Theology

The second question I’ve been pursuing is did [Jesus] perform acts that we, today, would agree are miracles? To answer this, I’ve been hoping to rely on sources outside of the New Testament because I am uncertain of its historical accuracy. Because it was written by Christians and for Christians, and because it has been translated and its contents adjudicated multiple times, I just don’t feel it to be an un-biased source.

Bill O’Reilly, executive producer and anchor of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, is, to put it lightly, completely unafraid to say what he thinks and, if people don’t like it, he’d almost certainly say “Tough.”

Not surprisingly, there are no sources about Jesus written during His lifetime. Indeed, the earliest gospel is thought to date from about 70 C.E., thirty odd years after the crucifiction. And Thallos, the earliest non-Biblical source, wrote only of one aspect of Christianity, the darkening of the skies at Christ’s crucifiction, and that only that same number of years later at a minimum, and what we know of Thallos’s writings is itself only second hand.

In a list of attributes of second-century Christianity:

And, alas, the latter is exactly what I’m trying to do, to reason Jesus as deserving of the claims Christians make.

I’m on a three part quest to answer the following questions.

Okay, you all probably know this one.

And you’ll probably recognize this also:

Carl Sagan, in his Cosmos television series about the universe said, “We are star-stuff.” He meant that the atoms that make up our bodies were generated in the nuclear furnaces of stars and that, over billions of years, those stars exploded, cast their products out, and those parts were captured into new stellar systems. In our case, those atoms coalesced into our Sun and planets and, on at least one of those, life arose and through a long series of evolutionary steps, you came into existence.

Where does evil come from?

“The devil made me do it,” is sometimes heard. The comedian Flip Wilson made it one of his catch-phrases.