[Ohio]

Originally Posted by Timotheist

Sorry, my "faith" will not let me accept large portions of Matthew and Luke without challenge. All of the added material before the baptism is suspect, requiring supporting evidence. So much to cover in that list, but the suspect material includes:

• The virgin birth and the stories surrounding it. It does not help that Matthew and Luke have almost nothing in common in these chapters. To accept both stories as 'gospel' takes more faith than I have.

• Herod going on a baby-killing spree because he wanted to keep the Messiah from being born. No reference to the deed elsewhere in the NT or credible evidence in historical documents. I challenge the story as factual in any form. This includes the assertion that Jesus lived in Egypt.

• The age 12 story is suspect, but does not add or take away much from the story. I only mention it in this list because you brought it up. It does seem to be agenda-driven, trying to prove that Jesus knew who he was before being baptized.

Why do you think I should accept these stories "on faith"?

I always become concerned when others need to discard huge sections of scripture to confirm their theories.

• The stories in Matthew and Luke are complementary, not conflicting. If they were identical, then we should be suspicious.
• I love the reference book Halley's Bible Handbook. Henry Halley had a real love for archeological explorations. He used a number of them to rebut long standing "proofs" that the Biblical record was false. He was convinced that if historians and archeologists would just keep digging, then every clain in the Bible would be proved.
• The entire bible is agenda driven! It is God's agenda, not ours, so we cannot arbitrarily delete verses that suite our agenda.