Friday, February 17, 2012

The Bible: Worst Ever Propaganda

While I was digging around online searching for some references to share here, I found some interesting ideas. I know that someone who doesn’t believe in the Bible doesn’t want biblical evidence, but sometimes that is exactly where the best truth is to be found. Consider these 2 paragraphs:

“There are characteristics within the texts themselves which mark the four Gospels as sober history and neither legend nor fictional propaganda. Consider that the Gospel writers set the leading disciples [including themselves!] in very poor light (Matthew 14:30, Mark 9:33f, Luke 22:54f). Notice as well that they included hard words by Jesus, which in fact repelled many hearers (Matthew 21:28f, Luke 9:23f, John 8:39f).

One distinction of the four Gospels is that their famed treasure of good news lies not nakedly on the surface, but hidden behind both challenge (Mark 8:34f, John 12:25f) and threat (Matthew 25:31f). Such characteristics would have been counter-productive to propagandists. Their presence in the Gospels demonstrates the willingness of the evangelists to tell the truth, however embarrassing or inconvenient.”

Reading this today reminded me of some teaching from about 20 years ago. The speaker said that the Bible is its own proof as the true Word of God. Why? Because the “heroes” are liars (Abraham), drunks (Noah), adulterous murderers (David), scaredy-cats (the disciples in the boat during a storm), and they denied even knowing Jesus (Peter). Not to mention that the first people to “testify” of the resurrection are women - the Jews and Romans forbid women to testify in a court of law! If mere men were the real writers, all of this would have been white-washed and every Apostle would be squeaky-clean, rich and famous. Instead you have a low-life tax collector and nobody fishermen running around telling people about Jesus.

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