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.
********** * [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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