Tag: No Double Standards

The uninterrupted testimony of ages

We receive the books of the New Testament as the genuine works of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, and Jude, for the same reason that we receive the writings of Xenophon, of Polybius, of Caesar, Tacitus, and Quintus Curtius; namely, because we have the uninterrupted testimony of ages to their genuineness, and we have no reason to suspect imposition.

Read More

No double standards

About the end of the second century, the Gospels were reverenced as sacred books by a community dispersed over the world, composed of men of different nations and languages. There were, to say the least, sixty thousand copies of them in existence; they were read in the churches of Christians; they were continually quoted, and appealed to, as of the highest authority; their reputation was as well established among believers, from one end of the Roman empire to the other, as it is at the present day among Christians in any country. …

Read More

Strauss’s Leben Jesu

It is, indeed, pitiable to see the distress of Strauss in dealing with this alarming subject. In the amazement of his perplexity he is even forced (who would suppose it?) to help out his mythic theory with that natural solution of the rationalists, which he elsewhere tramples upon with such contemptuous derision.

Read More

Charles Leslie: How unreasonable to reject these facts

How unreasonable then is it to reject these facts, so sifted, so examined, and so attested, as no other facts in the world ever were; and yet to think it the most highly unreasonable, even to madness, to deny other facts, which have not the thousandth part of their evidence, and are of no consequence to us, whether true or false!

Read More

One layman’s reaction

You must face the fact that he does not expect the present school of theological thought to be everlasting. He thinks, perhaps wishfully thinks, that the whole thing may blow over. I have learned in other fields of study how transitory the ‘assured results of modern scholarship’ may be, how soon the scholarship ceases to be modern.

Read More

The strange world of New Testament scholarship

There is a world—I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently to inhabit—which is not the world in which I live. In my world, if The Times and The Telegraph both tell one story in somewhat different terms, nobody concludes that one of them must have copied the other, nor that the variations in the story have some esoteric significance. But in that world of which I am speaking this would be taken for granted. There, no story is ever derived from the facts but always from somebody else’s version of the same story.

Read More
Loading