Note: I have decided that I will post an index of these pieces later because the list of them is going to get rather long to keep posting. For those who want to read the earlier ones, they started on Easter Sunday.
Fourth difficulty. A close analysis of the Easter accounts reveals insuperable discrepancies and inconsistencies. Attempts have indeed been made constantly to combine and harmonize them into a uniform tradition. But - to sum it up briefly - it is impossible to establish agreement about 1. the people involved: Peter, Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, the disciples, the apostles, the twelve, the Emmaus disciples, five hundred brethren, James, Paul; 2. the locality of the events; Galilee, a mountain there or the lake of Tiberias; Jerusalem, at Jesus' grave or a meeting place' 3. the whole sequence of appearances; morning and evening of Easter Sunday, eight days and forty days later. At every point harmonization proves to be impossible, unless we are prepared to accept textual changes and to minimize the differences.
The reverse side. Obviously no one at the time needed or wanted a uniform scheme or a smooth harmony, still less any sort of biography of the risen Jesus. The New Testament authors are not interested in any kind of completeness nor in a definite sequence and least of all in a critical historical investigation of the different pieces of information. From this it is clear that there is something more important to be stressed in the individual narratives; for Paul and Mark the calling and mission of the disciples; for Luke and John it is more the real identity of the risen with the pre-paschal Jesus (perception of the identity and ultimately proof of identity by the demonstration of his corporeality and his sharing food, with the constantly greater emphasis on conquering the doubts of his disciples). At the same time it becomes clear that any how, when or where of the narratives is of secondary importance by comparison with the fact - of which there is no doubt in the different sources - of the resurrection which in every context is clearly not identical with the death and burial. What is required is a concentration on the true content of the message and this in turn will make possible a renewed investigation into the historical discrepancies.
If the rule that all accounts of an event must agree in all ways, in details small and even large, were to be made universal, the same point I made this morning would be true, a huge amount of human culture and experience would have to be disbelieved. It is another special rule that is most applied in matters religious and in no part of that is that more true in contemporary academic and popular culture than it is for Christianity. There is, literally, nothing to almost nothing about which there will be a uniform account of it except those things for which there is not multiple attestation.
But we live with discrepancies even within what is supposed to be the hardest of science, certainly in 20th century physics the quest for a harmonization in a so-called theory of everything, our resting on the cusp of which is one of the most irrationally asserted and popular assertions very popular with ideological atheists in science. Though the very science they assert leads the to that so-called inevitability is the science that rather more convincingly leads to the conclusion that such a theory is never going to be had. And don't get me started on the discrepancies in the life sciences surrounding the origin if species.
It was one of the things I was most critical of the Jesus Seminar and other historical-critical projects that their use of multiple attestation as evidence of the authenticity of the words of Jesus and the events of his life were not uniformly applied but it seems to have become a matter of double speak, at times not used to support authenticity but, especially when there was not total harmony among multiple attestations to use that, as desired, to discount authenticity. When your goal is to support a desired conclusion, any way you can turn things would seem to be acceptable even within modern academic discourse.
The desire to come up with a harmonization of the Gospels is a very old one, the earliest known one was the Diatessaron of Tatian from just after the middle of the second century. That there was clearly no harmonized, uniform and self-consistent account placed into the canon of the Scriptures supports Kung's contention that that wasn't what the authors of the books wanted but, since it's clear that something like that was wanted, very much, that those with the authority to do that wanted to be honest about the texts they had received more than they wanted to avoid the refutations that would make use of discrepancies.
The other day I pointed out that there is no such a thing as an objective witness or recorder of events, something which science has established as a truth about the most "objective" of observations about a hundred fifteen years ago. There is certainly nothing objective in either believing in or disbelieving the Resurrection of Jesus, there is nothing that can be refuted on the evidence available and there is no direct physical evidence, the testimonies that have come down to us are the only available evidence to make a decision on. It would be claimed that a CHOICE to believe is based in a subjective choice to buy the claims made in the New Testament. But the choice to not believe is no less subjective, it is as fully fraught with aspects of choice on the basis of predisposition. A religious believer - one who really believes - will probably admit that their belief is a matter of choice, it is a rare non-believer who will admit the same thing.
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