Blessings DavidW--When your busy life permits, watch this, this and this. (The last is shortest.) Enjoy!

A fairly straightforward university course in the New Testament will show the lack of eyewitness material. I remember having a wry smile at evangelical students at theological college suddenly finding out that all their 'reportage' assumptions were undermined by their own denominational tutors.

Yes David W another complicated situation in the gospel to contend with. Firstly lets deal with the issue of eye witness accounts according to Matthew Mark Luke and John and others , for we have more in common today with the "eye witness" account, No one can claim to be eye witnesses to the actual acts of that time, so they cannot prove one way or the other positively that biblical accounts are true, ONLY by faith and belief, but we know that faith and belief has to be confirmed sometimes it is in the short term and sometimes in the long term, the second coming for instance is yet to be proved, but as christians we have faith that it will be.

What we are eye witnesses to is the fulfilment of faith, many times over in our time real time. This does apply to orthodox christians as well as unorthodox christians.

What i mean by Orthodox or Unorthodox is simply whether one follows the traditional route of the Word, or whether one conforms to traditional values or not. What i was trying to say was that, our experience of the fulfillment of faith, is equal in the same way as none of us have literally seen the word made flesh from the original source like the disciples seeing Jesus for instance. But we have seen the original results of faith fulfilled.

Matthew Mark Luke and John and others could not have viewed jesus life or crucifixion exactly the same, as their views would have been based on not only what they saw but also on what they believed about what they saw , some of that would also have been reliant on their faith in what Jesus represented on the earth and in spirit.

I really hope i have not confused you, and i am always willing to read others points of view, I am just wondering to myself what understanding this means to us today in real time. Sometimes in all the discussion about the different models it is easy to forget that it is not about what we see but what we understand. We can only understand in so far as belief enables and we see and experience faith fulfilled.

The strange thing is that we often only understand in retrospect, I think that the eye witness accounts were the same, they more than likely did not understand what they saw until afterwards. The issue with this is the way in which it is recalled and reported.ie redaction

Angela

Another David-- The village has a pub at the sign of the Three Davids. You will find it just across from the cathedral, and there is much traffic between the two. On tap, they serve small batch brews, usually of local provenance and sometimes rather experimental. Brewmasters passing through the village often stop by to comment on the latest. The barkeeps are sensible folk, and things are peaceable so long as the regulars avoid That Topic, but there's a back window above the eponymous River Fulcrum for those who get too unruly. (A few come in swimming trunks.) At the tiny skete down the road, the few Orthodox monks are puzzled that anyone in the pub considers himself orthodox at all, but since they have heard of the ale, they have tried to visit. Alas, by the time their long services are over, it's closed.

I suspect that the opinions of the villagers overlap more than they either agree or disagree. Agreement is splendid, of course, but so is calm sorting of differences of opinion.

Another David,

There is not necessarily any danger of people sitting in theological huddles, it could be a good thing to make sure the truth is preserved.

When you say "The issue of the nature of the Gospels & Acts is such an important issue, as they are the main witness to the person of Jesus, " this is not necessarily a good reflection. All of the NT was written post Pentecost writers, quite a bit before the gospels were written. Whilst the gospels give the a more historical witness of events, the epistles are the church powered in the spirit and faith.

But there is a problem with the claim "they are not eye-witness accounts" of Jesus. The only evidence we have says they are. All Pluralist has done is say why he doesn’t believe they are, based on his expectation of 'how did it happen' to be more specific. But even his expectation doesn’t change the claim by the writer, it just implies the writer is genuinely deceived or purposely lying. If this were the case, there is no way any of us can know whether anything he writes is correct, and if he is making it up then so must the other NT writers. But there is still no evidence to suggest they are not eye-witness accounts, the only evidence is the text that says they are.

WATERANGEL,

I dont understand your remark "The orthodox Christians however closely they read the gospel and follow the Gospel cannot proclaim to have done the former of these two." They don’t claim it, and for that matter neither can non-orthodox Christians, nor those posting here according to historical and Biblical witness who are not Christian of any kind.

"The word became flesh and dwelt among us"   Seen

"Leaving his spirit until his work is done "           Unseen

Matthew Mark Luke and John and Peter and many others Saw the word made flesh.

The orthodox Christians however closely they read the gospel and follow the Gospel cannot proclaim to have done the former of these two.

"By their faith" and the fruits of the Spirit you shall know them.

"Unseen " ie the action from Faith is an Unseen act

The result of the action from faith is a Seen act.

These distinctions are important, for what the orthodox perceives as unorthodox, is often in reverse, for it is unorthodox to expect to read the word in the gospel and see the word made flesh as it is an experience, bought about through faith and acted out by the receiver ie such as in healing for instance.

We are all living the second hand word with a first hand faith which creates the word anew for relevance and application.

There is a difference between the recollection of someone elses experience of faith, and actually having faith yourself and experiencing the result of that faith. The word can only become flesh when you experience the gospel in real time through revelation, revelation comes from working together and sharing.

Anyway i like sharing with Pluralist and David W and David R , Bowman, Lawrence, Nerson ,Iconoclast ,Simon, Jody, Mark B, amongst others, i think in our unique way we are living the gospel as orthodox in an unorthodox way. Understanding one another can only enhance the gospel we dont have to agree, but we need to understand. Why would we contribute here if we did not care about the understanding of the gospel?

Angela

I must admit that when I first saw the thread title, I read it with a capital 'O', and thought "It would be good to have some input from our Eastern brothers and sisters." (I also thought that perhaps the thread title should be "Should people not called David or Dave depart from Fulcrum?" - there do seem to be a lot of us with the same first name!)

The point of these discussion threads is, surely, to have place for debate about areas of disagreement. It is not a place simply to put forward (one group's view of) what is 'orthodox'. There are huge dangers in people just sitting in their own theological huddles agreeing with each other, and reinforcing their view of things. This can result in people being unable to understand why others have a different view, and as a result discussion degenerates into repetetive restatements of beliefs held, and name-calling of the "other side".

So, I welcome the contributions of folk like Pluralist. Pehaps the ideas and arguments coming from someone who has a position which is acknowledged to be non-orthodox, even non-Christian will help those of us who would want to be orthodox and Christian to think more deeply about fundamental issues, and perhaps find that we are actually more in agreement than we realized. And perhaps, dare I hope, that these issues will avoid "That Topic", which seems to dominate the discussion threads.

The issue of the nature of the Gospels & Acts is such an important issue, as they are the main witness to the person of Jesus, who is - after all - the center of the Christian faith. However, to respond to those who say "they are not eye-witness accounts" with "but they say they are", is not exactly persuasive :-) There are, after all, many works of fiction written in the first person that report what is seen and heard and touched. So, we need to work a bit harder to establish that it is reasonable to see these texts as a reliable witness. I believe that researchers at Tyndale House are doing work if interest in this area.

In parentheses, I would suggest that 'reasonable' is the best we can get to with human argument. At the end of the day, the written words only becomes the living word when the Holy Spirit takes the words and convicts the heart, and the people find the Bible speaking to them personally (as so many do).

Pluralist,

Again, one can only say its not the character of eyewitness testimony, if one simply doesnt believe it when a writer says we have seen, and we speak of what we know. I am not aware you are claiming to have seen the Lord, but John did claim they saw Him and witnessed what He did. 

All you are doing is describing some of the reasons you don’t believe it which is ok for an atheist forum but of no use on a Christian forum. It is only your opinion of the account, your word against the NT writers. 

Laurence,

Which is not credible at all on your part, and would be better off on a non-believer’s secular forum. The Christian faith historically is about it being true, not myth.

Even the wiki link you gave, which is a secular one, contains various opinions including belief and doubt, you seem to have sided with doubt. It is also about the gospels, I referred to the NT, the New Testament is more than just the gospels. Even in the link it acknowledges that Mark’s gospel is probably resulting from a lot of Peter’s testimony. Peter being an eye witness of course and who wrote 1 and 2 Peter, which is in the NT.

John’s gospel says The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John was an eye witness.

Perhaps you might like to address his point when he writes "Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony."

James and Jude may well have been eye witnesses, and Paul, though not literally an eye witness, received what he knew directly from the risen Lord.

As to the question of the thread ‘should orthodox Christians depart from Fulcrum’ there are few such impartial forums around and orthodox Christians should be thankful for Fulcrum and the chance to debate. Whether one will be debating belief  or unbelief rather than the evangelical centre is another matter.  

"Sorry Pluralist, I don’t think so. The NT describes men having seen and touched the risen Lord. That is eye witness testimony not a developed theory. "  DavidW

That's pushing credulity to its limits.  The so-called eyewitness testimony is all at least second-hand and none of it was written down until several decades after the supposed events took place.  Heavily embellished myth is all it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reliability_of_the_Gospels

It's impressionistic via theological tales, each with a further meaning. It is not the character of eyewitness testimony, which is usually basic and unexplained, though people are always seeking to link events together. Plus there is no ability to answer 'how did it happen' other than at a most basic 'visions' level, which is highly subjective and only objectified in any sense once a narrative has got to work on it. That throws it across to the reader or the community, to see it as a roll call of leadership, authority and congregation, for a time, and as such a reader it is clear to me it is not describing anything of the real for which I (in the end) take the consequence of not idnetifying myself with that community.

Sorry Pluralist, I don’t think so. The NT describes men having seen and touched the risen Lord. That is eye witness testimony not a developed theory. Sure the NT writers dont use the word trinity but they do describe Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which became known as the Trinity.