Media - Anti-christian bias?
You have to wonder whether the media is just plain old ignorant or hopelessly biased. Over the last few days a couple of headlines have caught my attention.

Ex-Pastor, Wife, Charged With Sex Abuse

A Ponchatoula, La., ex-pastor, his wife and six former congregants have been arrested for sexual abuse in a case that may involve up to 24 children.
There is a warrant for the arrest of a ninth person.
Investigators believe the alleged abuse occurred between 1999 and 2002 and involved congregants of the now-defunct Hosanna Church, according to Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff's spokeswoman Laura Covington.

Nowhere in the article does it actually explain that this church is a cult. A convenient ommission if you want to cast the Christian church in a bad light.

NASA technology reveals texts of Trojan Wars, early gospels

A relatively new technology called multispectral imaging is turning a pile of ancient garbage into a gold mine of classical knowledge, bringing to light the lost texts of Sophocles and Euripides as well as some early Christian gospels that do not appear in the New Testament....There were plays by Sophocles and Euripides, poems of Pindar and Sappho, and some of the earliest documents recording Christianity's spread to Egypt. The gospel of Thomas, for example, records the "Sayings of Jesus" in a manner that some scholars of early Christianity believe is more authentic than the Gospels in the New Testament.

You've got to be amazed at the audacity. 'Some scholars'. What a joke. The New Testament can be almost completely reconstructed by the writings of the early church fathers (All bar 11 verses were quoted). How many verses of the Gospel of Thomas have been quoted by the Early church fathers? None that do not appear in New Testament (Roughly half of the Gospel of Thomas has a rough counterpart in the new testmanet). Indeed, the gospel of thomas is most widely quoted in the 2nd and 3rd century by gnostic writers, which seems to clearly indicate that it either was not known in the first century, or was already thought to be heretical, like the rest of the gnostic works.

Yet here we have a reporter who claims with a straight-face that 'some scholars think it is more authentic' and in the title of the piece talks of 'early gospels' as if it is equivalent to the accepted and well supported 4 gospels.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, May 27, 2005