A Form of Sacrifice

No, this post has absolutely nothing to do with religion.

This post was prompted by a post I read over at Questions and Observations.  The post is titled "The major tasks for the incoming GOP House."  It might be helpful for you to go read the brief post before continuing on here, but I trust what I have to say can stand on its own.

Before I go on, I need to stop and define who I'm talking to. Conservative voters.  All of my instruction and cajoling is directed at you.  If you are a leftist drone or someone who has given up on voting, you are welcome to stay, but I can't imagine why.

We the people who are not going to Washington to legislate have this terrible habit of merely showing up at the polls, holding our noses and voting for the lesser of two or three evils, and then doing little or nothing beyond that, other than complaining loudly about how the GOP sucks, and even then, we only do it with others who think the way we do.  While at parties or church or any other social setting, with rare exceptions, we will smile and nod and keep to safe topics of conversation for fear of getting that wilting look or sharp elbow from a spouse who doesn't want to risk being thought of badly by anybody in the room.

It has been my experience that the leftist drones and such have no qualms about speaking up at parties.  I can't count the number of times I've experienced this personally. I was married to a government school teacher for 21 years and saw it a lot, and most of the time I let her reign me in, and when I didn't "heel" I typically paid for my indiscretion for days afterward.  I even remember attending a wedding shower where there was a woman that I had once considered a friend, the wife of an Episcopal priest.  This was near the end of Bill Clinton's second term, when it was well established that the man was a womanizer, a rapist, and a pathological liar, and yet here was this woman talking about how great a man he was.  Three people who knew me well immediately turned in my direction, I presume to see if I was about to explode. Because it was a wedding shower, and out of respect for the guests of honor, I simply left the room.  I was told later that the mother of the bride made it clear she didn't want to hear Bill Clinton's name mentioned again.

There is a time and place for engaging in political debate, but I don't go looking for it where it doesn't belong. Now that we are over the cliff and dropping into the pit of hell known as socialism, the time for showing polite deference to people like my former friend is now well past.  Of course I have to admit that I've moved up into the mountains and so my exposure to such people in person is limited.  When we go to the feed store or such places as are frequented by folks who cherish freedom and self-sufficiency, it's doubtful that we are going to encounter those who are champions of the involuntary collective.  But if it happens, I will NOT be quiet.  Most of the people that I share DNA with really won't have anything to do with me for that reason.

How many of you know that the revolution that brought about this once great republic was really only supported by about a third of the population or less?  How many know that Benjamin Franklin saw his own son deported to England after the war for being a loyalist to the British crown?  Don't you think there was much anguish and tears in that relationship?  I can't see how any decent father would find any pleasure in being so estranged by his own son.

If there is to be any hope left that we can still live in a free republic, enjoying individual liberty under a rule of constitutional law rather than the whims of a ruling political elite, those of us who claim to be conservators of the principles that this country was founded on are going to have to shed our desire to be liked by those who would go along with a socialist agenda.  We are going to have to speak up.  We are going to have to learn to argue and debate and point out the flaws of the collectivist voodoo ideology that insists that a man-made Utopia can be created.

Don't you wait for the Rand Pauls and Marco Rubios to make the case for truth in the media.  You get in the fray.  Obama instructed his myrmidons to get in the faces of "our enemies."  Well, let's take them on where were we can't be edited like so much video on TV.  Ask your left leaning friends and family who still seem to have a couple of brain cells to rub together, why they think the methods and ideologies that created the conditions in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Venezuela, Spain, and Greece will somehow magically work here.

Don't expect incoming Speaker Boehner to use his position to champion true conservatism.  He's already proven that isn't going to happen by how he handled the tax deal he did with Obama.  Boehner is just more of the same, lame, ostensibly loyal opposition to the hard left communist democrats.  Boehner believes that if he just seems to throw an occasional bone in the direction of the majority of GOP voters, they'll quiet down and go back to watching football or American Idol or whatever.  And I fear he may be right.

It isn't just about negative harping either.  The new guys that got elected by conservatives need to hear from you as well, because the media is going to constantly demagogue the issues as if to tell them they were wrong about why they got elected.  Let them know when they are getting it right.

I Should Have Known

But then again, how could I?

I thought I was going to move on to ELS codes, but after thinking about it for quite a spell, it seems to me that this issue of someone like Paul  is what I need to deal with and get it over with.

I didn't chase after Paul.  He came to my Blog, I didn't go to his to try and proselytize for my side.  I won't go to his blog and comment there, because, quite frankly, I don't see any point.  From here on out, I expect there will be those who won't like my tone or some such thing. While my rhetoric will be sharp and uncompromising, and I will not entertain warm and fuzzy methods of persuasion, I am not trying to hurt feelings for the sake of scoring points.  Eternal destinies are at stake.

I started out making it clear that I had spent most of my youthful years of development coming to a dedicated belief in evolution.  I was so very gung ho about evolution that watching the movie Inherit The Wind was almost a religious experience for me. Watching Clarence Darrow just make an idiot out of William Jennings Bryan had me pumping my fist in the air.  I actually grew up believing that the movie was a documentary.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not defending Bryan, he went into that trial completely unprepared and with little understanding of what he was dealing with.  This is very much like most people who claim the title of Christian today.  The vast majority of Christians don't understand the importance of having reasoned, logical answers that help prove Christianity.

I thought and pondered, pondered and thought, gathered notes and copied links to websites regarding ELS codes in preparing for my next post, but I couldn't stop thinking about Paul my commenter.  In Knowing God: Part 3, I made the point that he reminded me of other people who just seem to be able to pull one part of their brain out and isolate it from the conclusions that logic demands in order to maintain something else they want to believe.  I almost started to go back over the scientific evidence and facts to show that Paul doesn't even understand the science, because he simply parrots stuff that he has heard or read and can't explain it in his own words.  But there is the rub.  If he truly understood the science, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, he would KNOW that the stupid stuff he's been told about energy being added to an "open" system doesn't overcome the chaotic nature of entropy.  I can use the simple analogy that if you pour gasoline on a bonfire, it doesn't result in carbon crystallizing into more complex shapes that contain coded information. I dare anyone to take a power supply for a computer and create a voltage and current amplifier system so that you can just vary the current input for days, weeks, or years on end and then explain to me how that will result in more complex, or any kind of programming language being developed inside the CPU.  Build yourself a little terrarium and set it out in the sun and then show me how, other than adding heat to the enclosure, you ended up with more complex structures just because of the sun's radiation. No, going over the science again and helping to actually understand how the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics works is not going to change Paul's mind, because some guy with a Ph.D. who Paul respects more than the Bible is going to tell him that's how it is, and Paul will just accept it.

Now, because I try my best to think logically, and would like to think that anybody who would take the time to read my posts values logic as much as I do, I figured a few responses to Paul would at least send him away thinking for a while. I try to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who claims to be a follower of Christ, that their loyalty is to the Creator and what He has to say about His own creation, and that a follower of Christ understands that man is inherently flawed.  Problem is, I forgot that just like in the issue of firearms and hoplophobia, there are people  who can seem reasonable at first, but upon further inspection reveal themselves to be happy with a condition of cognitive dissonance.  Then again, maybe the human mind is so complex that we'll have to come up with a new label.  Or maybe I just don't understand Paul's condition, or the last option is that Paul is just crazy or evil.   WHOOAAAAHH!! Did I just say that?  Not that I wanted to.  To go to Paul's website, you would think he's such a nice guy.  Far nicer than me.  He has six kids.  I'm sure he's a loving father and his kids and his wife adore him.  What in the hell is wrong with me for picking on Paul?

You know, I've got other people I like and respect in the blogosphere.  Let me use Kevin Baker as an example.  Kevin runs The Smallest Minority.  Kevin and I think the same about a lot of issues regarding personal liberty, firearms and government.  I like Kevin and consider him a friend.  In the interest of full disclosure, I've never met him.  I feel I know him based on his rather candid writings.  Kevin is a self proclaimed atheist.  Religiously, he's my polar opposite.  How could I possibly like him so much?

I would much rather be in a combat situation with Kevin Baker than with Paul.  Kevin is an engineer by trade.  A logical thinker.  His essays display a deep, thoughtful character.  I have read so many of Kevin's essays and the sources he cites to explain how he comes to the conclusions that he does.  His writing reflects a deep desire to find real objective truth, regardless of feelings or wishful thinking.  Kevin says he is an atheist because as far as he has wanted to search, he has found no reason to believe in a deity.  Thus proving that you cannot and will not find something that you are not looking for, even if it is right in front of your face.  This is profoundly important.  While I may feel regret in the idea that I won't see Kevin in the next life, I understand that the worst thing I could do would be to preach at him about his soul when he sees no need and would merely be irritated by my efforts.  If the subject of the afterlife came up because Kevin was sincerely interested, I would have no doubt that his logic and engineering type mind would demand that he make some decision either way, but I can tell from his writings that there would be no sitting on the fence or compartmentalization when it came to deciding on what is real and what makes sense.  In that regard, I feel confident that given all the good evidence, Kevin would choose the right way.  I respect that about Kevin.  Regardless of his decision, I respect that.

Not so with Paul.  I wouldn't trust Paul as far as I could throw him. Paul says he's a Christian. He found his way to my blog, and has gone out of his way to defend evolution as if it can somehow be compatible with a belief in Jesus of Nazareth.  Mind you, Paul doesn't just speak of some passing, shoulder shrugging acknowledgement of Jesus as a figure of history.  I don't get the impression that Paul's Jesus is like that of the Unitarians or the Mormons or some strange cult, but I'm not really sure.  According to Paul's blog, he claims to love and glorify Jesus.  But when I take in the whole picture of Paul and what he writes on his blog and in my comments section, I have to say, "Nonsense!"  Or at least I have to understand that the Jesus Paul worships is a God of Paul's own making and not that of the Bible.

Yeshua HaMashiach who was prophesied about for thousands of years and proved Himself to be God incarnate, referred to the Torah as being Holy and incorruptible. Eternal and transcendant over even the world itself.   The very Word of God. The Gospel of John declares that the Word of God and Jesus are one and the same entity.  If the Bible is a liar and cannot be trusted, then Jesus is a liar and cannot be trusted.  At every turn, Paul would take the words of fallible, sinful men with limited knowledge that they in turn learned from men of limited knowledge about a theory that was dreamed up by men who's primary goal was to explain the world in such a way as to eliminate a Creator.  In any argument with me about science or origins, Paul would choose  Darwin, Dawkins, Gould, Hawkings or anybody else but Jesus Christ to make his case.  Yet he tells the world from his blog that he loves Jesus.

I made the points in my earlier posts that Genesis doesn't leave us any room to compromise with evolution.  As if He knew that the controversy would arise before and after Charles Darwin, God went to the trouble to define each of the days of creation as having evening and morning, i.e. regular 24 hour days. He went to the trouble of waiting until day four to create the sun, moon, and stars.  He specifically made the point that until man sinned in the garden that there was no bloodshed, no death or dying.  He created all the land animals and man on day six, so there were no millions of years between them. There is a lot more there that  Does all of this sound absolutely bat-$h0t crazy to an evolutionist or someone who has been indoctrinated in the government schools?  Of course it does.  I don't mind being thought of as crazy to people who think that man knows better than God. I quit worrying so much about that when it dawned on me that over the centuries, science has had to revise its thinking about so many things. At the same time, while man has had to adjust his interpretation of what the Bible means, at no point has anyone been able to point to something the Bible says and say, "We know THAT can't be true, because of THIS."  The Bible obviously conflicts with the interpretations and theories of scientists who only allow for a materialistic explanation of the universe, but the Bible doesn't conflict with things we know to be established fact. Believe me, I've pissed off several guys with Ph.D.s when I made them admit that fact.

 Evolutionary scientists love to crow about how science is "self-correcting," even though it can spend decades or longer wallowing in whatever the most accepted theory is before they are dragged, kicking and screaming, into a better understanding of the evidence.  Problem nowadays, as evidenced by movies like EXPELLED, and even lots of cases I studied before that movie, any heretic who presents hard evidence that goes against the dogma of neo-darwinian evolution is fired and ostracized from mainstream academia, without anybody demonstrating why the evidence is bad.  There are perfectly good explanations as to why the creation story of Genesis works with the science we know to be fact today.  Creationists don't need to be embarrassed by what the mainstream scientists think they know.

Paul's insistence on defending evolution raises the big question.  Why?  What's his motivation?  To help people accept that they can have a warm, fuzzy, non-judgmental Jesus who doesn't care what they think, regardless of the evidence? In order to do that, you have to dismiss the Bible as nothing more than allegorical stories and poetry and just a tiny smattering of wisdom.  The rest just shouldn't be taken seriously.   Is he trying to get evolutionists to say, "Hey, I can have evolution and Jesus too!"  Why bother?  If evolution is true, and it renders the Bible just so much religious nonsense that can be taken or left with or without the salt, then why waste my precious time?  Since Darwin's time, and actually even before that, the champions of evolution theory have made the main body of their argument not about scientific evidence, but rather about how crazy creationists are for going against the conventional "thought" of those who accept evolution.

Think of this another way. Imagine this improbable scenario.  Paul says he loves his wife.  And to everybody who sees the family that seems to be true. But there are some "well respected" people in academe who say Paul's wife is a good for nothing whore and he's wasting his time giving her any devotion or attention.  Out in public, Paul doesn't want to be thought of as being less intelligent than the average guy by disagreeing with those "well respected" guys in academe, so he actually defends those guys, while at the same time saying he loves his wife and is completely devoted to her.  Does this make sense?

Since Paul would never consider heresy against his beloved champions of evolution by considering anything the Bible has to say as being authoritative, I suppose Paul cannot be offended when I say that he brings to mind the passage where Jesus says that many will come in "that day" and say to Him, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and heal the sick and do this and that in your name." And Jesus will look at them and say, "Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.  I never knew you."

You know, I will be very careful to not offend an unbeliever, because my goal should be to bring him to God. However I must do so while being faithful to God and not compromising the truth.  There are lots of believers who need to be disabused of errors that have been taught as the traditions of the churches over the centuries. I know I am constantly learning, and have regretted being taken in by some stuff in the past, especially when it comes to keeping the commandments and understanding eschatology.  I can be understanding and deferential up to a point, but when someone shows his self to be hell-bent on taking the teaching of man over the teaching of God, I have to draw the line.

Did A Donkey Just Fly By?

What in the heck just happened?

My lovely wife has done something that shocks even me.  I'm talking about someone who puts extreme effort into the concept of not saying anything if it's not uplifting and positive.

It takes an awful lot to get her stirred up over anything.

Now, I will admit that she has a great restraining influence on me, because had I commented on Katie Couric, it would have been along the lines of snatching that little elitist snob out of her New York apartment and dropping her in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and then interviewing her a month later if she had survived the time there.

"So, Katie, how are the bruises healing?"
"How many beatings did you endure until you found a burqua?"
"How many times were you raped as an unescorted female,  until you could find some benevolent Muslim family to claim you as one of theirs?"  "Oh, you mean it got worse?"
"Gee, Katie, you don't seem very talkative about your wonderful experience among the "peace loving" Muslims."

I will make myself stop now.

How A Typical Leftist Sees America

I don't think I even need to comment on this.

A World Of Insanity

Perhaps the United Nations serves one purpose.  It puts all of the idiotic and insane antics of corrupt governments on display in one convenient spot for intelligent people to point to.

I do my best to treat people who think that a UN is a good idea as ignorant little children who just don't have the cognitive ability to know any better; you know, smile benignly, and say something like, "Oh, bless your little heart.  I know you mean well."  But sometimes I just want to have the ability to take away their keys and their voter registration and tell them when they grow up and start thinking rationally, we'll let them start driving and living amongst rational people again.

I want to thank whoever put this video together to expose the sheer idiocy of the UN.

Hat tip to Moonbattery.  And I suggest you watch all five of the top videos if you go there.

New Year Resolutions: Brava!

This was my first stumbling upon this writer, over at David Horowitz's Blog.  I'm so glad I did.

I read all eleven of her short pages, and it was a very pleasurable read.  Reading about the Fair Tax made me think that I need to do a post on that some day, even though all the economic indicators I can see tell me it's too late for it to make a difference before the collapse and reset comes about.  I suppose the only good reason for posting about it in detail is to make sure that we never again make the mistake of allowing an income tax.

Go check it out.

Knowing God: Part 5

I was pondering whether or not to launch into Equidistant Letter Sequencing (ELS) codes that prove the Bible is of supernatural origin, but my guest, "tpmoney," brought up the issue about "which version."  This is worth covering here before I move on to ELS codes, because before we had the discovery of those codes -- made possible only with modern computers -- we have always had manuscript evidence.

One of the myths that critics of the Bible like to casually throw around or repeat is the idea that the Bible we have today can't possibly have survived until now without serious redactions, editing, or alteration.  This myth easily gets perpetuated because the vast majority of folks who call themselves Christians are too lazy or don't care to answer the false charge.  That is why in my last post I talked about Josh McDowell and Evidence That Demands A Verdict.  You see, I don't need to re-invent the wheel here.  That volume meticulously demonstrates that the manuscripts of the Old Testament have been faithfully copied down through the centuries with only the minutest of errors that don't even change any of the meaning of the texts. We also have many extant manuscripts that date very close to the first century CE, and the writings of the early disciples of the apostles to testify as to what should be considered Scripture and what is not.  If you are serious about knowing whether or not the Bible is true or not, you can go check out McDowell's work or Stroebel's work.  McDowell's work is heavily footnoted to all of the source material.  Let me deal with each of TPMONEY's points.

"So which version of the Bible contains the truth? While the original scribes may have been intent of preserving the history as it was, we've since had 2000 years of editing and cutting and politics interfering."

Over the years when I have heard someone make the claim of redacting or editing of the Bible, my question is always: "Give me an example."  To which I get nothing.  I keep asking and I keep getting nothing.  The reason is because you would have to have manuscript or archaeological evidence that at some point the text said one thing, and then later it was found to say something else.  Is everybody clear on that?  Upon questioning further, I find out that this is what they heard somebody else say with no evidence to back it up.  Once again, it's all about empirical evidence. Most critics of the Bible haven't got a clue about how the process of copying Holy Scripture is done.  Which is why they just assume that errors must have occurred as their imagination warrants.  So let me explain.

A Torah scroll is considered a very, very sacred object. The standards for how the Hebrew Scriptures must be written was established by Moses and has been carried down ever since. It must be written on kosher animal skin (most likely lamb).  It must be written with a certified kosher quill that meets very demanding standards.  In order to be a scribe who is going to create a faithful, kosher (perfect) copy of a Torah scroll, you not only must have been educated and bar mitzvahed and considered a righteous man, you then must spend five years learning the most intricate details of forming the sacred letters of a scroll. The picture to the right is of the letter "tsade" (pronounced tsah-dee). You can see that this isn't like gouging cuniform into clay tablets. This isn't like taking dictation or mass producing books to sell to the general public.  The act of writing the letters was considered creating holy art.  The characters in a Torah scroll are not like the common Hebrew you see every day or in other writings. There are special quirks all throughout a Torah scroll that seem to have hidden meaning, but that must be faithfully reproduced to look exactly like the original. This is why even the least expensive kosher Torah scrolls can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Strange things like oddly larger than normal or smaller than normal characters in certain spots, some letters that are stretched way out on the page.  Places where gaps of a certain length must be kept.  Some words have special little strokes placed a certain way above each letter.  After each segment is copied by a scribe with the special attention to all of this detail, it must be inspected by at least three and possibly five other more experienced scribes to make sure that each detail has been faithfully executed.  One of the inspectors even counts the characters backward on the scroll to make sure the numbers match.  If a scribe makes an error while writing any regular word on a segment, he may carefully scrape off the layer of ink and make the correction as long as it is not visible to the naked eye, but if he makes any mistake in copying the tetragrammaton, the Holy Name of God (Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey) that entire segment becomes unredeemable and must be set aside for burial.  It cannot be used under any circumstances. If a segment is found to contain an error after the whole segment was completed, it also is set aside for burial.  It cannot be used.  There was no editing.  Creating a new scroll of Holy Scripture as a copy is not like copying your friend's history essay in high school.  It's more like creating a forgery of the Mona Lisa that you'd like to sell.

When the first copies were starting to be written, it was still fresh in the minds of the Jews that they were dealing with the One and Only God who wiped out the Egyptians and struck fear in the hearts of every inhabitant of the middle east from as far south as Ethiopia to as far north as what is now Lebanon.  When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in a cave in Qumran, their discovery was monumental because they proved that the modern day copies of the book of Isaiah, the most complete examples found there, were essentially identical, meaning that a thousand years of faithful transmission by copying had preserved the text.

Political interfering?  What would that be?  Israel didn't have a king for the first 400 years of their history after Moses.  If there was to be political interference, where would it come from and why?  Regardless of that, where is there any evidence of that?  Asking me, "What about political interference?" is like asking me, "What about the influence of the Australian Aborigines?"  I made the statement before that the Bible records about the kings of Israel (both kingdoms) just as they are, warts and all.  If someone had political reasons to edit Scripture, who were they, what were their reasons, and what is the evidence for it?

I'm one of those people who get's fairly peeved by that silly bumper sticker saying, "If it ain't King James, it ain't Bible"  The King James Version has some good things going for it, but as a translation from the original language it can't be perfect.  Sorry if this is the first you are hearing this, and it upsets your sensitivities, but that's the way it is.  Some poor, undereducated folks have seen that word "Authorized" in the KJV and thought somehow it got there by the hand of God Himself.  Sorry, not so.  What that "authorized" means is that it was finally authorized by King James of England after centuries of it being illegal, on pain of death, to translate the Scriptures from the Latin into English so the laity could read it for themselves. [UPDATE: see comment below, somebody did some serious research to correct a misperception of mine. Apparently not all of Europe had problems with the Bible being translated into local languages. Congrats to good research.]  Some of the KJVs were so fraught with errors that they had to be recalled.  Gutenberg's invention had made printing so easy in comparison to hand copying that it made it easy to get careless.

The vast majority of "Christians" know little to nothing about their own church's history, let alone the history of translations from the Greek Septuagint to the Latin Vulgate.  Most Christians in America don't know that the KJV wasn't even accepted by most of the puritans who fled to these shores precisely because it was King Jame's Bible.  They were mostly all using something called the Geneva Bible.  Many of the most educated of our founding fathers and others in Europe, such as Sir Isaac Newton, studied Hebrew and Greek in order to study the Bible in it's original language.  Newton spent most of his life trying to discover the hidden codes that he was sure existed in the Bible.  Alas, he was ahead of his time.

I'm still learning Hebrew, but I know enough to read it in the original language and compare it to the interlinear versions and cross reference to the concordances and lexicons.  Some of the greatest difficulty stems from the fact that Hebrew has a very small vocabulary compared to English.  Where we may have twenty different words with various shades or connotations of meaning, there is just one word in Hebrew and the context determines the meaning.  For the most part, it is pretty straight forward, especially in the historical sections.  The only places I run into problems, along with scholars far beyond my ability is when it comes to prophetic passages that have yet to be fulfilled.  I'm still stunned by people who can be shown all the stuff that has been fulfilled and still don't believe, but then I covered that in a previous post.

TPMONEY also said: "what about things like the gnostic gospels?"

The gnostic gospels are called that because they apparently were written by men who had their own mystical ideas about Christ and what it took to be saved.  The term "gnostic" comes from the Greek word "gnosis" meaning knowledge, and in this case, arcane or mystical knowledge that had nothing to do with the historical and factual Jesus.  They are an extreme contrast to the canonical gospels since the gnostic "versions" were not discovered until many centuries later.  Far removed from any eyewitnesses, let alone tertiary or more separation from anybody who knew the apostles.  They are no more important than 17th century novels about Jesus.  The canonical gospels were already circulating within 30 to 70 years of Yeshua's resurrection. Matthew's possibly earlier, having started out in Hebrew.  We know from the impeccable historian Luke that the body of believers was growing rapidly due to the appeal of eyewitness testimony of those who had seen and heard all that had happened with Yeshua. Luke compiled his gospel in a chronological fashion and interviewed many eyewitnesses, friends and family members of the Messiah and His followers. Had there been any significant mistakes in the accounts of the gospels, there would have been plenty of people who could have stepped up and said, "Hey, wait a minute; that's not how it happened at all."  And before I move on, let me make this point: because the apostles and all the initial disciples of the Messiah were Jewish, they would have regarded the recordings of the sayings and actions of the Messiah as on par with Torah.  Therefore, when it came to making copies of those writings for distribution to the congregations throughout Israel and beyond, they would have taken the same great care with the transmission of copies, and this is borne out in the extant manuscripts that scholars know of today.

TPMONEY continued:  "If the included gospels can have such differing interpretations of the same even  [sic](IIRC, of the 4 gospels, only 2 mention that the crucifixion had two other prisoners, and only 1 mentions that one was repentant, while the other say s they were both mocking) how can we be sure whichever version we have is "correct"? Or perhaps a better question is how did you decide which version to accept?

The mistake that my guest makes here would be well known to any law enforcement officer.  If you get just two, let alone four "witnesses" apart for questioning, and each of their stories are identical in every detail, you immediately know that something is wrong.  It's a concocted story.  Don't take my word, go ask a detective or google investigative techniques.

As for the differences, each of the gospel writers had slightly different perspectives on the events.After the arrest of Jesus, the disciples scattered.  Even after the resurrection, there were times when the disciples weren't all together all the time.  The gospel accounts weren't given as testimony in a court where there was a prosecutor cross examining and asking why one writer didn't mention something that another one did.  Missing details don't make a story false.  Conflicting details can.  Some things that were important to one guy weren't important to note for the other.  The important thing is that none of the four gospel accounts disagree with each other on any substantive issues.  One writer didn't say Jesus said one thing, and another writer said he said something just the opposite.  The four writers also had reasons for emphasizing different aspects of Yeshua's ministry, which obviated the need to tell of some things and not others, and finally, the gospels are all incredibly short, considering they spanned three years of the Messiah's life.  But a much more in depth study of the question of the four gospels and their qualities comes from a distinguished professor of law.

Dr. Simon Greenleaf specialized in law and was responsible for writing the standards for documentary evidence and examination of testimony of witnesses.  He was challenged by his students regarding the truth of the four gospel accounts. Dr. Simon Greenleaf, one of the principle founders of the Harvard Law School, originally set out to disprove the biblical testimony concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He was certain that a careful examination of the internal witness of the Gospels would dispel all the myths at the heart of Christianity. But this legal scholar came to the conclusion that the witnesses were reliable, and that the resurrection did in fact happen.  The result of his research and his conclusions is in the book, The Testimony of the Four Evangelists.  It completely puts to rest any idea that there is a problem or any conflict between the gospels.

Once again, I'm barely scratching the surface here when it comes to the overwhelming evidence that the Bible of the Hebrews is a book that defies explanation as an invention of mere men.  I can't take 25+ years of just my learning and stuff it all into this blog.  I wish I could take everything I've learned and download it to your brain like a few JPEG files, but it doesn't work that way.  If nobody raises any more questions for me to answer in the next day or so, I'll move on to ELS codes.