As a general unrest in Palestine fomented outright rebellion in the mid to late 60’s A.D., Eusebius tells us that the disciples and apostles abandoned Jerusalem and Judea.
Author: Wade Stanley
From the writings of Clement of Rome and Irenaeus, we know that the core elements of the Christian faith were established by the end of the first century, some 60-70 years following the death and reported resurrection of Jesus. I indicated in my previous post that though this is early testimony in terms of ancient history, there are more ancient documents that communicate these truths.
In my last blog post, I briefly discussed how historians are faced with the difficult task of unravelling true historical facts from the embellishments that creep in over time. However, the threat of legend overtaking fact is mitigated by the gap between the actual event and the earliest record.
One of my favorite movies in recent time is The Fellowship of the Ring. This adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic, The Lord of the Rings, is by far the best of the cinematic series. The filmmakers introduce us to Tokien’s Middle Earth with a brief history of Sauron’s One Ring. When the ring was lost and forgotten, the prologue’s voice-over says, “History became legend. Legend became myth.” Tolkien shows a keen understanding of human nature in this statement.
In his book, The Nature of Historical Explanation, Patrick Gardiner asked a worthwhile question:
“In what sense can I be said to know an event which is in principle unobservable, having vanished behind the mysterious frontier which divides the present from the past? And how can we be sure that anything really happened in the past at all, that the whole story is not an elaborate fabrication, as untrustworthy as a dream or a work of fiction?”
There are two types of people who struggle with the big bang cosmology:
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Those who embrace materialism and exclude God from the equation, and
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Those whose religious teachings present the universe as eternal.
The bodily resurrection of Jesus lies at the heart of Christian theology. If the body of Christ did not rise from the dead, the Christian faith means nothing. Since belief in the resurrection relies on the evidence, it’s worth our time as either believers or skeptics to evaluate the quality of the evidence.
Are you familiar with the idea of religious pluralism? Pluralists believe that all religions are essentially teaching the same things and directing their practitioners to the same goal. You may have seen the “Coexist” bumper stickers where the word is spelled with the various symbols of major religions. That’s a pluralist message. Pluralism is best illustrated by the parable of the elephant.