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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (34264)	4/10/1999 2:58:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Jesus, continued: "Despite all these glaring inconsistencies and unanswered questions, for the best part of two millennia Christians have taken on trust that the history of his life and deeds, as recounted in the gospels, has been at least broadly reliable and correct. These days, even a Church of England bishop will admit that it's not all literally true, that many biblical events are not to be understood as documentary facts, but metaphors, allegories and flights of imagination. Most academics in the field would agree. In a challenging new study, "The Bible in History", Thomas I. Thompson, Professor of Old Testament Studies at the University of Copenhagen, has argued that 'we have taken literary characters, the prophets, and we have read our [bibles] as if these prophets wrote and spoke what was put into their mouths by God, and not by poets. Wholly uncritically, we have refused to use the simplest tools of reading up to understand the perspective from which these great poems [the scriptures] speak.' The approach, he insists, is 'historically meaningless and theologically abhorrent.' The biblical historian Professor Alvar Ellegard (a convinced Christian himself) goes even further, insisting in "Jesus: One Hundred Years Before Christ" that 'the basic story of Jesus in the gospels has to be completely abandoned as an account of what really happened. The gospels and the acts were composed roughly a century after the time in which they place Jesus and the Apostles. They are certainly not eyewitness accounts. Nor are they secondary reports of such accounts. Bluntly: their story is fiction.'"