The "Gospels". Non-substantiate-able Rumors and Disingenuous Apologetics ; Used As Props And Camouflage For Blind Faith In Irrational Religious Narratives.

 I have said that 
"We can't un-do all the corruptions that
*absolutely must have happened*
during 20 years of the Telephone Game,
before some rare, random literate religious people started "faithfully" writing down what they themselves heard."

In reply, a Christian,
somewhere on the hazy spectrum between fundamentalist and moderate Christian-religiosity,  
responded with this:

“absolutely must have happened”
That’s quite an assumption.

We also have differing Christian writers from different regions quoting much of the Gospels.

The Gospels are not essentially important; it’s the essential traditions, liturgy, and teachings that were received through authorized apostolic lineage.

 The Gospels arose out of this tradition.
( From)this authorize(d) apostolic lineage, the Bible was canonized.

---------------
This is where I reply
to each of those assertions: 

[Note: Later edits will make this blog shorter. 
I'll have to decide which parts to remove, to make it shorter.

For now, I'm highlighting the material (in blue) that I'm likely to remove later.

Ironically, I wanted to make this blog longer.

I want to explain how the Christian narrative is hyper-abusive and antithetical to the health of individuals and all human social and societal systems.

But since I cover that in other blogs, I'll just add a link to those when I come back to edit this blog.

Meanwhile, those are easy to find from the main page of this blogsite]

1. "That’s quite an assumption."

--
First, understand that the burden of proof
rests on the person making "quite the assumption" that the stories didn't change (at least, not in any meaningful way) during at least 20 years of circulating only-orally.

Meanwhile, ..,
calling it "quite the assumption" that meaningful changes surely happened, ...
is like:

 Rebuking a judge in a court of law that it's "quite the assumption" that he isn't interested in hearsay on the basis of it being unreliable.

- Or 
telling a school teacher TEACHING about what we should EXPECT to happen during the Telephone Game ... that she's making "quite the assumption"; 

-as if the effects of that transmission method hasn't been well-studied and well-stablished. 
--

Physics
accounts entirely (although, for this point to be valid, this only has to be true at least 'partly')
for what happens when humans:
*hear,
* think,
* feel (subjectively process. In this case, with significantly emotional psychological mechanisms),
* attempt to communicate,
and then:
for each-next-person in a widely-branching tree of gossip,
to:
* correctly hear some parts,
* mis-hear other parts,
* correctly understand some parts,
* misunderstand other parts,
* recall parts correctly,
* recall other parts incorrectly,
and
* attempt to pass those ideas along,...

[with the occasional "clarification" of what the hearer/repeater feels certain was "probably meant" (and/or what they come up with entirely on their own, to forward the interests of [their understanding of] the larger "cause" they're now speaking on behalf of], ...

as communication-via-hearsay,
in random chains
of countless fallible repeaters;

- within the social-cultural context of an impressively ill-equipped, and *religiously biased people.

("religiously, here, meant in two different ways;

a. literally "religious",

b. "religiously" in the sense of "overly-committed".)

There is no greater form of objectivity-impeding, emotion-skewing bias known to humans.
--
Meanwhile, ...

As Bart Ehrman has explained several times:

The general idea of a messianic figure
 saying/doing many of the things later stories attribute to "Jesus"
was:
 such a common theme in that region and era, that it was a "trope" (Bart's exact word for it).

Unless we want to call this a fantastic coincidence, ...
that's what they were building from.
 
More importantly,
we know they were building from:
some random Jewish guys' (poor) understandings 
of:
Hebrew religious ideological, cultural, and textual history;
as they attempted to portray a character which seemed (to them) to satisfy the Hebrew messianic prophecies.  

Even more importantly:
We know that the Hebrew religion 
is a false religion.
So anything based upon it (no matter how well that religion was understood by the people building upon it) 
is automatically going to be false too.

---
Meanwhile, ...
Religious ideologies
absolutely do spread by patterns of viral propagation; perpetually mutating, in order to spread, survive, and thrive.

There's no objectively good reason for anyone in any religion 
based on an ancient religion 
to claim that their religion is the grand exception.  
------------------------------
2. "We also have differing Christian writers from different regions quoting much of the Gospels."
--
Years later, sure. 

But so?
Add a billion more people quoting what any of the so-called "gospels" say.

Add another trillion people quoting it.
It doesn't change a thing.

They'd still only be quoting those very same unsubstantiated rumors that we're calling the "gospels".

That doesn't have any impact on the fact of 20 years worth of the Telephone Game ...
generating what was eventually written,
and then later quoted by others.

--------------------------------
3. "The Gospels are not essentially important;"
--
As a non-believer, that's an easy thing for me to agree with.

However, ...

Without those, there's nothing for any later Christian to quote or build upon, except for the 7 corrupted-but-otherwise-actual letters of Saul/Paul, and the ~7 forgeries (aka: lies) written in his name.

   You could say that later Christians would have still had the gospel stories, ... but:

The longer it would have taken for someone to finally start writing down any then-current version of those rumors, the more changes would have happened by then; resulting in a different set of "gospel" story/claims.

You can CLAIM there was God-magic-interference; ensuring the stories didn't change in any meaningful way.
But you can't validate that claim, except with blind faith and circular reasoning. 
---

Consider 
there are some fundamentally important parts of those stories were added later by anonymous people trying to improve the legends.

 -Such as the event where Jesus says "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". -one of the most famous and character-endearing moments from the lore ... not part of the earliest versions of the stories. 

 And then there's the book of "John"; written by yet another anonymous, non-eyewitness ... with a later and DIFFERENT Christology than than the Luke/Acts writers;
all of whom had a different Christology than Saul/Paul. 

Trying to combine all of those stories and views into one narrative ... has created quite a mess.

That has necessitated special "apologetics";
 dogmatic religious fans struggling to make it all seem to mesh; usually by imagining things-unsaid, and then reading those creative bridges back into the texts.   

-Which, as Ehrman has also pointed out:
 can be done with literally anything, written by anyone, about anything.

 -which makes every interpretation of every story:
un-faultable and unfalsifiable;

-which is exactly what religious apologetics are meant to do. 

As Sam Harris put it:
 "This is how you play tennis 
without the net."

-----------------------------------
4. " it’s the essential traditions, liturgy, and teachings that were received through authorized apostolic lineage."
--
a.) At what point do religious rumors
circulating only orally
within a poorly organized and informal localized religious cult
become an "essential tradition" of hearsay/rumoring?

b.) Calling that a "liturgy" is redundant. So there's not really a separate claim here to respond to.

c.) You have no idea (because you have no way to know)
what was taught in any formal or informal gathering
among people who gathered for the purpose of wanting to share and follow whatever they heard about Jesus,
during the 20 years between:
* when ~whoever~ died
and
* when the anonymous gospel writers started writing down the conflicting stories they heard (possibly inventing parts they didn't copy verbatim from the mark-book; since the non-mark-parts contain the parts they didn't agree about).

d.) "received through authorized apostolic lineage"
--
Imagining that
doesn't make it so.

Blind faith in rumors.

That's all it is.

Calling that "tradition",
as-if human group-behaviors and group-shared overarching narratives are self-substantiating, ...

and

as-if human authority counts as "God-given" as long as humans are willing to SAY it is, ...

and then:

using those assumptions 
as the "essential" support for an end-resulting "faith", ...

is just a complicated expression of blind faith;
being muddied intentionally,
so that subscribers can pretend it's not blind faith.

Every Christian is, of course, entitled to blind faith.
But I'll know when they've made peace with that;
the very moment they stop pretending it's something else.
------

As for how "The Bible" (whichever version) was canonized, 
 the path was impressively meandering, disorganized, disjointed, and competitive.

Even if we ~choose to assume~ there was a Super-Being trying to get the final word on ANY of the decisions that went into it, ...
we could only wonder if he ever managed. 

Meanwhile,
there was zero acknowledgement
to the last part of the post (of mine) being responded to.
But I think it bears repeating: 

"it's just never going to be reasonable

for anyone to assert that a literally perfect-everything, omni-everything (Being)

chose to use such an inevitably auto-corrupting, and poorly circulate-able method

to deliver crucial messages to humanity.