Please Tell Me Jesus Didn’t Say That

"As much as Christians celebrate the virtue of faith, they rely far more on doubt—as in benefit-of-the-doubt—when they want us to believe that the gospel accounts of Jesus are true. Only just so much can be downgraded to metaphor (“Well, of course, you can’t take that literally…”), so their default position is that we need to be overly generous as we scrutinize the gospel stories; give the gospel writers the benefit of the doubt that they were sincere and somehow got it right.

"But sorry, it doesn’t work that way."

 

Mark, Chapter 4: The gospel writer pushed history off the page