The Gospel According To Matthew

Saint Matthew and the Angel by Rembrandt

The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham: (Matthew 1:1)

Here begins the first verse of the first Gospel of the New Testament. When you start to research the origins of the Gospels you find yourself wandering down rabbit holes best left unexplored, to be honest they would have been better left off undug. 

People, being merely humans, will argue anything, many times just for the sake of arguing. I've often heard engineers arguing the exact same side of an argument as their opponent just as caustically as if they were disagreeing over a matter of life or death. My boss calls this "vehemently agreeing with each other." Much of the time disagreements, especially between scholars, has little to do with the actual subject and in the end the argument boils down to "Listen to me!" 

I see that a lot in arguments against the Gospels, intellectuals and psudo-intellectuals thumping their chests and promoting the theory du jur of why the Gospel they targeted is false/forged/phoney. In the end their treatises do little more bowdlerize the gospels by expunging Jesus from the material and focusing solely on the "researcher's" skills of morphology while congratulating themselves on their conversion to evangelical atheism. 

Sewing Doubt - The Attack is ON!

After re-reading my previous post I realized that there was a huge point that I wanted to make which I didn't get around to making. The point was that intentional or not, Dr. Martin's theory that Christ's disciples were little more than armed thugs was merely part of what appears to be a coordinated  and multifaceted attack on the bible. It is quite possible, and probably likely, that some of Jesus' may have started out as lawless thugs, but in the end they were men and sinners like we all are and learned at the foot of God made man. To claim that Jesus was crucified simply because Peter was carrying a knife denies the sanctity of Jesus' atoning work on the cross and is nothing less than a blatant attack on God's word.

Does Dr. Martin even realize he's being used as a tool of Satan to sew doubt? Probably not, but as I researched that post I found so many 'great minds' all across the internet sewing doubt by proclaiming God's word as little more than insignificant babble that I began to get nervous. I shouldn't be surprised as creating doubt over God's word was Satan's first attack to drive a wedge between us and our Father;

The Difference Between READING the Bible and Reading The Bible

Dr. Dale Martin, a professor of Religious Studies at Yale University has come to the conclusion that Jesus was crucified because his disciples were a band of thugs. He bases his arguments on John 18:10

Simon Peter then, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest's slave, and cut off his right ear; and the slave's name was Malchus.

From this one passage Dr. Martin makes the conclusion that Jesus' disciples were a bunch of armed thugs and Jesus was been executed just because they were armed. I will admit that the Pax Romana (Roman Peace: roughly translated as "We will keep killing you until you are peaceful") was pretty stringent. Martin goes on to say 

Christ Is The Thunderbolt

God Called Us...