathar the high priest”? These are significantly larger problems for inerrancy than the few, isolated textual problems—and they are not in passages that are capable of facile text-critical solutions.
"This chapter addresses a popular argument that is used against those who hold to an inerrant Bible. Essentially, the argument is posed as a question: How can you claim to have an inerrant original text when we don't even have the original text? On its face, this argument has seemed so compelling that some people never get beyond it. This chapter will show what are the underlying assumptions behind this question and why they are fallacious."
Today, when someone opens any English Bible (NKJV, NASB, NIV, ESV, TNIV, HCSB), he or she may know that generations of faithful scholarship have managed to preserve and protect that Bible as it was originally given.
One can say that Paul was a catalyst which helped lead the Jesus movement out of Judaism and into being its own religious group. Paul was not the inventor of Christianity, but in some senses he was its midwife, being most responsible for there being a large number of Gentiles entering this sectarian group and not on the basis of becoming Jews first (i.e. having to keep kosher, be circumcised, keeping the Sabbath) which in turn changed the balance of power in the movement everywhere in the empire except in the Holy Land.
At the end of the day, Paul's view of the Mosaic law and whether it should be imposed on Christians most clearly reveals that Paul understood that being in Christ meant something more and something different from being "in Judaism". This is why in an elaborate argument in Galatians Paul compares the Mosaic law to a child minder or a nanny, who was meant to oversee the people of God until they came of age, but now that Jesus has come they are not under that supervisor any more (see Gal. 4). Paul even goes so far as to say that one of the main reasons Jesus came born under the law was to redeem those under the law out from under its sway (see Gal. 4:5). Those under the law are seen as being in bondage to it, until Christ came and redeemed them. Now this is clearly enough sectarian language, the language of a split-off group from Judaism. Paul insists in Galatians 2:21 that a person could be set right, or kept right with God by the observance of the Mosaic law then "Christ died for nothing." He even urges his converts "every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law" (Gal. 5:3 NIV). This is also why, in a salvation historical argument in 2 Corinthians 3:7-18 he speaks of the Mosaic law, and even the Ten Commandments, as a glorious anachronism, something which was glorious in its day, but which is rapidly becoming obsolete.
In the end, one can say that Paul was a shepherd leading God's people in new directions and through uncharted waters to a new promised land where Jew and Gentile would be united in Christ on the very same basis and with the very same discipleship requirements. Though Paul did not call this end result Christianity, he more than any other of the original apostles was responsible for the birthing of the form of community which was to become the early church. Though he did not invent its doctrines or even its ethics, he most consistently applied its truths until a community that comported with these truths emerged.
According to Romans chapter one, God has made some of his invisible attributes known through the world in which we live. The stars, the sun, the moon, the ocean, and many other wonders of nature were not the work of a bull, a horse, a calf, or a man. These are the products of a cosmic designer of immense intelligence. In Romans chapter 2, Paul tells us that God has instilled basic knowledge of his moral laws in our conscience, so that, instinctively, we know that actions such as rape, murder, stealing, and falsehood are immoral. We all are accountable to God for immoral actions we have committed of varying degrees. Theologians refer to this type of knowledge as general revelation. In other words, given our universe and our conscience, we should be aware that a God of some sort exists and that we have failed to live up to his moral law.
Let’s summarize. We’ve faced the difficult questions pertaining to the fate of those who die without ever having heard the gospel as well as that of babies and the mentally handicapped who lack the mental capacity to understand the gospel. Since the Bible does not directly address either of these questions, speculation pertaining to possible solutions is our only course of action. However, we may look at other situations in which God has acted and get a glimpse into his character. We observed two divine principles: (1) God judges us according to our response to the knowledge about him we are given. At minimal, this knowledge consists of the fact that there is a Creator to whom we will stand accountable for our moral failures. (2) God does not hold accountable those who lack the mental capacity to choose between good and evil.
Throughout this essay, I will not assume the inspiration or even the reliability of the New Testament writings, though I think these doctrines rest on strong grounds. I will refer almost exclusively to those data that are so well attested that they impress even the vast majority of non-evangelical scholars. Each point is confirmed by impressive data, even though I can do no more than offer an outline of these reasons.
We must be clear from the outset that not only do contemporary scholars not mind when points are taken from the New Testament writings, but they do so often. The reason is that confirmed data can be used anywhere it is found.
Response 1: "We did tests. Here are the results. Judge for yourself."
Response 2: "Shut up, or we'll set the lawyers on you."
1) Who do YOU say Jesus was?I answered both, but the first question is the one relevant to this post, and my answer to that was:
2) Do you deny the resurrection?
1) It seems likely that Jesus was an itinerant preacher who developed a considerable local following, to the extent that he annoyed the established religion of the time, which got rid of him in an effort to preserve the status quo.This still seems to me to be a reasonable interpretation of the story we have of Jesus. There are some who deny Jesus existed at all; others suggest that the popular account is a melding of stories of a number of different preachers who were around at the time.
"...imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise."
The story, theoretically plausible, says that if enough monkeys pound out random letters long enough, all of the great texts in history will eventually result. If enough monkeys pound out random letters for a long enough time, all of the great texts, such as Moby Dick (1,170,200 characters), Grimms Tales (1,435,800 characters) and the King James Bible (3,556,480 letters not including spaces) will eventually result. The finiteness of the closed universe, however, prohibits this. (p 93.)
The necessary information, which expresses itself as molecular complexity, simply cannot be developed by chance and necessity but requires an intelligent cause, an intelligent designer, a Creator God. (p 67)