Posted by Illuminati on 5/2/2005, 2:17 pm, in reply to "Re: Validity of the Bible" Reading about someone and knowing them are too entirely different things. I have recently read the biography of David Livingstone and have read extracts from his journals. I know about him but I don't know him and since he has been dead for many years I will never know him. As I said earlier, memory is multifaceted and is stored in different parts of the brain. To know someone is to know how they sound, how they speak, their accent, their patterns of sleep, how they smell how they breath, etc. Those who have lost a parent know that when you know someone intimately and truly care for them, your memories will remain for life. Perhaps the details of some of the stories will grow dim but the deeper understanding of the person will last for the rest of the life. Those people who are trying to get beyond the gospels and to know the real historical Jesus have repeatedly failed. Anyone interested in a scholarly summary of the quest for the historical Jesus up to his time should blog onto this site which has a copy of Albert Schweitzer's book, THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS,A CRITICAL STUDY OF ITS PROGRESS FROM REIMARUS TO WREDE. The reason for their failure is obvious. The early church knew Jesus, none of the critics do. How can someone who doesn't know Jesus go beyond the records produced by those who actually talked to Him, actually memorized His discourses, who actually loved Him and in turn were loved by Him? How can someone who is a complete stranger to Jesus believe he can know Jesus better than His own friends, family and close associates? This is a mission which is destined to failure from the beginning. In reading Albert Schweitzer's summary of previous works, one is struck immediately by the common assumption that Jesus followers' were deceivers who deliberately falsified the records. Any yet these same researchers all plowed through the gospels under the delusion that they could pick out those things which were true and reject those which were false. Exactly how to begin with a source which you believe is lying and separate the truth from the fabrications based only on the information in that same source is a problem for which I've never heard an answer and apparently neither have any of those who have written papers about the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar has apparently resorted to ballots and the verses which receive the most positive votes are the authentic ones! Now is that deep or what? Another problem is their apriori rejection of the miraculous. Since Jesus as a Jew in the Second Temple era undoubtedly did believe in miracles and undoubtedly believed He himself could perform miracles, how can someone who rejects miracles imagine he can understand Jesus better than His own followers? If someone rejects miracles, doesn't he also have to reject Divine revelation? It is difficult to see how the possibility of miracles can be automatically rejected and the other preserved. And yet from the Gospels, Jesus certainly seems to believe He Himself was the recipient of Divine revelation. How can a researcher who doesn't believe in Divine revelation inderstand a man who actually experienced revelation and actually knew He was called by God to be the Jewish Messiah? The failure to look beyond the Gospels and find the historical Jesus seems to have been doomed from the start. Perhaps if the founders of the movement had thought about their approach more closely before they began, they would have had more success. As it is, there appear to be methodological flaws in their basic approach which has doomed their quest from the beginning.
206.206.120.230
That people are able to form stable memories which persist over decades is something to which I can personally vouch. An elderly relative of mine could recite from memory long passages she learned as a child without making any mistakes whatsoever. Although I could not begin to recite those passages myself, I could recognize immediately whether she was reciting it correctly. Thirty or forty years after learning the passage she still could recide it word perfectly. Therefore it is no stretch to believe the apostles had memorized long discourses and parables which they then reproduced accurately years later. These formed the basis for the synoptic gospels.
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/schweitzer/
So far as I can tell, those skeptical critics who have followed Schweitzer have failed even more spectacularly.
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