CADRE Comments

  It seems to me that the accurate position of the Christian (or any other theist) is that it is necessary that God possess some contingent property or other, but there is no particular contingent property that God possesses necessarily. Am I going in the right path, or am I missing some important aspect of your argument? Thank you for taking the time to read this. (letter to William Lane Craig) [1] Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/must-some-contingent-being-or-other-exist#ixzz2RC8nrV2X .... I'm always running into atheists who try to argue that necessary being is impossible. The other day I saw an atheist on a message board who was wondering "why do Christians mess around with this absurd idea of God as necessary? Why don't they just say God is contingent, it's so much more logical since God in the Bible is contingent?" In trying to clarify this mystery for him he plunged deeper into the unknown and asserted that a necessary God c

After two posts worth ( Part 1 and Part 2 ) of carefully sifting the data, we arrived at the standard conclusion that pretty much everyone goes with: Jesus held the Last Supper as a Passover meal on Thursday night; and was executed and buried Friday. (Which is "Good Friday" only if, and only because, Jesus was raised to life again sometime between sunset Saturday and dawn Sunday. But this is a historical analysis series not a theological one.) Sure, GosMatt and (to a lesser extent) GosMark have some oddities in the Greek that can cause some problems, but GosLuke's language is far more specific; and even taken by themselves, GosMatt and GosMark independently add up to that timing schedule once the narrative details are thoroughly accounted for. So GosLuke isn't simply settling things one way that could have meant something else in the other two Synoptic Gospels, just clarifying what the other two Gospels added up to after all. Soooooo.... where's the problem?

Back in Part 1 , I introduced some of the peculiar grammatic factors in GosMatt and GosMark which are solved by reference to the tradition that a rabbi (and/or family head) may hold the Passover seder service one night early in emergency situations such as (following the example of the revered Maccabees) an expected battle on the morrow. The references to the Passover and (Feast of) Unleavened bread "after two days" found in GosMark 14:1 and GosMatt 26:2 seem tied instead to the "Little Apocalypse" teaching on Olivet's hillside and/or Jesus' dramatic departure from the Temple, not necessarily to the date of the Last Supper (relative to Passover), thus occurring Wednesday afternoon and/or evening if Passover started Friday sunset for example. More problematically, on the face of it, typical English translations of GosMatt 26:17 and GosMark 14:12 seem to indicate that Jesus was preparing to hold the Passover at the normally expected time, i.e. making prepa