Nionyeshe kwenye Koran tarehe aliyo zaliwa Isa? Hapo ndipo utafahamu kuwa Yesu ni Mungu na Allah wako kashindwa fahamu na hafahamu wala hajui tarehe ya kuzaliwa. Eti, Allah kamtuma Isa, my foot. Nipe tarehe ya kuzaliwa Isa kutoka Koran.
Geographical Errors
Commenting in his (Harold Liedner) 1999 book
The Fabrication of the Christ Myth on the well-known Gospel story of the Gadarene swine, which rushed down a steep cliff and were drowned in the Sea of Galilee, the Jewish scholar Joseph Leidner points out that because Gadera is actually several kilometers away from the sea, the whole incident is evidence of either ignorance or total lack of concern with veridical history.
Citing other similar examples, he writes,
"From the evidence…the blunt conclusion emerges that the Gospel writers did not know the geography and customs of the Holy Land, and did not know Judaism itself.
They were working with source material having nothing to do with historical data of any kind.
(ibid, p. 163)
Mark makes serious mistakes in his geographical references to Palestine. He knows the Galilean place names
and the general relative positions of the localities, but not specific details. Hence he "represents Jesus as travelling back
and forth in Galilee and adjacent territories in a puzzling fashion" (Kee, 117, pp 102 - 3).
To go (as Jesus is said to in Mk. 7:31) from the territory of Tyre by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee "is like travelling from Cornwall to London via Manchester" (Anderson, 2, p 192).
Again, Mark's references to movements across the Sea of Galilee are impossible to trace sequentially. Mention of specific location near the sea are either unknown sites, such as Dalmanutha (8:10), or are patently inaccurate, as in the designation of the eastern shore of the lake as the country of the Gerasenes (5:1)" (Kee, loc cit).
Gerasa is more than thirty miles southeast of the lake, too far away for the setting of the story which demands a city in its vicinity, with a precipitous slope down to the water. Probably all that concerned Mark, collecting and adapting pre-existing stories about Jesus, was that the lake and its surrounding territories, some Jewish and some mainly Gentile, was an ideal setting for journey's of Jesus and his disciples, showing how both Jews and Gentiles responded to him with faith.
That place names in Mark caused perplexity among early readers is shown by the wide range of variants in the textual tradition where names occur in the gospel. Perplexity is also evidenced by Matthew, who changed Mark's Gerasenes to Gadarenes (Mt. 8:28), Gadara being a well-known spa only eight miles from the lake.
(G. A. Wells,
The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Prometheus Books, 1982), p. 230
Many other examples of improbable reconciliations could be offered. Since Matt has a Sermon on the Mount and Luke has a similar Sermon on the Plain (Matt 5:1; Luke 6:7), there must have been a plain on the side of the mountain.
Since Matt has the Lord's Prayer taught in that sermon and Luke has it later on the road to Jerusalem (Matt 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4), the disciples must have forgotten it, causing Jesus to repeat it.
Mark 10:46 places the healing of the blind man after Jesus left Jericho, while Luke 18:35; 19:1 places it before Jesus entered Jericho.
Perhaps Jesus was leaving the site of the OT Jericho and entering the site of the NT Jericho!
Raymond E. Brown, S.S.,
An Introduction To The New Testament, The Anchor Bible Reference Library (Doubleday, 1997) pp. 109-110
