According to your version, these disciples obviously had memories like sieves; I mean, one of them says (Matthew 27:50-53) that Jesus' death was accompanied by an earthquake and the walking dead seen by many. I would think that those would be pretty significant details, not to mention details that would be impressive tools for converting people, but none of the others apparently thought they were worth mentioning. (I mean, you see dead people walking around every day, right?) John doesn't even mention the three hours of darkness that the others agree on, which is a little odd given that he was detail-obsessed enough to list the languages in which the cross was inscribed. Given the number of details which are unique to Matthew and Luke, they must have had trouble remembering their names, since their accounts of the birth of Jesus are distinctly different: Matthew has the star of Bethlehem and wise men, but no angels or shepherds, while Luke has angels and shepherds but no star or wise men. Apparently angels and new stars in the sky weren't worth mentioning either.

(Just as a side note: I've always wondered how the wise men "from the East" were supposed to know where to stop moving west if the star of Bethlehem was actually a star. It would have remained in the same place in the night sky no matter how long they travelled west. In order for a star to be clearly "over" a building, especially for days at a time, it would have to be moving with the earth, which is implausible for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is that in those pre-spaceflight days, people would have remarked on a star moving quite quickly with respect to the background sky, which is how such a thing would appear. No records of such a thing at the time outside of Matthew, though.)

Yes, you can explain this away with vast and worrisome absent-mindedness. (Worrisome because one has to wonder what else were they leaving out that might have been critical. They already mention the arbitrary detail of a requirement for baptism for salvation; what if Jesus also wants everyone to do a clockwise pirouette every day or something and they just forgot to say so? We wouldn't know about the virgin birth at all if one of them hadn't said something.) You could also conceivably explain why Matthew and Luke give explicitly different (and mutually exclusive) genealogies for Joseph (Luke 3:23 - 38 versus the beginning of Matthew) -- and also why it's more important to mention who Joseph's great-great-great-grandfather was, even though Joseph was not supposed to be Jesus' father anyway, than to mention that, oh yeah, there was a freaking earthquake and dead people walking around after the crucifixion -- and why Luke says the birth of Jesus took place in a year that didn't exist (when Herod was king of Judea and Quirinius was governor of Syria -- King Herod died about 10 years before Quirinius became governor) and why the census which required Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem appears in no Roman records; Josephus (who I'm told some consider to be a forgery anyway) mentioned a census, but it didn't require people to go to their hometowns and was in any case in a year which doesn't match either of Luke's mutually-exclusive chronological details.

No doubt you will come up with some way to discredit this, just as you do the "immunity from poison" thing. (And this despite having claimed that the bible is "totally true" -- you language-polluter, you! You really believe that the bible is mostly true.) But that begs a question: why does god allow people to play these games with the editing of what, according to you, is the only path to salvation? There is no record of Jesus' existence outside of the new testament -- the Romans didn't notice it at all, no darkness or earthquakes or walking dead saints in the official records. The new testament is it. So how is it that god allowed people to add, among other things, the exhortation to accidental suicide which is the end of Mark? Why did the church put up with it, for that matter? One would think that the second-century church was in a shaky enough position, being illegal and all, without letting some idiot tell believers it would be safe to poison themselves. And then letting that stand for centuries until Christianity's stranglehold on intellectual inquiry was sufficiently broken to produce criticism of the bible?

Of course, you already believe a really peculiar narrative: god made two perfect people who almost immediately sinned despite being perfect; they were at fault for this despite the fact that god explicitly didn't give them knowledge of good and evil. This sin makes all of their descendants for all time tainted. God decides not to fix this immediately, which would save all of humanity; instead, he first waits thousands of years in order to let the majority of us miss out on salvation because of geographical dispersion. In the meantime he also tries a bunch of other things, such as wiping out nearly all of the earth by physically impossible flood. Then his plan begins: he makes himself be born and has himself killed by some of us, except he isn't really killed -- he comes back and almost immediately vanishes instead of going to confront the local authorities who would actually give the story credibility by writing it down. The only record which is left is a book mostly consisting of the history of a bloodthirsty bronze- and iron-age tribe, followed by the semi-contradictory recollections of the followers he himself criticized as faulty, lots of text on the vital nature of faith by people who incorrectly believed that the world was soon to end, and visions from a drug addict. This book is then repeatedly badly edited, tinkered with, and mistranslated, and is open to interpretation as metaphor nearly throughout. He did this because he loves us all, and as a result, he can forgive a relatively small number of us who hear all this and believe, and probably also get dunked in water under supervision of a priest. The rest of us are given a small taste of his mercy by being condemned to eternal suffering instead of forgiveness or even oblivion.

I don't know what sort of cognitive dissonance you'll employ this time, but Occam's Razor says: it's all a lie. You already believe that a majority of the world (combined, believers in the world's other religions are definitely in the majority) live and fight and die for lies, mainly because a corrupt few use those lies as a meal ticket, although you would probably use gentler language than that. Well, although I know it's probably a wrench -- I'm not being sarcastic here; doubting a truth you have long accepted without criticism is hard -- think for a minute about the possibility that the early Christians, as suggested by the story of Peter, Ananias, and Sapphira, were con artists living off their dupes (and occasionally activist dupes), and that you have been sucked into a structure built on top of their lies. It explains without any contortions all sorts of things which require a lot of hemming and hawing and headscratching otherwise. It doesn't make you evil; it just makes you human, like the rest of us.

Why has this segment not been removed?

I'm not saying this is a good reason, but it IS a reason: it has been part of the King James Bible, which has been (until more recently) the standard English text. Like I said before, the Bibles I have make it clear that there is at least a discrepancy in whether or not it should be there. It's really an issue of textual criticism- which I don't have space (or time) for here.

Which version is right (of the Gospels)?

I'm not quite sure why they can't all be right. The man who carried the cross was 'pressed into service' as they were heading out to the hill where Jesus would be crucified. John merely says Jesus 'went out bearing the cross'. It was typical for the person who would be crucified to carry his own cross, but since Jesus had been so badly beaten, he probably did not get far under the weight of the heavy wooden crossbeam. So though he started out with it, they asked a man who was standing by to take it the rest of the way.
Second: the bandits who ridiculed him. The crucifixion lasted several hours. Surely a man seeing his dying hour coming to pass could change his 'tune' from "you're just as bad as we are" to "I don't want to receive judgment for the sins I've committed". Again- I'm not saying that this is how it happened for sure. The text does not eliminate the possibility though. Also- the variances of perspectives are a testimony to the different authors. It is an indication of their authenticity. If all four Gospels were exactly the same, there would only be a need for one. However, John is a closer friend of Jesus. He gets to see firsthand more of the scenes of Jesus' life. Each one has his own personality coming through (although inspired all the same).
It is like- if four people were to observe the scene of an accident and fill out a report, they would have differing accounts. No account would be 'more true' than another. They would just have observed different things (perhaps at various moments during the accident). When you put all 4 together, you get a complete idea of what happened. Hope this helps.

In all fairness, Mollie's not just pulling that bit about the final part of Mark being a later addition out of the air -- I can remember noting it, myself, and I get the impression that it's not particularly controversial (they wouldn't put it in Bibles, otherwise, believe me -- look at the way no-one dares to translate 'almah' as 'young girl' instead of 'virgin' in Isaiah 7:14 after the uproar when the Revised Standard Version did it).

Presumably, if you're going to admit that there was one adulteration of the Bible, then you can't discount the possibility that there might have been others. I'm not sure what Mollie thinks about that.

I'd love to give you publication information, but three of the bibles were in churches I walked into while I was out and one is a copy of the new testament handed to me on a street corner. It has a red cardboard cover, cheap binding and printing, and the only information about the book beyond the text and title are the words "Printed in China" on the outside back cover, and if I hadn't seen your reply right away I wouldn't even be able to tell you that, because I'm junking it. The last, which is the one with the footnotes, is "The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Edition with the Apocrypha, Third Edition", and the one I use for reference when I'm not using the Skeptic's Annotated Bible (see the sidebar for a link). I'll try to get back into the churches and get that information for you, but no promises -- I don't think they liked me doing it the first time. (Maybe I shouldn't have admitted that I was an atheist checking to see whether their bibles claimed they were immune to poison; I didn't want to misrepresent myself so I told the truth.) Call me crazy, but as an atheist, I barely have a reason to personally own one copy of the Christian bible, let alone 5. (I bought the Oxford Annotated one back when I wanted to sit down and read the bible from cover to cover. That determination did not even last through Exodus, because the old testament obsession with lineage and leadership is frankly boring.)

A subsequent question which occurs to me: why is the end of Mark even a controversy? Surely this can be tested directly -- after all, the proper version of the book is only of serious interest to people who believe, so it should be quick:

"Okay, everyone who thinks our book of absolute truth should contain a line about immunity to poison, stand over here. Good, now all of you have a nice cup of cyanide. Any of you feeling immune? No? Okay, that section isn't true, so it can't stay in there."

Why has this segment not been removed? I'm asking you to tell me because I can't think of any reason which doesn't assume that Christians are either dishonest or stupid.

For that matter, if we're going to start allowing criticism of the text, which you are employing already, then we run into many, many more problems. The very first one -- not even starting on scholarship and authorship and history -- is a serious one: the central event of Christianity is the crucifixion, but the new testament isn't clear about it. Matthew and Mark both say that there were two bandits crucified at the same time as Jesus, and that both mocked him. (Matthew 27:32-44 and Mark 15:25-32) Luke specifically says that one of the bandits defended Jesus (Luke 23:39-43) and John doesn't mention them at all (although that doesn't prove anything one way or another -- he doesn't say Jesus was alone, either). Furthermore, the first three claim that the cross was carried by a man named Simon of Cyrene (Matthew 27:32, Mark 15:21, and Luke 23:26), while John says specifically that Jesus carried it himself (John 19:17). So we have three versions of the story: Simon carried the cross and there were 2 mocking bandits (Matthew and Mark), Simon carried the cross and there were 2 bandits but one of them defended Jesus (Luke), and finally Jesus carried the cross himself and there may or may not have been bandits but we aren't told (John).

These are details, it is true, but they are "big" details. One would expect any Christian then living to be able to remember whether Jesus carried his own cross and whether there was somebody also crucified who defended Jesus, particularly given that this was such an important event.

At best, the first story is true, meaning that only 2 of the 4 gospels are wrong about the central event in your religion (!). Or one of the other two stories are true, and 3 of the 4 gospels are wrong. Or all four could be wrong, which is my stance.

Before I continue further: tell me, person who has gone on the record that the Bible is "totally true", which version is right? They directly contradict each other, so they can't all be true.

P.S. !@#$% checkbox on this form... Grrrr!

I am curious to find which 5 editions of the New Testament you looked at.

Mollie has said that the new testament is the literal truth. She has said that it should be taught to children as such. (Well, okay, that second one isn't strictly accurate: she has said that it would be wrong to not teach it. Same net effect.) This text contains certain statements about the real world, in particular that people who believe in Jesus can safely drink poisons.

Now, either this statement is true or false. Given the nature of the claim, it seems only reasonable to assume it is false until proven true. I have asked Mollie to prove it true, and she has declined, and even backpedaled a bit from her earlier claim, which suggests that she believes it to be false as well, and said that others of her persuasion also believe it to be false.

I have since then checked five different editions of the new testament. Only one of them, a scholarly edition with extensive footnotes, gives any sort of indication that this statement might not be true, and then only by noting that its inclusion is controversial. Furthermore, none of them included any statement noting that the contents of the book were not intended to be taken for literal truth. Legally, I suspect that either people who make claims of the literal truthfulness of the bible or else the printers who bring out these books without disclaimers are already guilty under the laws of any country in the developed world.

I have been always in the habit of considering the dis[si]milarity of African & American species as the necessary resu[lt] of ``Creation'' adapting new species to the preexisting ones— Granting this unknown & if you please miraculous power acting as steadily as does extinction and all the consequences are the same as those of ``natural selection.''

It's not really credible to suggest that he distorted his geological findings to disprove the Flood and such.