Let me point it out, again. Color mine.
John 19:30
When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
Versus
Luke 23:46
Jesus called out with a loud voice, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." When he had said this, he breathed his last.
At what point did one have time for the other? Did Jesus manage a magical speach after he had breathed his last just to get that last bit in or what?
Time is not really the issue here. Neither of these two texts expressly indicates how much time elapsed between the last reported words and actual death. For that matter, neither text explicitly indicates that the last reported words were actually the last words spoken before death. Accordingly,
any conclusion about how much time elapsed or what the actual last words spoken were, is going to involve the assumption of facts not stated in the text.
On the topic of assumptions, one of the more conspicuous assumptions you appear to be making regards the referent of John's phrase "
gave up his spirit." You seem to take this to mean something along the lines of
"died (instantly and wordlessly, in fact)". That is not an illogical or unreasonable interpretation, although it does, as I said, involve an extratextual assumption. Yet, as I have pointed out, it is also technically consistent with the text for
gave up his spirit to refer to Jesus' giving his spirit over into his Father's hands as constituted by a verbal expression along the lines of the one reported by Luke. In fact, it's consistent with the text to interpret the phrase
gave up his spirit to refer to
the combination of Jesus' verbal expression
and his physical death.
The reason I had thought it might be useful to parse the texts into their component parts, breaking them down into discrete informational propositions as I did earlier, was that it might make it easier for you to recognize the distinction between information actually conveyed by the literal text and information added through extratextual assumptions. You seem not to want to engage in that exercise, however. That's too bad, because it's now fairly plain that the logical contradiction you're perceiving is not between the texts themselves, but either (i) between one text and the unconscious assumptions about the other text or (ii) between your assumptions about one text and your assumptions about the other text.
Let's take a simplified sample text:
"Jesus said X
. When he had said this, he died." Strictly speaking, all this says for certain is that:
- Jesus said X;
- Jesus died; and
- 2 ("he died") did not obtain before 1 ("he had said this") obtained.
Let's see what happens if we add a fourth proposition:
4. After Jesus said
X, but before he died, he said
'So long, guys.'"
Now, that's not in the source text, but does it contradict any specific part of the source text (
i.e, is it logically incompatible with 1, 2, and 3)? Obviously not. The objection that there was insufficient time for 4 to take place between 1 and 2 is premised
not directly on the text but on an extratextual assumption (5) that there was not sufficient time. The text doesn't tell us exactly how much time elapsed between 1 and 2, just that 2 did not occur until 1 had already occurred. It would be reasonable to infer that the time between 1 and 2 was not great, but we'd still be dealing with an assumption rather than a requirement of logic.
Evil Atheist
