It’s a bit like leaving some money in an old savings account, forgetting about it, and then being surprised to find it in there years later. You’ve been handed an impressive looking bullseye, with a bullet hole through the center, but what they didn’t tell you is that after taking thousands of shots at a barn, they just found the one they liked and drew a circle around it.
The reason that that book has those stories with those features in it and not some others is because a bunch of the early Christians went through all the early writings and found the ones that would hang together in that fashion. So for the modern Christian to hold that book up centuries later and marvel at its coherence and unified message creates an ironic embarrassment. And That’s why you probably haven’t heard of Marcionism, gnosticism, the antitactici, Montanism, and other apocryphal writings, especially the ones that do not tell the same stories about Jesus. That’s why you haven’t been reading the stories in Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of the Twelve, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of the Basilides, Gospel of Mathias, Acts of Andrew, Acts of Paul, Acts of John, and the Epistle to the Laodiceans. In short, they took a very large set of diverse writings and carved the version of the New Testament that we have out of them. They consciously excluded the stories that did not seem to fit with the favored view, they even ruled some texts heretical. That is, when these 2nd and 3rd century Christians were sifting through all of these hundreds of documents they made a deliberate effort to settle on one story. Part of what was on their minds, it seems, were questions about consistency, plausibility, coherence with other older texts, and unification. By sometime in the mid 200s, those debates were being won by a sect of followers who had settled on the 27 book canon of the New Testament that we have today. In others, the course of events is very different than that told in the four Gospels. In some Jesus was not resurrected from the dead he was only a man. These documents told a wide range of stories about Jesus, God, and the early history of Christianity. From the time of Jesus until about 250 A.D., hundreds of early Christian writings came into existence and began to circulate among early followers. What the modern believer often fails to realize is that they are at the receiving end of a very long, complicated historical Sharpshooter fallacy. They say, “How else could so many people over so many centuries come to agree about so much and have such an integrated view about what God is?” The book itself, it seems, is evidence enough that the book itself is profoundly accurate. Or they are awestruck by the seeming consistency between the different Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life (they aren’t very consistent, but we’ll leave that alone for the moment.) They marvel that Jesus was the culmination of lots of Old Testament prophecies about a savior. It’s a singular, coherence narrative, they say. It has become very common for Christians to proclaim the virtues of the Bible.
Then he goes over, draws a big circle around the bullet hole and proudly announces that he’s a perfect marksman. The Texas Sharpshooter gets his rifle and fires a round at the side of a barn.
0 kommentar(er)
