10-28-2015, 09:53 AM
I partially agree and partially disagree.
I try to explain in my english.
People write stories. Sometimes they report something about their own life, sometimes is about what they have heard from other people. Open a newspaper, read it. Journalists make the same every day.
Even in ancient times people was doing it. Also in ancient time they were not "objective" as today.
Gospels or Acts were written to tell a story not for theology that is a term created in modern times. The Bible is the same a big group of tales transmitted for centuries by people.
They contain errors, but also true facts and sometimes also invented or mystified episodes.
Also when people write about something it is normal not to report what he thinks is already known by the reader so can happen that when Julius Caesar report a battle in his Bellum a bug amount of details were not reported because at that times the potential readers were already knowing them, but after 2100 years we do not anymore, so we have missed many details. But even Caesar wrote his bellum with huge amount of mystifications and ideology and propaganda, but these are with no doubts historical sources?
Back to the Acts, Luke that seems to have written it, is the only of the four "official" gospel writers to try to report historical coordinates. Yes he did it with a lot of errors, but it is in anyway interesting. So when it reports about a italic coort is an historical coordinate, it does not match with any theological issue or idea. It needs to be compared with other sources, of course, and this is the amazing work we need to do.
Just my opinion.
I try to explain in my english.
People write stories. Sometimes they report something about their own life, sometimes is about what they have heard from other people. Open a newspaper, read it. Journalists make the same every day.
Even in ancient times people was doing it. Also in ancient time they were not "objective" as today.
Gospels or Acts were written to tell a story not for theology that is a term created in modern times. The Bible is the same a big group of tales transmitted for centuries by people.
They contain errors, but also true facts and sometimes also invented or mystified episodes.
Also when people write about something it is normal not to report what he thinks is already known by the reader so can happen that when Julius Caesar report a battle in his Bellum a bug amount of details were not reported because at that times the potential readers were already knowing them, but after 2100 years we do not anymore, so we have missed many details. But even Caesar wrote his bellum with huge amount of mystifications and ideology and propaganda, but these are with no doubts historical sources?
Back to the Acts, Luke that seems to have written it, is the only of the four "official" gospel writers to try to report historical coordinates. Yes he did it with a lot of errors, but it is in anyway interesting. So when it reports about a italic coort is an historical coordinate, it does not match with any theological issue or idea. It needs to be compared with other sources, of course, and this is the amazing work we need to do.
Just my opinion.
