A Christian response to atheism

[Kona]

Wow, I didn't realize that the death of Judas was such a huge raging controversy!  I mean who cares about all of that, has anyone seriously considered the end of the world may be coming in only about 5 years??  It's all there in the Mayan calendar!

http://www.survive2012.com/

[Big Mac]

You do realize that the entire Gospel is a fairy tale and we all know that Fairy Tales are worth killing each other over.

[Theist]

What I want to know is, what gives you the literary license to "combine" the two stories? Just because they're about the same event? I used to wonder this when I was a Christian about the Christmas story. Who the hell told my preacher he could take two completely different narratives and make them one? God?

I am well aware that I have not been on this site for quite some time, and it's possible that the person quoted above has left within that time. But if you will kindly excuse my beating a dead horse, I would like to respond.

I am not "combining" the two stories as you put it, what I am doing is simply being aware that the two gospels are essentially the same story, but from a different perspective. Take newspapers for example, two papers receive the same story but for obvious reasons they are not written identically. First of all, they are written by two different journalists and therefore those stories also carry some hint of what that journalist perceived as happening, a bias if you will. Secondly, the stories were likely written at different times where new facts and information may have been released, in which case the story would be altered accordingly. Is it impossible that one account was written later on, therefore changing the way it was written? Would it not be redundant to keep repeating the same story over again, exactly the same? Therefore there must be some differences.