by Mark Smith
The Significance of The Contradiction
?????
To put it into modern perspective, a journey of 80 miles back then thru that
territory would have
taken a minimum of 5 days** by the standard transportation of their era:
“on foot.” A journey of equivalent
duration (5 days) in our own era, via our standard transportation (automobile)
would easily span the distance starting from Vancouver, Canada, thru the
continental United States, thru the length of all Mexico, and end up in the Central American
country of Honduras.
This being the case, if the
ascension of Jesus really happened, it would be impossible for the eyewitness to
such a stupendous event to have so thoroughly screwed up its location. If this
ascension really happened, and these people actually witnessed it, their
memories of such a memorable occasion would not have scrambled the location so.
No one would think for a minute that the people who witnessed the fiery death of
TWA flight #800 off the coast near New York City in the summer of 1996 would
ever, even decades later, mistakenly remember it as having occurred some
thousands of miles away, say, near Los Angeles, or Mexico City. Nor would New
York pedestrians who stood and watched as airplanes smacked into the World Trade
Center in 2001, twenty years later misplace the event as having happened in
Kansas. To put the Gospel problem into modern terms so that we can better get a
handle on it, it would be as if some claimed this singular event of Jesus’
ascension occurred in the deserts of Mexico while others in the cool forests of
Canada. As I said, a discrepancy of this magnitude is an impossibility for REAL
eyewitnesses, leaving us the only reasonable alternative, that we are dealing
with false eyewitnesses:
people who claimed to be eyewitnesses to an event but actually weren’t;
or people who claimed to witness an event that never occurred at all. To
top it off, these people not only lied about being eyewitnesses to an ascension
that never happened, they then went and wrote down their lies on the documents
that later evolved into The New Testament.
Of course, modern Christian apologists would like to have you believe that
somehow “The Great & Powerful Oz” innocently screwed up when he inspired
these New Testament authors to pen such contradictory stories. Christian
apologists refer to how different witnesses to the same car crash often differ
in the details of the incident. They mention this is just human nature, people
seeing things differently etc. Of course, the chances of four witnesses to the most memorable
crash in human history scrambling their memories
to the point where some place it in
Mexico, others in Canada— the
chances of this is ZERO. Therefore, the contradiction between the Gospels was not created in innocence; it is rather the direct child of
deliberate and calculated fraud.
Another “small detail” Christian apologists fail to deal with is their own claim of inspiration. They claim that the New Testament authors were inspired in their writings (something the New Testament authors themselves DON'T claim for themselves). If this were the case, this would rule out any and all possibility of error, while witnesses to car crashes (unless insane) make no such claims for themselves. Therefore, for these Christian “witnesses” to have blundered so, proves either that the Fundy claim to inspiration is pure fabrication, or, if the witnesses really were inspired, the witnesses were inspired by their gods to fabricate false stories. Either choice on this limited menu will hang Fundies by their cojonés, and show Fundy Christian Inerrantists to be in error.
The contradiction exists, and it is not the innocent result of human witnesses
“seeing the accident from different angles”.
It is rather the child of prevasive premeditated Christian fraud. At
several
points in history, various Christian scribes sat down at their desks, and
deliberately made false stories. The
only reason we today are able to catch this particular falsehood is that we have
several versions of the same supposed incident and the liars in question weren't
bright enough to coordinate their lies. Other supposed incidents of
which we may have only one version could be even worse lies, but we’ll never
be able to find out, as we don’t have other “eyewitnesses” to corroborate
the stories against.
The
Bottom Line...
The
bottom line is that within the resurrection claims documented lies have been
shown to exist, and therefore these resurrection claims do not merit our trust.
The Christian claim that
Jesus rose from the dead is based upon the claims of documented liars that can
not and should not be trust. The
only thing that “rose from the dead” after Jesus died were the odors
normally associated with a rotting corpse. End of story.
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* [60 mph X 10 hours per day X 5 days = 3,000 miles total. Vancouver, Canada to Honduras, Central America]
**[Rabbi Jesus, Bruce Chilton, Doubleday, NY, 2000, page 24 "The pilgrimage from Galilee to Jerusalem would have taken more than five days, even at a quick pace."]
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