Google is your Friend

Oh, Reza ... why do you get under my skin so? Is it the smug confidence with which you play the reasonable, sophisticated believer talking down to me from out your ass? Is it that exact mix of well-researched points delivered in polished phrases and "the first damned link on google lists a bunch of people who said what you just claimed no one ever said"-level stupid?

Whatever the reason, here we go again:

[D]o you think that the Church fathers who in the 4th century decided to put both Matthew and Luke in the canonized New Testament didn’t bother to read them first? They didn’t notice that they have different dates for Jesus’ birth? They didn’t notice that the gospel of John absolutely contradicts the entire timeline of Matthew, Mark, and Luke? They didn’t notice that there are two completely different genealogies for Jesus in Matthew and Luke? Of course they did! They didn’t care, because at no point did they ever think that what they were reading was literally true.

Either you're lying, or you don't know the first damned thing about this question--as in, you literally did not google this. Did not type the words "genealogy of Jesus" into the internets.  Did not click on the first thing to come down the tubes.  Did not give it a quick once-over. Did not encounter the 3rd century references to Levirate marriages as a means of reconciling both genealogies as literally true. Did not discover Augustine's initial objections to the faith (4th century) on the grounds of the impossibility of it being literally true.  Did not learn of Augustine's propagation of the adoption theory for reconciling both accounts as literally true.

Literally. Did. Not. Google. This.

This is creationist-level stupid.  Demonstrably, verifiably, empirically, embarrassingly, and categorically false.  Aslan does for church history what Ken Ham does for biology: doctrinal denial of known facts, with just enough truth mixed in to make the pill go down easy.  But then, you're talking about someone who says that:

We think that truth and fact mean the same thing. Indeed, science tells us, ‘that which is true is that which can be factually verified.’ But that’s not what the ancient mind thought. They were not as interested in the facts of Jesus’ life as they were in the truth revealed by Jesus’ life. When they constructed these stories about Jesus, and I mean that quite literally, they constructed these stories. If you asked them, ‘Did this really happen?’ they wouldn’t even understand the question. What do you mean did this really happen? You’re missing the point!

Uh huh.  Perhaps if we take Aslan's statement that "at no point did they ever think that what they were reading was literally true" and ask, "Did that really happen?" then he, too, might misunderstand the question and accuse us of missing the point.  But we didn't even need to go to wikipedia to know this is horseshit: we could have just read the Bible--specifically, 1 Corinthians 15: "if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ ... if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain [and] we are of all men most miserable."

If only Reza had been around to set him right.