Time Immortal

Nicholas has some questions.

The title of your site comes up on my machine as

STOP ERROR 0xC5FA721B or MEDIA_JIHAD_STATUS_FAIL (Time Immortal)

Do you happen to know whether this a glitch in my settings, or what? (I use the hated IE7 - sorry!)

I think there’s also a glitch in the link to the Hoffmann article.

By the way, I look at your site occasionally because your photos are wonderful, and you write well about matters that interest me. Usually, I strongly disagree with you. But if I only read things I agree with, I might as well be dead.

Also by the way, I think the gospels have some historical basis, though deciding exactly what’s history, what’s legend, and what’s myth, is difficult. Maybe I’ve got it wrong, but I thought that was what Hoffman was saying too.

Firstly, the site title is correctly displayed, O Reader, if in fact it reads as Nicholas is reporting that it reads. As far as I know, no Microsoft error code incorporates the term “jihad” into its error variable name. Moreover, as far as I know, 0xC5FA721B is not a valid hexadecimal error code in the Windows environment. Both the error code and the error variable name are of my own composition.

This is what nerd humour looks like. Periodically, I change the site title on a whim — this one is probably due for a change.

There was, however, a glitch in the link to the Hoffman article in my previous reply to Nicholas — Wordpress added a line-break after the URL, which I have now removed. The link should work now. Not that I particularly recommend the article, of course.

I am glad to hear that Nicholas enjoys the photos; quite a number of people tell me that, in fact. This is a bit of a tangent, of course, but I have offered in the past to make full-resolution (usually 3000 x 2000, except in the cases of panoramics) available to people who have written in concerning pictures I’ve taken.

It can’t hurt to make the same offer public, so please consider this notice of that offer. I don’t charge for pictures, so if anything strikes the Reader as compelling, simply provide me a link (either to the relevant Pic of the Day article or the gallery entry) and an email address to send the high-res version to, and I will get it sent out.

Moving on, while the opening parts of the Hoffman article could be looked upon as being an attempt to sort out history from fallacy in the Gospels, it quickly gets mired down in a discussion of contradcitions between the accounts and ends up more or less dismissing the historicity of Jesus entirely. The problem, of course, is that discussions of contradictions are entirely too subjective to provide a substantive basis for a rejection of the validity of the Gospel accounts. After all, any student of criminal trials knows that eyewitness testimonies often contradict each other to a certain extent (usually pertaining to side details). What is important in eyewitness testimony is that A, B, C, and D saw X do Y to Z. If A, B, C, and D can’t quite agree on the time of day, the number of bystanders, or whether X was wearing a sweater or a hoodie, that is okay, and in fact is to be expected.

If anything, I find that what few inconsistencies exist between the Gospel accounts add to the credibility of the accounts as a whole. Each approaches Jesus’ life from a different angle, and at the end of the day the exact count of women at the tomb is substantially less important than the fact that the tomb itself was empty.