Re: Biblical Interpretation Reconsidered

Don Winterstein wrote:

>  <?xml:namespace prefix="v" /><?xml:namespace prefix="o"
> />Alexanian wrote: "If you claim that there are all sorts of
> possibilities, then you are indicating that Scripture is untrue and so
> Jesus is not the Son of God. Where would you ever get the notion of
> Jesus being the Son of God if it is not from Scripture?" Perhaps it
> would help to take a broader perspective here. Many if not all
> religions with ancient roots have scriptures with stories that sound
> far-fetched. Why is this? Presumably not all these stories are true;
> yet many people have accepted them as cornerstones of their
> faith. Example: A Buddhist text (Lalitavistara) maintains that the
> Buddha planted himself in his mother's womb in the form of an
> elephant. Eventually he exited the womb through his mother's side,
> not down the birth canal. At his birth he was a human baby. Later on
> stone statues of Hindu gods bowed down to him. These tidbits and many
> more are depicted in stone bas-relief at the Buddhist monument of
> Borobudur in Java. How does such stuff get written? How does it get
> accepted? The fact is that it does, and it's common. So in the
> writing of the gospels, could there have been something of this same
> sort of impetus at work? If not, why not? If we don't understand why
> this kind of thing appears commonly in religious literature of all
> sorts, can we assume it didn't happen with the New Testament? We can't
> just assume it didn't happen, but I think we can make compelling
> arguments that it's unlikely to have introduced serious
> contamination. But our conclusions will not be obvious to everyone,
> and they never will be. There's a well-known human tendency to
> exaggerate. Can we say that the NT contains no exaggerations
> whatever? What if John, for example, stretched things just a bit? If
> you take everything John wrote in his gospel (assuming he wrote it) as
> the "gospel truth," then you're right: the choice is between black and
> white. But because John (or whoever) was a human, we can at least
> imagine that he wrote his gospel in a human way; and a human way, when
> you're writing religion, is to include stuff that seems far-fetched,
> stuff that very likely never happened.
>

Again, I am not a theologian but I think that the NT makes the position
pretty clear. The opinion that Jesus was the son of God (and that he
said so) was not just something said by John. I did a search in
http://www.biblegateway.org/cgi-bin/bible for that phase. It appears in
all Gospels and other NT writings. So it would take more than one
person's exaggerating. A "conspiracy" would be more like it. (MHO)

Walt

===================================
Walt Hicks <wallyshoes@mindspring.com>

In any consistent theory, there must
exist true but not provable statements.
(Godel's Theorem)

You can only find the truth with logic
If you have already found the truth
without it. (G.K. Chesterton)
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Received on Sun Dec 21 14:52:50 2003