In my previous post I referred to the amazing way one can find Jesus throughout the Bible. I asserted that similar examples cannot be found anywhere and challenged others to prove me wrong. In case you think I’ve misrepresented the complexity and difficulty of creating a story like the Gospel writers have done, or similar aspects in other writings, consider two modern examples where this very feature was attempted.
The examples are two stage presentations where a simple story is created around songs
written 10-20 years earlier. In this way the story and the songs are deliberately intended
to be interwoven into a unified whole. Even though the stories are fiction, shorter and
simpler, the incorporation of past references are much fewer, and the writers and resources are much greater than the Gospel accounts involved, the quality of the final product is so inferior to what the Gospel writers produced that it is truly laughable to claim they Gospel writers produced their work as the critics claim.
First example: In 1999 the musical MAMMA MIA! Opened in London. The show is based on existing ABBA songs within the format of a new, original musical. The creative team includes two of ABBA’s original group and song writers - Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, which is a great advantage. The show is fairly successful but anyone who has seen the show will agree that this story line does not fit seamlessly into the music and lyrics written in the 80s. I am not saying it is a bad show, just that one has to allow for awkward connections at times knowing that the songs were written 20 years before the story line tried to bring them together. (e.g. – Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! lyrics were written about wanting a lover not a father as the play uses the song.)
Second example: Another musical based on earlier songs is the stage musical “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” based on the Beatles album recorded in 1966. The stage musical was adapted in the mid-1970s, which would itself provide the partial basis for a widely-panned 1978 film version, produced by Robert Stigwood and starring Peter Frampton as Billy Shears and the Bee Gees as the Hendersons, with an all-star supporting cast including George Burns and Steve Martin. (Billy Preston also appears performing "Get Back.") The Beatles authorized the use of the title and new versions of many Beatles songs in the film, though they did not appear in the film or play on the soundtrack. Despite the fact that The Bee Gees were among the hottest stars in music at the time, the movie was a critical and
commercial flop.
In these examples we have the professional writers of the original songs working with a
team of other professionals to create a simple fictional story. The end result is satisfactory
for entertainment purposes but no where as cohesive, interwoven and complex as the
Gospel accounts. Unlike the modern day works, the creative team of the Gospel accounts were ancient uneducated men, working apart from each other and rarely having access to the Old Testament scriptures they incorporate. (These would only be available in synagogues they were unwelcome at). They had the additional challenge of incorporating true history, which to date has only been found accurate. The simplest explanation is that God wrote the whole story from beginning to end and the Gospel writers were simply witnesses of the last act.
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