The evangelists did not lie. That is a vulgarization that I would never make and it is a secular idea that would never occur to the authors spreading the "Good News" of Jesus to the first-century world.
I only hope you read your Bible more carefully than you read my last post!
You have taken my reply and elaborated upon it, yet you deny the gospel writers did the same. If they were "channelers" of inerrant truths, then it must follow that our understanding of those truth must also be inerrant. This would mean that we would all have to have a claim on inerrant interpretation and we would all need to participate in an endless perfect chain of right interpretation! Clearly this is nonsense.
We moderns need to understand that the evangelists were human beings and experienced Jesus as continuing to be present with them after the crucifixion. This means that they were concerned with the Jesus who is. not the Jesus who necessarily was. the Jesus who speaks and acts, not the Jesus who may have spoke and acted.
It is clear to a careful reader that Matthew and Luke had copies of Mark in front of them when they wrote their account. This explains the consistent differences in their gospels. Matthew and Luke are not independent gospels but variations of Mark. I also believe they made use of a separate sayings source when they didn't follow Mark--often using it in the same order and with the same word combinations!
Most believers are understandably shocked at the notion that the gospel writers mythologized actual events and even created stories and sayings from scratch. There are a number of reasons for this: first, we live in a secular world and read the Bible as if it were a modern biography or a newspaper article. Second, clergy have been derelect in teaching the rest of us what has been known in Christian scholarship among theologians for nearly 300 years. Third, it has only been 500 years since Luther took the Bible away from the province of the priests and translated it for the people. One only has to enter a good, reputable Christian bookstore today to see the amazing number of Bibles and translations. It is as if Judge Wapner's "People's Court" did so well, so now it seems everyone in daytime TV is getting into the "court business."
Finally, there is that sticky matter of history versus faith--which is actually a false dichotomy, but even so it just proves the point that a Christian of the caliber of, say, Mother Teresa, can be a perfect example of the best of the faith and still not "need" to know anything about biblical scholarship and the quest for the "real" Jesus. No one is insisting that biblical scholarship be shoved in anyone's face (even though some fundamentalists actively try to subvert a fair hearing of the evidence!).
To the Christian who seeks a deeper and different dimension to her faith, the long tradition of Christian history, thought and interpretation is a refreshing well to drink from.
It has been quite recent in world history to add the letter "s" on the end of the word "religion." It has also been quite recent for anthropologists to define the word "myth" not in the popular sense terms of fable or falsehood. but in the sense that myth is the closest humans can come to describing absolute truth. Now that we're waking up to smell the coffee of other religions and cultures, we are finding ourselves in the awkward position of respecting humanity's other faiths, or seeing our faith as true and their faith as lies. If one reads the Bible as a literal, journalistic account of true history, then one will have a difference experience of the divine from the one who reads the Bible as a complex blend of history and theology.
I feel that all of these issues are profoundly disturbing--but I also feel that truth, and not "what we would wish to be so" should be the final standard. That is because finally, I have faith that God is omnipotent enough to take care of Himself!
