Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
But I to generally take the gospels as the core of our belief and the epistles as commentary.
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I do, too, but I take Mark as the original of the synoptics, and question the additions of Matthew and Luke. If the additions are at least supported by Paul and the other books, then I accept them as reasonable.
But if they cause confusion and, even worse, change the story then I reserve the right to challenge the material.
Regarding the early chapters of Matthew and Luke, not only are they suspicious for many reasons, they are not even consistent with each other. They tell completely different stories that defy harmony. I feel cheated that I was raised to take a harmonious approach to reading this material.
I used to take Luke over Matthew because the Matthew account is too incredible to believe. But after doing my research, I now highly question Luke.
OBW, you are a difficult one to figure out. You accept that there are errors, but hold on to the most egregious one. Take out the VB and the NT is much more consistent with itself, which I have endeavored to point out. The chaos drops by a tremendous factor, leaving not very much to debate about.
The end result is the same: Jesus is the Holy Son of God. Why hold onto this material when it has clearly been added to Mark? Why cleave to the VB when it did not start showing up in other Christian writings until very late in the 1st century?
Ohio states a belief that Mary kept it a secret, revealing it later. These authors never make that claim: they jump right to Isaiah, citing Greek text because they did not know Hebrew. After 70 AD, the Jews were scattered, and the remaining Gentile church took over. These looked at the destruction of Jerusalem as God's judgement for killing the Christ, and they stopped listening to the Jews. It is amazing how fast the Virgin Birth started weaving its way into their beliefs as a result.
And it was not too long after that that they stopped arguing against the Greeks over the resurrection and started adopting the Greek afterlife.