# Logical Errors in the Bible? Show me! **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 3, 2003, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/logical-errors-in-the-bible-show-me/186145 "2003-07-03T23:33:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 19
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/logical-errors-in-the-bible-show-me/186145/361 "2003-07-17T03:42:32Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Rodrigo \* > \*\*The Challenged has been met. > I went to the horse’s mouth Mr Jesus Seminar himself, Robert Funk. > > 1. “It is time for us [scholars] to quit the library and study and speak up…The Jesus Seminar is a clarion call to enlightenment. It is for those who prefer facts to fancies, history to histrionics, science to superstition.” Robert Funk, The Gospel of Mark, Red Letter Edition (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991), pp. xvi- xvii. > > 2. “[Jesus is a] secular sage who satirized the pious and championed the poor.” He then adds, “Jesus was perhaps the first stand-up Jewish comic. Starting a new religion would have been the farthest thing from his mind.” [2] Los Angeles Times , March 11, 1995 > > 3. “The Gospels are now assumed to be narratives in which the memory of Jesus is embellished by mythic elements that express the church’s faith in him, and by plausible fictions that enhance the telling of the gospel story for first-century listeners…”[3] [emphasis added] Robert Funk, Roy Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 5, quoted in Moreland and Wilkins, Jesus Under Fire (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), p. 4. > > 4. Criteria used by the Jesus Seminar (Funk, et al., 1993, p. 19-32). [I’ve omitted some] > A. Words borrowed from the fund of common lore or the Greek scriptures are often put on the lips of Jesus. > B. The evangelist frequently attribute their own statements to Jesus. > C. The Christian community develops apologetic statements to defend it’s claims and sometimes attributes such statements to Jesus. > D. Sayings and narratives that reflect knowledge of events that took place after Jesus’ death are the creation of the evangelist or the oral tradition before them. > F. The oral memory best retains sayings and anecdotes that are short, provocative, memorable—and oft’ repeated. > G. The most frequently recorded words of Jesus in the surviving gospels take the form of aphorisms and parables. > H. The earliest layer of the gospel tradition is made up of single aphorisms and parables that circulated by word of mouth prior to the written gospels. > I. Jesus’ characteristic talk is distinctive—it can usually be distinguished from common lore. Otherwise it is futile to search for the authentic words of Jesus. > M. Jesus rarely makes pronouncements or speaks about himself in the first person. > N. Jesus makes no claim to be the Anointed, the messiah. > [With these pre-conceptions no one can state they accept Divine inspiration, the gosples become a bunch of lies]. > > 5. No passage of John makes “the red”, ONE makes “the pink” and only TWO make “the gray”. [It’s clear they don’t think John is reliable and only logical conclusion is that God couldn’t’ve written it] > > If this doesn’t convince you that the JS ain´t that big on Inspiration, nothing will. \*\* Funk is talking about the analytical methods used to isolate the authentic words of hisotorical Jesus. This does not speak either to the possibility of divine revelation or the spiritual validity of scripture. Funk (and the rest of the JS) draw many conclusions about the evolution and authorship of the Gospels but the make no statement at all about a divine role in that evolution or about the gospels’ spiritual validity. You are making _a priori_ assumptions about what constitutes validity and about how a divine revelation must be read and interpreted. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/logical-errors-in-the-bible-show-me/186145/362 "2003-07-17T03:52:55Z")
> [@](#): > > I’ll give you two: Scott Hahn and Father Most. Sorry. I asked for Scripture scholars. You have provided two popularizer apologists. You have also not provided evidence that either of them disputes the Q theory, and I have not found any evidence, on-line, that they do. (I found one link to a book review by Most that was vaguely critical of a book by Burton Mack. However, as was already pointed out, Burton Mack is also not a Scipture scholar, but a popularizer who tends to be viewed as a bit of a crank by the scholarly community. Therefore, criticism of Mack’s odd views of Q have no bearing on Most’s views of the actual Q–even if Most was an actual scholar in the field.) Your dispute over the inspired nature of the Gospels is with **Diogenes**. I will note that I see nothing in your extensive list of quotations by Funk that support the notion that he (or any associated scholars) are scornful or derisive of people of faith. (My own perspective of the Jesus Seminar is that they have done some good work, but that on two counts I find the project to be silly: that they actually believe they can parse the “truth” or historicity of the Gospels on a verse by verse (or clause by clause) basis and that they can arrive at the correctness of their views by a vote of the participants. I do not dismiss the JS as “bad,” but I look on it as only one of many studies and give it less weight than some other efforts. **Wandering Agnostic** , Fr. William G. Most is a Catholic priest who writes a “Q & A” column for various print and electronic Catholic publications. Scott Hahn is a Catholic apologist who has written several books for Catholic lay persons addressing different issues of spirituality. He has gone on record as saying that he is not (and does not want to be identified as) a scripture scholar, prefering to approach Scripture from a perspective of enthusiasm rather than research. > [@](#): > > If Q is what scholars say then the Gospels are basically a bunch of invented stories, ergo, they can’t be inspired, It always saddens me to see people putting limits on what God can do. 😉 Q as described by Mack, and possibly by Funk, might argue against Divine Inspiration, but Q as accepted by Brown, Feine, Behm, Conzelman, Dibelius, Kümmel, Barth, and dozens of other scholars who believe in Divine Inspiration makes no such argument. The issue is merely one of understanding where the information was gathered, not one of the Divine guidance in organizing and presenting the material. If Hahn and Most reject Q (as opposed to rejecting Mack’s Q), then I would argue that nothing that either of them says is worth hearing–especially among a Catholic audience. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/logical-errors-in-the-bible-show-me/186145/363 "2003-07-17T04:01:05Z")
> [@](#): > > [With these pre-conceptions no one can state they accept Divine inspiration, the gosples become a bunch of lies]. > … > [It’s clear they don’t think John is reliable and only logical conclusion is that God couldn’t’ve written it] You are applying post-18th century views of history and biography to first century literature. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2003, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/logical-errors-in-the-bible-show-me/186145/364 "2003-07-17T04:36:16Z")
> [@](#): > > (My own perspective of the Jesus Seminar is that they have done some good work, but that on two counts I find the project to be silly: that they actually believe they can parse the “truth” or historicity of the Gospels on a verse by verse (or clause by clause) basis and that they can arrive at the correctness of their views by a vote of the participants. I do not dismiss the JS as “bad,” but I look on it as only one of many studies and give it less weight than some other efforts. I would quibble with the statement that the JS attempts to parse “truth” in any absolute sense. The JS never asserts anything as absolute historical fact bit merely grades words and deeds on a scale of relative certainty. For instance, the JS rates the crucifixion as ranking very high as something we can be certain of historically and the Virgin Birth as very low. Their position is not that Virgin Births are impossible, therefore it didn’t happen, but that a Virgin Birth would be such an extraordinary (and _prima facia_ impossible) event that we can’t have any _certainty_ that it happened. The goal is simply to find out what we can know _for sure_ about historical Jesus. The stuff that doesn’t get the red ball (and very little does) is not being assertively denied so much as it being judged as not meeting a standard for historical certainty. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/logical-errors-in-the-bible-show-me/186145.md?page=18)