Lord or Legend by Gregory A Boyd & Paul Rhodes Eddy

Author:Gregory A Boyd & Paul Rhodes Eddy [Boyd, Gregory A & Eddy, Paul Rhodes]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-03T06:38:48.057000+00:00

98

The

and

of Historical Reliability

people who were emotionally involved, who believed fervently in the story they were telling, and who were not impartiaL But this seems clearly unreasonable.

To illustrate, would it have been reasonable for leaders of the Western world in 1942 to reject

reports about what was transpiring

Nazi

concentration camps on the grounds that the reporters were emotionally involved with and believed in the things they reported? Clearly

If

what these people were saying was true, as it turned out to be, should we not have expected them to be emotionally involved with and to fervently believe in their own reports? Indeed, wouldn't we have been justified in questioning the reliability of these reports if the reporters were emotionally involved

with and

not fervently believe in what they reported?

So too, if what the Gospel authors say about Jesus is at all close to being accurate, should we not expect them to be emotionally involved with and to believe fervently in their own reports? These authors in essence report that Jesus made worIdview-jarring claims, lived an outrageously loving life, performed incredible miracles, and rose from the dead. This, they declare, is what convinced them, against their most basic Jewish assumptions, that this crucified man was the long-awaited in fact the embodiment of Yahweh on earth. If these claims are at all accurate, how can we possibly fault them for fervently believing them and for being emotionally involved with them? Indeed, far from dismissing these reports on the grounds that the reporters fervently believe in and are emotionally involved with what they report, it seems to us that the challenge is to explain the fervency and passion without accepting the historical veracity of the reports.

2. If we applied Funk's argument against the reliability of the Gospels consistently, we'd have to reject a great deal of ancient history, because much ancient history was remembered by individuals or groups precisely it meant something to them and they believed fervently in the story they were telling. Indeed, the very idea of doing history from a detached, impartial perspective is a rather modern

we submit, some·

thing of a modern myth. This leads us to our second argument. If there's anything that has become clear in ourpostmodern world, it's that everybody experiences the world, thinks about the world, and communicates about the world from a biased perspective. Try as we might, there is no

repOrling. Yet we don't customarily dismiss reports

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