things just don’ t happen. The attraction of such stories is the same as that of Ripley’ s and the story of my grandfather. They convey an unbelievable message that the impossible is not only possible, but has been accomplished.
The Hell You Say?
Most of us have played the telephone game. Someone tells someone else something and the message is passed around the room. The result is always the same. The message the last person in line retells is extraordinarily different from the one originally conveyed.
This is the case with the stories from the Bible. We have no originals. We have copies of copies of copies. We also know there have been some additions. The ending of Mark in the earliest copies we have has two women running out of a cave. Someone added in the resurrection story later. We also know the“ cast the first stone” story was added in later, as it also does not appear in the earliest versions we have. This was common at the time, to take a story and add something to it to convey a new message, or add to the message being conveyed.
The story my father told me about my grandfather is one passed down to him by someone else. My dad or uncle Peyton could have been lying or embellishing the story. I may even be lying or could have embellished the story in my own mind since it was told to me. There is no way to tell. The stories in the Bible are stories passed from one person to another an unknown number of times. There is no way of knowing if the author was lying or the stories became embellished over time. It is also possible that the stories were never even intended to be taken literally at all, but are merely allegories and parables.
To Bear False Witness
Many Christians will cite Josephus and others to attest to the existence of Jesus and his resurrection. The main text cited is one known to be at least partially an interpolation, which is a fancy way of saying forgery. But he did at least mention Jesus in his writings. Why doesn’ t this matter? He and others who wrote of Jesus were not contemporaries of Jesus, but were born after Jesus supposedly died. They were simply retelling stories told to them by Christians who had themselves been told by others. There is no way of verifying if any of these people were lying or embellishing their stories.
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