Originally posted by Sparko
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It is patently clear that you cannot answer the question I have put to you because to do so would require you to acknowledge that the respective narrative details found in the various gospel accounts of the trial are entirely contradictory and therefore these texts cannot be considered as either inerrant or infallible.
Mr Holding quite clearly likes to keep his personal site open only to those who are in accord with his own views and, as he made quite apparent, does not care to have his subjective and preconceived opinions questioned or challenged.
I find it highly amusing that [rather as with Mr Holding] you likewise do not care to have your beliefs or opinions confronted.
Even more droll is your dismissal of a reasoned argument as “handwaving away” some of the various textual anomalies that are to be found within these NT texts.
With regard to Christian scholarship if one wishes to be really pedantic one might note that the Apostolic Fathers writing in the late first and early second century are [according to Christian tradition] believed to have either been personally acquainted with some of the disciples or to have been influenced by them. The earliest ante-Nicene Father, Justin Martyr was born around 100 CE, which is over six decades after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. We are therefore not precisely back 2000 years.
The earliest critical examination of a specific biblical text [the book of Daniel] is by Porphyry of Tyre writing in the late third century. However, his Against the Christians [Κατὰ Χριστιανῶν] which consisted of fifteen books were all burned in the mid fifth century on the orders of Theodosius II. His work is therefore only known [as with Celsus] through the refutations made by various Christian apologists.
That notwithstanding the modern critical historical New Testament scholarship as it is now undertaken did not commence until David Strauss published his Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet in 1835.
In the early modern period Baruch Spinoza offered his systematic critique of Judaism, when in 1670, his treatise Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was published anonymously.
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