On Sep 8, 2006, at 10:30 AM, Charles Brown wrote:
> CB: Is he mixed up or what ? Presumably Cockburn's alternative to the
> "official" story as to what happened with the stone and Jesus
> is ...huh ...
> a conspiracy by the Gospel writers. Odd example to use in discouraging
> conspiracy theories.
Hardly. It's not like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John got together in a smoke-filled room and said, "Let's foist a religion on the world - a three-in-one god who sends his Son/emissary to down into the world via a virgin, and he gets strung up, dies, resurrects, and ascends bodily into heaven. We'll each write pretty much the same thing, except John can sorta go off on his own the way he likes to." No, it was about the circulation of myth and the evolution of religious practice over the course of centuries - messy and complicated, just like history.
Doug