Raf

Actually, there is. The Luke of Colossians 4:14 is someone who was close to Paul. The writer of Acts is someone who flagrantly contradicts Paul on more than one occasion, crucially. So it's really unlikely that the author of Acts got his information from Paul. If he did, you would expect him to agree with Paul a bit more closely. Hilariously, the portion of what you wrote that I highlighted in bold is the polar opposite of Ehrman's conclusion. Ehrman concludes: "But there’s little reason to think he was Paul’s traveling companion and virtually no reason, in my opinion, to think that he was a physician named Luke." How have you brought yourself to cite Ehrman to reach the exact opposite conclusion of Ehrman? This is true, but by the time Luke is writing, most of the original sources of this information are dead. Now we've gone from speculating to declaring the speculation true by fiat. In the preceding sentence, it is not clear whether the sources are oral, written or both. Suddenly, it's emphatic that he has both. This, of course, assumes "he" is Luke in the first place, so you're now building one piece of speculation on another. This is not scholarship.

Of the three people you cite, only Ehrman walks away unscathed in the bias department. Alone among the three, Ehrman went into his research intending to prove tradition and changing his mind because the evidence led him elsewhere. ----- No, it's a statement of objective content (note, I left out "doctrinal," because "doctrinal" is not relevant to bias in this context). A serious, unbiased scholar goes where the evidence leads. He does not lead the evidence to where he wants to go. Yes, everyone has biases, but you can check those as you write, and most scholars are very, very good at that. Not at all. I am saying I have examined enough scholarship concerning the authorship of the gospels to the point that I am confident in declaring that anyone who believes Matthew wrote Matthew, Mark wrote Mark, Luke wrote Luke-Acts and John wrote John cannot be taken seriously. I absolutely stand by that, and modern scholarship agrees with me overwhelmingly (remove the "preachers" from the ranks of "scholars" and "overwhelmingly" approaches "unanimously"). How about the scholar who concludes without hesitation that Luke did not write Luke, and that whoever did write it was not a companion of Paul? How about him? He agrees with me. Which strongly implies what he explicitly states elsewhere: The author of Luke is not "Luke." BAM! Stop right there. That's where scholarship stops and speculation begins. Well, there you go. "Tradition" is not "scholarship." There is no "scholarship" from patristic times holding that author to be an apostolic companion named Luke. That is tradition, and it is a tradition that post-dates the writing of the gospel by, oh, about a century. As already mentioned, there's no evidence anyone taught from earliest times that the author WAS Luke. Or anyone else. The author of Luke was anonymous. You cannot conclude that it was a man named "Luke" just because no one said otherwise! That's not scholarship. That's embracing tradition for tradition's sake.

If you're asking me to produce a list of scholars who agree with Ehrman on this, it will take me some time to compile it. You can start with Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz. Then there's Eugene Boring, who, not surprisingly, uses Ehrman's language in referring to the author as "Luke" as a matter of convenience. He writes: "The problematic historical value of patristic data regarding authorship of New Testament documents means the burden of proof is on advocates of its reliability." In other words, "there's no evidence to suggest it wasn't Luke" is insufficient to conclude that it WAS. But that's just one author of "An Introduction to the New Testament: History, Literature, Theology." You can look these folks up on Amazon. Let me know if you need more. I'm really just stalling for time while trying to post on the other thread.

From the God-breathed thread: I'll agree with that. Not that I missed the mark, but everything else you wrote. SNIP I need to stop to ask you here, with an apology, where you are receiving this scholarly training. I apologize because I know you have mentioned it, but I have not committed that to memory. I'd like to know the name of the school and the particular degree program. True. However, two things need to be said: First, when a source is concealed, the information provided by that source needs to be corroborated elsewhere. Otherwise, in ethical journalism, the information cannot be used without jeopardizing the reputation of the reporter. Now, sometimes a reporter will be willing to take that risk. But when he does so, he knows it is HIS integrity on the line. For example, we once obtained the blood alcohol content of someone who had been involved in an accident. The source could not be exposed publicly, or he would lose his job. But ANY source that divulged the information would have lost his job, so there was no way to verify it. What we did was, we reported it anyway, indicating we had a source but refusing to divulge it. Then we waited. And when we weren't sued for libel, we knew that the risk we took in reporting unverified information paid off. This does not happen in historical scholarship because the need to protect sources is generally not there. Darrell Bock is a scholar, but he is far from unbiased. This is not to say that what he writes can't be trusted. It's just biased. The man's an evangelical. He's not going to say "Luke didn't write Luke." He's not going to say Paul didn't write all the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. He's going to defend tradition. The fact that he's writing an exegetical commentary tells you all you need to know. Historians don't write exegetical commentaries. That is the work of a preacher, not a historian. AND THAT'S FINE. You just need to know that going in, and treat his conclusions accordingly. To take another example, Walter Cummins. Walter Cummins was a sharp cookie (still is, I assume). And we could learn a lot from him when he writes about textual variants and such. But I will never expect him to conclude that Jesus is God. Just won't happen. Just like I won't expect Darrell Bock to conclude Jesus is not God. Not gonna happen. So I'm not trying to insult Bock. I just take his traditional conclusions with a grain of salt if/when the evidence is contrary to the conclusion, as it is in the case of the authorship and research of Luke. The man is writing as a preacher, and probably a very good one, but not a historian. To be clear here, Ehrman agrees with me. "Luke" did not write Luke, nor was the author of Luke a companion of Paul. That you cite him only bolsters my position. Associate professor of Biblical Studies at Anderson University, a Christian college, described in her online bio as a scholar, preacher and author. Again, not unbiased.

Are you saying the scholarly consensus is not behind Ehrman on the issues I raised? Not even up for debate. Sorry. I only argue matters that are up for debate. You can say he's wrong, but you can't say the scholarly consensus on the authorship of the gospels disagrees with Ehrman.

Did Matthew write Matthew? Did Mark write Mark? Did Luke write Luke? Did John write John? Did Moses write Genesis (spoiler alert: probably not)? While we were discussing Steve Lortz' excellent question about the impact of the presence of errors and contradictions in the Bible on the status of those books as "God-breathed," Steve and I became engaged in a side discussion about whether Luke wrote the gospel of Luke and Acts. Steve says yes (or would it be more fair to say "probably?") and I say no (or, more accurately, "probably not"). Different scholars approach the material in different ways. There is a right answer, but no one can lay claim to it with 100.0000% certainty. The Floor is Open.

In order to maintain the integrity of this thread, which is concerned with how the Bible can still be God-breathed even if (or, as I would claim, even THOUGH) it contains errors and contradictions, I will be starting a thread in Questioning Faith to explore the state of scholarship regarding Who Wrote the Bible. We can there go into any area you would like (gospels, epistles, Old Testament) without derailing the conversation about what it means for a work to be God-breathed.

As you probably well know, that is NOT all Bart Ehrman says about Luke in terms of authorship of the gospel and Acts. Ehrman reached the conclusion, with scholarly consensus behind him, that the author of Luke and Acts was 1. Not Luke and 2. Not a traveling companion of Paul. In Ehrman's own words: "But there’s little reason to think he was Paul’s traveling companion and virtually no reason, in my opinion, to think that he was a physician named Luke." http://ehrmanblog.org/summing-luke-luke-2/ Unfortunately, Ehrman's blog posts are behind a pay wall, so I can't easily link to most of his argument online. Nonetheless, it is hard to conclude that Ehrman has nothing further to say about the authorship of Luke-Acts just because he had nothing further to say about it in the single chapter you cite. More to the point, the fact that he is calling the author "Luke" for "convenience" implies that he does NOT believe Luke to be the author of those books, which he documents in detail elsewhere (maybe not in that chapter, but certainly in other works and, for a lay audience, in his book "Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible's Authors are Not Who We Think They Are"). Luke did not write the gospel. If you believe he did on the basis that no one has demonstrated otherwise, that's not scholarship. That's faith. And there's nothing wrong with that. But that's one of the reasons that I moved this thread from Questioning Faith. Because you're not. Which is fine. Regarding the gospel of Luke, you arrived at the conclusion that Luke interviewed Mary through pure, unadulterated speculation. There is not a scrap of evidence that he did so. In fact, there is good reason to believe otherwise (the anachronism of Jesus being born during the Quirinian census AND during the reign of Herod, historical events that were separated by as much as a decade, demonstrates that "Luke's" source was someone who would not have been aware of the conflict. Someone who was there would have been aware of the conflict. Mary was there. So either she did not know the circumstances of her son's birth, or she was not his source). This doesn't even take into account the absurdity of the Quirinian census as a plot device to move Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the birth of Christ (there was no requirement to go to where your ancestors lived for the census. What census does that? The whole point of a census is to determine where you are now, not where your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather lived a thousand years ago. I know, I'm short a few greats). As for the first few verses of Luke, I'll repeat what I said: "Luke" never claims to have interviewed witnesses. Read what YOU quoted: What is he saying? Other people have been writing things down that were handed to us by still other people. That, of course, is the definition of hearsay. But let's look at the rest of what he wrote as well: There is a claim to have investigated carefully, but there is no claim to have interviewed eyewitnesses. The only thing he is claiming is to have investigated what others have written, people who came before him. This makes sense when you think of WHEN Luke was writing. 80 AD. Decades after the events they portray. The vast majority of people discussed in the gospel are dead by then, and Mary would be among the OLDEST, at least in her 90s. That would have been an unusually long life at that time and place. Not saying it's impossible, but what IS impossible is to say with ANY degree of certainty that she absolutely was one of his sources. Peter? Dead. Paul? Dead. Most of the apostles by then, in fact, were dead (I'd venture to say "all" as a matter of probablity, but it's certainly possible some were alive. Regardless, Luke never claims to have interviewed them. His claim is to have reviewed the earlier accounts and composed a coherent story. So, in short, yes, I stand by both statements: Luke, the figure mentioned in Acts and the New Testament letters, did not write this gospel. And whoever did write it was not working off eyewitness testimony, except as it was allegedly passed down second and third hand from earlier writers.

Yes

yes

"You're not gonna fall for a banana in the tailpipe?"

I'll add there's no evidence of a historical Abraham and plenty of reason to suspect he is just as mythical as Adam. But whatever. I agree that Jesus the rabbi probably existed, but so much of what has been passed down about him is legend, midrash and nonsense that it's tough to discern what really happened in his life and what was made up to suit an agenda. The Virgin birth was made up to suit an agenda. There was no Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. And maybe he was born in Bethlehem, but how did he get there? The accounts in Matthew and Luke are mutually exclusive. One cannot have happened if the other did. When did the wedding at Cana take place? Read John. It's a couple of days after Jesus' baptism, right? JOHN HAD ACCESS TO THE PREVIOUS GOSPELS. He should have known full well that Jesus was fasting in the wilderness at that time. So either he wasn't, in which case Matthew, Mark and Luke are wrong, or he was, in which case John is wrong. I know! John time jumps! No he doesn't. That's an excuse on par with dispensationalism designed to explain away blatant contradictions in the text. The notion that Luke interviewed eyewitnesses to the events in question assumes two things that are not true. 1. It assumes Luke made this claim. Read the verses. He does not make this claim. 2. It assumes "Luke" wrote the gospel. No serious, unbiased scholar believes that. I could go on (and on), but I'm going to stop here for the sake of time. This thread is in the wrong forum. You are not questioning faith in the same sense as the name of this form. You are not really asking WHETHER the scriptures can be God-breathed while still containing errors and contradictions. You're asking HOW the scriptures can be God-breathed and still contain errors and contradictions. And that's a perfectly fine, valid, doctrinal question.

I don't think you mean the same thing I do when we use the term "questioning faith."

So when we're dividing the historical from the figurative, where do we draw the line? Ben Carson is out there talking about how the pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain. There probably was no Joseph, and if there were, the pyramids would have predated him by 700 years or so (give or take, based on proposed dates for the Exodus, adding the required number of years in Egypt, the pyramids were still around for centuries before that). But the Bible (conveniently) doesn't give the dates or the names of the Pharoahs involved in any of these stories. So was the sojourn in Egypt figurative? Was the Exodus figurative (because it, too, is probably not history. Egypt never lost that much of its population at one time, slave or free). If the Exodus is a figurative event, what does that mean about Passover and the giving of the Law? Or are we saying that only the Genesis creation myth is figurative? There was no Adam. There was no Eve. Ok. So why do we die? And how did sin enter the world? And how is Jesus the second Adam if there was no first? Big can of worms being opened when we say Genesis was figurative.

The Aileen on that list is Wournos. And she won an Oscar for it. And you could see the movie a dozen times and not recognize her. Which totally ruins her topless scene.

My Fair Lady

Spoilers? Good warning, but nothing mentioned was major, I don't think. I did like the fact that Supergirl's adoptive parents were Helen Slater and Dean Cain.

Regarding my use of the word "probably": I do not believe I am more astute than liberal or conservative theologians. I just think I'm choosing my words carefully because I am, frankly, in a forum where words get parsed more than they would in your average conversation. As such, when I am conscious of it, I try to express thoughts carefully. I originally wrote: "That Jesus walked is history. That he walked on water is not." But then I remembered that historians don't talk that way. They speak in probabilities, and the further removed they are from an event, the more qualified their language becomes. I have no doubt there will be times when I will slip and leave the "probably" out of my comments. For example, when I say "Adam and Eve, as described in the Bible, did not exist," I'm going to leave out the "probably" because including it introduces a level of uncertainty that is missing from my opinion. There was no first man and first woman living in Mesopotamia six or seven thousand years ago who are ancestors of all humanity. That is so extablished in multiple disciplines that to say "probably" would be misleading. I would also say Moses, as described in the Bible, did not exist. Now, there may have been a Moses who was influential in the founding of the religion that eventually became Judaism. Or not. But Exodus? Probably never happened. The evidence is against it. Overwhelmingly. Israel emerged from Canaan, it didn't invade Canaan. Probably. That's what the evidence strongly suggests. It is often said among atheists that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If I told you I drove to work today, you would probably accept my word for it, even though I am providing you with no proof. If I told you I teleported to work today, you would demand proof, and more than just my word. You would want to see the machine. You would want to test it. The amount of evidence required to support my extraordinary claim would be extraordinarily high. And you are under no obligation to believe my claim until I prove it. You don't have to disprove it. It is enought that you don't accept it. The burden of proof is mine. That a written work is "God-breathed" is an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence. But it has none. The Bible shows no indication that it was written by anyone with any extraordinary insight into anything. Sure, there's some wisdom in it, but is it extraordinary wisdom? Not really. You find similar bits of wisdom in all sorts of historical writings. Science? Nah. It botches science left and right. God's existence is in the same category. That there is a transcendent being who created all life on earth, the earth, the solar system, the rings of Saturn, the diamond rains of Jupiter, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, BILLIONS of other galaxies, each with billions of stars, black holes, nebulae, dark matter... and that this transcendent being never began to exist and will never cease to exist, and he cares, very, very deeply, about who you please with your genitals, is an extraordinary claim. I no longer believe it. It's not that I've demonstrated that such a being doesn't exist. It's that no one has demonstrated that he does exist. Claims are not evidence. The Bible is a claim. It is not evidence. And no, I don't think it's God-breathed.

Regarding The World having TWO heroes now, I would argue that this does not necessarily exclude Flash and Arrow, each of whom is very much identified all but exclusively with his city. They are not The World's heroes. Superman is, and Supergirl, by using that expression, clearly intends to be. Just a thought. I'm going to see if I can merge the two threads.

Okaaaaaay

You can always see it online

Wow. This show rocks.

Enjoy your celebration! I actually agree with you on that point. If you isolate my comment from other comments I've made on the same subject, it would cause confusion, but I agree: "Paul" was not writing about the very letter he was writing when he said "all scripture is given by inspiration of God" (and, it is important to note, I do not believe Paul wrote the epistles to Timothy). Unlike other holy books, the Bible is not aware of itself as ONE book. It has no statements about itself as a book. When the writers of the Bible speak of "His Word," they are not talking about the Bible. They are not talking about Psalms. They are being very literal: HIS WORD. Insofar as any scripture contains His Word, it is His Word that is exalted. My problem, of course, is that "His Word," as communicated in those books, doesn't strike me as anything all that enlightened (see the "Are you more moral than Yahweh" thread for exploration of this position). But in this, we are coming to the material from very different positions. Steve, I appreciate you placing this thread in "Questioning Faith," and I see your reasons for doing so, but I'm feeling strengthened in the position that this is a more general doctrinal question: What does "God-breathed" really mean? By placing it here, you're explicitly inviting atheist input and/or views that might challenge your faith in God (as opposed to the nature of the Bible). I don't think you're questioning faith here. I think you're challenging a doctrinal position. I'm inclined to leave the thread right here where you put it, but it might not be seen by people who avoid this particular subforum. Your call.

I think the bottom line, in my opinion, is that if you believe the Bible's testimony of itself that all scripture is God-breathed, then you must conclude that it can contain errors and contradictions and still be God-breathed. Because it DOES contain errors and contradictions. If you look at the stories myths and legends as LESSONS, you can glean something from them. But the moment you call those stories HISTORY, you run into trouble. Some of the stories are history. Many, many, many are not. That Jesus walked is probably history. That he walked on water is probably not. If you are going to tie your faith in the inspiration of the Bible to a belief that this book is an accurate telling of events that took place in history, without error or contradiction, then you are going to be walking on a very fragile faith. In my opinion.

I raised those two points to demonstrate that the contradictions are not matters of failing to recognize figurative language, nor can they be dismissed with passive accusations of demonic influence.