Ancient unreadable writings decoded!

[Trevelyan]

Originally posted by: Skyclad1uhm1

Originally posted by: Trevelyan
The writing of the gospels is a very interesting thing to study indeed. I would be cautious to base your whole view on a documentary like that however, but yes you are correct in saying that not all of the gospel writers knew Jesus personally. But, there is a lot of evidence that the basis was interviews with people who did know Jesus, and saw and heard him teach.

It's a tough thing to talk about too, because we really do not know as much as people get the impression that we do. A lot of theories can draw on a small pool of evidence to create an ocean of speculation. In any case, I agree with most people I think in that I am all for uncovering new documents to learn more about the early Christian community.

As a side not, I often wonder what people will think about us 1,000 years from now... will they be able to separate our fiction from non-fiction like we do? Or will they have some ultra-distorted view of what our world was like?

I don't just base it on that documentary though, the old versions of the Catholic Encyclopedia discussed how the choices were made on which gospels to include, and what changes have been made to them.

The documentary was not made by someone who wanted to attack the church btw, but someone who was looking to prove his own faith to himself and to the world. He even ended with the words that his findings were a great shock to him, that it meant a lot of what was in the Bible was doubtful, but that he believed that you shouldn't take it too literal, and that Christianity was based on love and that it therefor was still good (... Great way to say you don't want to acknowledge your own finds and want to continue to believe blindly what you believed before)

I don't doubt that this person who made the documentary felt that the Bible's accuracy was doubtful, but that doesn't make him correct. Frankly, I would not follow something I knew to be inaccurate and I would certainly never recommend to anyone else to do the same. I'm not defending Christianity despite all these problems with it, I'm saying that many of the "problems" that are often cited are unfounded.