Sorry, this is waay too tempting a target...

• Modern writing contains no consistent spelling, capitalisation or punctuation - on the Internet at least.
• Before WWII Charles Lindberg spent most of his time trying to convince everyone that the fact that Hitler was bombing the crap out of all the democratic countries in Europe wasn't America's problem. Thanks, Chuck.
• There is no E in Lightning. There is an E in lightening, but it means something quite different.
• The primordial universe consisted of about 75% hydrogen (almost all hydrogen-1, but a little deuterium, or hydrogren-2 as well), 24% helium and less than 1% heavier elements.
• The heating and ignition of a flammable gas when it's compressed is called the Diesel effect and Diesel engines use it instead of a spark ignition. Almost anything will burn if the pressure gets high enough and so a Diesel engine can burn a wide range of fuels. Diesel at one point considered using coal dust as a fuel, but finally settled on a heavy fuel oil. Diesel engines will run quite happily on cooking oil. Fuel is taxed so heavily here that cooking oil is cheaper than diesel! Using it to run your car is illegal (tax evasion).

Woo-hoo! He's alive! Where you been?

Dangit. Must. Proofread. Better. Fixed now. Gah...

On NPR they said diesels running cooking oil smelled like a fish n' chips box.

Yep, lots of mostly useless info. Doubt that it'll be in Trivial Pursuit. How about the call letters used by the military for the alphabet. I know them (why, since I was never military, I don't know), but it got me a pie piece when I was playing the game once.
The premature infant one, I believe, has changed, since our life span has increased. Not sure who could verify this.

Amazingly, baby chimps (since I used to work with them) are far more advanced than a human child comparitvly when born at the same time. The other amazing fact is that a chimp is smarter than a human baby for the first few years, BUT when a chimp hits the age of 3, they remain 3 when a human continues to develop.

Body proportion wise, a chimp head is much kinder to the body than a baby's head to theirs(one reason why a human is smarter, we have larger brain capacity)- this goes into the fact of humans learning language and chimps (some) language, but never go further than a 3 year old.

I remember back at the lab I worked at, my supervisor intensly teaching the babies sign language. They did learn,only about 100 words remembered. One chimp named Booey had an entire vocabulary and would ask questions, but never got any further than what a 3 year old would ask. I don't know why they say its the mental capacity of a 3 year old.

Pretty neat!

I've enjoyed reading your site when I should have been studying.
Speaking as a guy who has won nearly every Trivia Pursuit game he has played(except against those freaks in '89 who knew something like 70% of the answers), and as a Christian, I'll contest your Gospel account a bit.
The account of the wise men was at a considerably later date than the arrival of the shepherds. It had to be; they only started moving when He was born, and no interstate for camels back then. Also, Herod's Massacre of the Infants was not directed at newborns only, but included those born under two years old(I think).
Now, I participated in a church play that had Shepherds and Wise Men arriving at the same time. Totally inaccurate, but a convenient shorthand. Put it in the category of religious fiction such as Jesus having long hair.
Sorry, guy, but if it was that easy to disprove the Bible, it would have not succeeded like it has. My recomendation is to distrust a too casual critique.

Cordially,
Tadeusz

With respect,

While your explanation makes for a fine harmonization, the texts simply don't support it. Luke never says "and then the wise men showed up". The wise men are simply not mentioned. Likewise Matthew does not say "and the shephards were already there". The shephards are not mentioned.

Therefore, I stand behind my statement and would respectfully challenge you to provide citations from Matthew where the author mentions the shephards in the birth story, or from Luke where that author mentions the wise men (you don't need to quote here, just the references will be fine) in that birth story.

I was making no attempt to prove or disprove anything, merely pointing out some often-overlooked facts about the gospels themselves.

I seriously doubt there is a dual mention. Most Bible scholars feel that these are complementary accounts. Each author focusing on what was of interest to him. Luke was Dr. Luke, a physician who wrote in Greek I think; John focused on Jesus as the Son of God; another on Him as the Messiah, and another on something else. As you can probably see from my slightly vague terms, it has been a while since I studied this.

John began with the Creation of the World with that wonderful verse ... "In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." He definitely states Jesus=God. Another starts with the lineage of Jesus going back to King David because his focus is on Jesus the Messiah, the Promised One.

What would be the point of having four identical accounts?

And I am sure that I know less about Buddhism than you know about Christianity. There was this nice kid who lived in a palace and later did not want to be called God summarizes most of my knowledge of Buddhism.

Cordially,
Tadeusz

All of the new testament, including the gospel accounts, was written in Greek, apparently in a vernacular style that has lead biblical scholars from at least the time of Albert Schweizer to conclude the authors probably spoke Greek as a second language, or at any rate were not formally educated in it (most call the styles "crude", but I'm not clear exactly what this means). Mark is especially characteristic in this fashion, so much so that one of the primary stylizations of Matthew and Luke is their "smoothing" of Mark's grammar and word choice when they use him as a source.

Mark is generally considered to have been written somewhere in North Africa around 70 AD by someone who was probably not directly in contact with Jesus or one of his immediate disciples (see this excellent summary of scholarly opinion on Mark). His gospel is generally considered to have been the first written, and was used heavily by both Matthew and Luke. Matthew in particular seems to have lifted entire chunks of Mark almost verbatum for use in his own gospel.

Matthew is generally considered to have been written after Mark but before the close of the first century AD (it depends a great deal on where you put Mark, but general consensus puts Matthew around 80-90 AD). From his proclivities, interests, and texts Matthew's author is widely considered to have been a rabbi or in a rabbi-like position in an early Christian community, perhaps in an isolated part of Syria (again, this excerpt is an excellent elaboration).

Luke was, of course, written by the same author as that of Acts (the two were originally a single work, split and separated by biblical redactors after the liberation of Constantine in the fourth century). Of all the gospel's authors, his identity is the least contested. He was almost certainly Paul's companion, a physician from Antioch in Syria.

Whereas Matthew's gospel is generally considered to have been an answer to some external Jewish threat to his community, Luke's was explicitly meant as a missal to the gentiles. It is widely thought to have been composed somewhere in Greece, probably around the same time as Matthew. While Matthew and Luke used at least two of the same sources (Mark and the "Sayings Gospel" Q), it is widely agreed they knew nothing about each other (again, see here for the best on-line summary of research I've found so far).

John, with a language so powerful it clearly shines through the screen of translation, and with a portrayal of Jesus as a serene deity allowing calamity to happen for the betterment of humanity, is in my encounters by far the most popular gospel with the modern evangelical community. It is also the latest of the gospels, generally considered to have been written around 120 AD somewhere in Asia Minor (modern Turkey).

It stands far apart from the other three gospels in pretty much every respect, from the sources used to the style, even to the order of events in Jesus's life. For example, John's crucifixion occurs at a completely different date than the other three (as always, see this summary for a more complete account). Strikingly, while John is considered canonical, perhaps even critical, to Christian thought, it is also widely held as the starting point for Gnosticism, a heresy against which the church would fight in one form or another for at least the next fifteen centuries.

I agree that four identical accounts would not be useful, especially to the later Roman gentile Christian communities for whom the Bible was redacted in the fourth century. I think it's actually extremely useful that we have such widely differing accounts. Our extra-canonical evidence for Jesus consists basically of two paragraphs in one history (Josephus) and one paragraph in another (Tacitus).

Were it not for the gospels, one wonders if Jesus's ministry would have been able to continue past the lifetime of his disciples, and if it did what form it might have taken. Because the authors were human, with human failings and human agendas, it is only by taking the four together as a whole that we are able to get a real feel for who Jesus was as a person. To this day I am disappointed and puzzled that Paul's work and the much later works attributed to apostles seem to have far, far greater primacy in modern Christian thought than the stories of Jesus's own teachings.

For me, the primary mystery and power of Christian belief, the heart of what makes Christianity a force of good, resides in the inscruitable parables of a Jewish peasant. They are, to me, far more important than the way that peasant died, or the way the world might end if we do not obey the dogma of later, lesser people.

A detailed reading of the gospels provides titanic stumbling blocks for anyone who thinks every "jot and tittle" of the bible is utterly correct and irrefutable. In my own opinion such people are dangerously ignorant of a religion in which they obviously invest so much passion, and are therefore probably just as prone to manipulation as their Islamic brethren, for most of the same reasons.

I find biblical criticism, especially of the gospels, a deeply fascinating field, one which I have studied on and off for, gosh, nearly fifteen years now. I am profoundly disappointed in my own difficulty with foreign languages because I would desperately like to be able to read the bible in its original Hebrew and Greek. My own brief and tragic forays into German revealed to me just how much literally is "lost in the translation" of any work, much less one of such profound import to western culture, when it moves from one language to another.

It is impossible to figure out the sex of a child just from their bones. Before puberty, there simply are no differences (skeletally) between girls and boys.

Sex can be determined from a skeleton well before puberty due to differences in pelvis structure. I would say that is quite wrong.

If you fire a gun pointed straight ahead and drop a rock from the same height at the same moment, the rock and the bullet will hit the ground at the same time.

I would call this one false if for no other reason than the bullet would have farther to travel downward due to the curvature of the earth adding a few extra microns here and there. Not to mention the fact that the bullet is travelling at well in excess of 1000 feet per second.

All I can say is we were never allowed to score skeletons younger than 13. The charts just didn't allow it.

And, again as I recall from my osteology and physical anthropology courses, there are no differences whatever between the pelvis of a prepubescent girl and a prepubescent boy. None. All such changes ocurr during puberty and not before. I would be extremely interested in any citations you may have that claim otherwise.

As to the bullet, this is the simple physics of vectors. Perhaps I might have been more specific "on an infinitely flat plain in a vacuum," but really,the results are essentially the same.