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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (17077)	4/15/2004 1:55:12 PM
From: Greg or e	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

120 Things ABC CBS CNN FOX and NBC Won't Tell You" Cont.. 35. The views expressed by scholars from the Jesus Seminar do not represent the majority of biblical scholarship. Ankerberg: The interesting thing is that a lot of the scholars in the Jesus Seminar talk like they represent all scholarship. Talk about that. Witherington: Well, it’s problematic is several different ways. It’s not just the fact that in the Jesus Seminar there were no conservative or almost no conservative or evangelical scholars in the Seminar. The problem is that they didn’t even represent the spectrum of moderate and liberal scholars on these historical Jesus issues. When I go to the international meetings of the Society of New Testament Scholars in Europe, one of the things that is said to me repeatedly by moderate and liberal Jesus scholars in Germany and elsewhere is only in North America could you have a Jesus Seminar that could represent themselves as the scholarly opinion, other opinions not scholarly because they don’t agree with us. And so you have European scholars, highly respected, credible scholars who certainly wouldn’t be considered conservative, who would simply say, we don’t agree with this. We’d take a very different view of Jesus. 36. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Ankerberg: The Search for Jesus seemed to imply that Matthew was contradicting Luke and visa versa by depicting Jesus’ family living in Bethlehem and the other account saying, no he actually lived in Nazareth, and was born at home. What about that? Witherington: Well, the only Gospel that actually makes a point of telling us exactly where Jesus was born is the first Gospel in the canon, Matthew’s gospel, who tells us that a pilgrimage was made, by the family of Joseph, Joseph and Mary, to Bethlehem, to be registered in a census in Bethlehem, and that this was where Jesus was born. Only Matthew really makes a point of that. Luke does not say, and by the way, Jesus was not born in Bethlehem. He doesn’t say that. I mean, it’s an argument from silence to say Luke proves that Jesus was born in Nazareth. Silence can be read in a lot of different ways. The question is whether the silence is pregnant, or whether the silence really is just silence and you shouldn’t read too much into it. And so I don’t see a contradiction between the birth narratives on that particular issue. Ankerberg: Why is it that the Jesus Seminar makes a big point of that? Witherington: Well, it’s because these birth narratives come at the story of the birth of Jesus from very different perspectives. And what they want to do is they want to stress the differences in such a way that it then warrants the conclusion that since the birth narratives are sort of riddled with contradictions, then you know, we can assume that the rest of the stories that come after that have to be very critically scrutinized, and there’s only going to be a distinct minority of that evidence that could possibly be historically veracious. It sort of sets them up for a way of coming to the conclusion that only a distinct minority of the rest of the tradition is trustworthy.