some who believe also discredit the Bible, both due to its relatively unnatural Old Testament/New Testament makeup as well as the fact that it was "put together" long after Jesus' death by some pretty politically motivated, and sexist, church leaders.
Either, with the best and wisest of all ages, you must believe the whole of Holy Scripture or with the narrow-minded infidel you must disbelieve the whole. There is no middle course. - John Burgon We either have a reliable Bible in our mother tongue or we don't. Psalm 78: 1-7: "Give ear, O my people, to my law: incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old. Which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done. For he established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children: that the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children: That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments." Psalm 105:8: "He hath remembered his covenant for ever, the word which he commanded to a thousand generations." Psalm 119:160: "Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever." Ecclesiastes 3:14: "l know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him." Matthew 4:4: "But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Luke 4:4: "And Jesus answered him, sating, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God." Matthew 5:17-18: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." Matthew 24:35: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." I Peter 1:23-25: "Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you." John 12:48: "He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day." John 17:8: "For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me."
Why? I've never understood this sort of nonsense. The New Testament, including the words of Jesus, is clearly Holier than the Letter of Paul or the Old Testament. Maybe its because the Protestants did not accept the Apocrypha -- are they all misbelievers, for not believing the whole of the Bible? Was Burgon also the one who said : Leave your brain next to the Holy Water?
The Bible, called the Holy Scriptures, containing the Old and New Testaments, 66 Books only, is the Word of God and the only infallible source of Divine Truth and Divine Commandment. It is without error and is infallible. Rome has added other books to the Bible, called the Apocryphal. *Tobias *Judith *The Dream of Mardochai (added to the Book of Esther) *Wisdom *Ecclesiasticus *Baruch *The Song of the Three Children (inserted in the 3rd chapter of Daniel, from the 25th to the 91st verse, Douai Bible) *The Prayer of Manasses *The First and Second Books of Maccabees." The problem with these books are: First, they were never received, acknowledged or admitted into the canon of the Old Testament Scripture by the Jews, to whom, St Paul says, "the words of God were committed" (Romans 3:2); nor are they included in the catalogue of sacred books given to Josephus, the Jewish historian. Second, not one of the Apocryphal books was written in pure Hebrew. Third, the Apocryphal books are never quoted by our Lord or His Apostles. Fourth, they were rejected by the primitive Church (Eusebius: Hist., lib. Iv, c. 26). I can go on and on . . .
It took you almost three days to find THAT? That page is hilarious. It reminds me less of the silly Star Trek pages with their attempts to explain why Kirk is wearing a blue shirt in one shot and a yellow shirt later in the same scene than it reminds me of Bill Clinton trying to play sophist by twisting definitions of the word "is". Basically, behind all the sophistry and word games the arguments can be summed up as: 1) Genesis doesn't mean what it says (which is a funny argument for a dogmatic literalist to make). A day isn't a day, you see, it's a "day"... 2) Hebrew words like have been mistranslated or don't mean what they say. The first argument just shows how far some people will twist logic and common sense to try to avoid the obivous. The second shows just how far they'll abuse language to try to hold on to their mistaken views of what the Bible means. Also, unlike the JDEP theory, this page ignores the rest of the OT. If the JDEP theory drew it's multiple-author hypothesis only from Geneisis, this would be fine, of course, but the page answers none of the other duplicated stories such as Noah's flood (are there pairs of ALL animals or only pairs of "clean" animals?), etc. Finally, there is the evidence of comparative mythology which shows where the ancient or Hellenic Hebrews found some of their sources (ie, the common middle-eastern motif of the leader set adrift in a basket that is common to both Moses and the earlier Sargon, to name but one similar example). When ALL the evidence is tack, the literalist interperetation of the bible loses by a wide margin. Which brings me to... Actually, none of this "discredits the Bible". It only discredits the literalist interperetation of the Bible as a scientifically and historically accurate book about botany, zoology, history, astronomy, etc. Millions of Christians believe in the messages of Bible (or, to be more accurate, they believe in their own interperetations of what they think the Bible means) without being dogmatic literalists. This includes many of the aforementioned Bible scholars, archeaologists and linguists who are practicing Jews and Christians. Anyway, I agree with spejic. Even if you believe in god, why couldn't he express himself in a clear, concise fashion that would be less prone to causing wars, goofy literalist silliness and stuff?
> Anything can be misinterpreted when you search > so diligently for ways to misconstrue. When you > read the Bible looking to discount it, you're gonna > find what you're looking for, whether it makes > sense or not. That isn't what we are doing. There are plenty of inconsistancies in the Bible from very simple, on-the-surface reading without any interpretation or misunderstanding. How did Judas die? Sure you can make up some wild story where they two versions are combined. But who is doing the misconstruing in that case? You can play with the tenses of the verbs and come out with a way that the Genesis stories do not conflict. But try pulling that trick in a high school history paper. The teacher won't buy it.
It's psychology. People only hear what they WANT to hear. Many "Christians" find it difficult to accept that they can't hate their neighbor or spend all their time chasing material riches over the bodies of their fellow men if they want to be real Christians. Or they are looking for a stern cosmic Big Daddy to make everything nice and "black and white" so they won't have do all the difficult messy thinking. So they are prone to being more comfortable with the angry, unpleasant, jealous, violent, lunatic God of the OT than with Jesus's wussy, pinko-commie, lovey-dovey "Abba". Some people (mostly men but a few women for their own psychotic reasons) want to believe in male chauvinism so they ignore some bits of Paul's writing while focusing on contradicting parts of it. I'm convinced that most fundamentalists aren't "Christians" so much as "Saulians" because Saul's quotes are always on their lips whereas they'll either try to ignore Jesus or try to say the he didn't really mean what he is reported in the Gospels to have said. These people want to talk the talk of being Christians without having to walk the walk. I mean, let's face it, if everyone followed the majority of what Jesus is supposed to have said, things would be really boring, peaceful and non-capitalistic. We'd all be like the Amish, only probably without the buggies and the beards. We'd actually have to help each other and be nice all the time.
Joey, Joey, Joey It took me only a few minutes from the time I saw the thread. Due to a recent addition to my household, my leisure time and sleep time has been greatly reduced. Unfortunately, I have not had as much time to spend posting on BigSoccer. Both references are funny but neither are accurate. The Hebrew word for day is yom. There are five different meanings for the word. i. a period of light in a day/night cycle; ii. a period of 24 hours; iii. a general or vague concept of time; iv. a specific point of time; and v. a period of a year. The two words, 'morning' and 'evening', are combined with yôm 19 times each outside of Genesis 1 (three times these words share the same reference cf. Numbers 9:15, Deuteronomy 16:4 and Daniel 8:26), and with each occurrence a twenty-four day is signified. This is true no matter what the literary genre or context might be. It should be further observed that when 'morning' and 'evening' occur together without yôm (this happens 38 times outside of Genesis 1, 25 of the 38 occur in historical narrative), it always, without exception, designates a literal solar day. Genesis 2:4-These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens First, there are no other 'time' words (for example, 'morning', 'evening', 'night', etc.) used with yôm, nor is there a modifying number. Second, it is typical Hebrew usage to translate 'in the day' as 'when'. So using this verse as an exception is like comparing apples to oranges; both are fruit, but not really comparable, and comparing the 'days' of Genesis 1 with this day' of Genesis 2:4 is equally inappropriate. http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3745.asp http://www.xmission.com/~fidelis/volume1/chapter2/wright.html http://www.trueorigin.org/tablet.asp Where is that evidence? It's convenient that you left that out. There are stories similar to the Bible everywhere. How many accounts are there of a world wide flood that have nothing to do with the Bible? Many. This just proves that we all came from Noah. Whatever. If one jot or tittle of the Bible is wrong, the rest is worthless. It is clear and concise if you use the right interpreter - The Holy Spirit. On the other hand, if I was the devil, my main goal would be to discredit what God has said. I would do this by making up theories that sound good, nitpick on things that seem to be contradictions, and essentially try to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. He doesn't have to lie. All he needs to do is bend the truth a little. He's pretty good at it. He's had at least 6000 years of practice.
I already know the argument. It's not convincing, especially when dogmatic literalists begin abandoning literalism itself to argue that the Bible doesn't mean what it literally says. It's the academic equivalent of "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Hella weak. The argument against JDEP is basically "We weren't there to know who wrote it and we don't know the names of the J, D, E or P authors so they must not exist." The argument for Moses writing the entire Pentateuch is almost all internal: "The Bible says he did, so he must have." Externally, Moses's authorship is based on the fact that the writer had knowledge of Egyptian plants and animals, as if no later Israelite writer could have possibly visited Egypt to have known this. Finally, how could Moses write the story of his own death and events that came after him? I wish there was a five year old child here at work so I could let him or her demolish these arguments and save me the bother. A little better but still easily dealt with. Tries and fails to fix a definite dating for the earliest material in the OT. All we can do for sure is date what we have to Helenistic times although some of the material is much older. Attempts to say for sure, "This is from the period before the Israelites settled in Canaan" are simply unprovable. Next, the extraordinary stability of religious, political and cultural forms in ancient Egypt mean that unless there is some kind of specific reference to an outside source, such as names or links to external events such as we have in ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Hittite and Assyrian diplomatic reports or some monuments and stele depicting battles or the deeds of the king, it is very difficult to date a supposed event in egyptian history. Sying "Well, there was a pharoah and he had some chariots and he worshipped a pantheon of gods..." doesn't get us very far because these statements are all as true for Egypt up until Hellenistic times (after 300 BCE) as it is for Egypt in very ancient times. Finally, the JDEP hypothesis is not based solely on the different names the Hebrews used for "God". It also based on slightly different ideologies about him and the Israelites relationship to him. At least the website recognizes that: "Before proceeding to give in conclusion a brief summary of the circumstantial evidence supporting the ordinary belief in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch it is important to define the term. By it we do not mean that Moses wrote all the Pentateuch with his own hand, or that there were no editorial additions made after his death." So, even these people realize that Moses did not write the whole Pentateuch as the Bible flatly claims. Nothing new here. I do find it interesting that fundies show a marked tendency to try to fight only older versions of arguments while ignoring more recent work. For example, they love to take turns tilting at Chuck Darwin as if his was the last word on evolution and nothing has been done by scientists since then. the same is true here. Lots of erferences to 19th century scholars but few to current ones. Why is this? Can they not afford new books? Did they spend all their dough on the Left Behind series? Uhhh.. hello! I gave you one! The Moses/Sargon thing? Do I need to give you some Ritalin? That's funny, there are no flood stories from Asia or the Americas and some of those civilizations are older than the Israelites. The Egyptian, Vedic, Sumerian and Greco-Roman mythologies are older than the Hebraic and share lots of ancient similarities. I guess we'd better start sacrificing to Ptah, Gilgamesh, Zeus and Indra, then, huh? Only to you. The rest of us can read the Bible as it was meant to be read and judge it accordingly. Fixed your post.
I didn't say what my judgement of the Bible is, now, did I? I merely disposed of the least accurate way of reading it.
Now there's a failure of logic if ever I saw one. [4 out of 5 doctors recommend Pepsident, therefore the 5th doctor recommends it too]. If EVERY society that has ever existed on this planet had a world-deluge myth, with very little variation from that contained within the Bible, then it might be evidence that the myth contained in the Bible was "based on a true story". But the simple fact is, that is not the case. Though there are many flood myths, not every society had them, and many of the myths differ significantly from the Bible story (for instance, many had the survivors on high ground, or in trees, as opposed to on an ark). One might find it significant that the Egyptian mythos does not have such a myth of world-deluge with ravaging consequences to humanity. That's especially interesting given that Egypt's recorded history predates the supposed occurence of a world-deluge (as commonly calculated to have taken place c. 2250 BCE), and yet those records somehow fail to note such an event. Guess no one noticed, huh? And might there be a logical reason for some cultures having a flood myth and others not? Say, perhaps, the fact that some cultures lived in areas subject to unpredictable flooding which destroyed cities unwittingly built in flood plains? And gee, that might account for the fact that the Egyptians didn't have such a myth, given that the Nile's flood has always been fairly regular and predictable, and even a necessary and desirable part of the agricultural society. In the semi-arid portions of Central Asia as well there are no flood myths - care to hazard a guess why? Are the words "semi-arid" enough of a hint?
http://www.biblicaldefense.org/Rese...cal_Apologetics/old_testament_reliability.htm In short, the documentary hypothesis and its updated versions do not stand on a solid foundation. They are based upon an unjustified bias against the supernatural; they also resort to fanciful speculation. The concept of the JEDP documents was created by the imaginations of liberal scholars. There is no evidence whatsoever that these documents ever existed. This is not to say that Moses did not draw upon information from written sources which predated him, but, if this was the case, objective evidence must be produced for verification. Uncontrolled subjective speculation is not true scholarship; it is the antithesis of scholarship. Uhhh.... hello. No you didn't. I was actually hoping you would give me a link so I could read up on this instead of you pulling it off the top of your often confused head. You call this fixing my post? It figures.
In answer to Mr. Troll, from the previous link - Thirteenth, ancient legends of creation and the worldwide flood are universal among primitive peoples. These legends appear to perversions of the true biblical account. An example of this would be a comparison of the ancient Babylonian flood account (the Gilgames Epic) and the Genesis flood account. Whereas the boat in the Babylonian account would never float due to its dimensions, the ark's dimensions as listed in Genesis describe a vessel that would be virtually impossible to capsize. and The modern liberal scholars are guilty of circular reasoning. In their attempt to prove that the Bible is merely a human book, they assume that revelation from God is impossible. In spite of the fact that much of ancient pagan history has been shown to be unreliable, liberal scholars assume that these pagan historical writings are always right when they differ from the biblical account. Meanwhile, again and again the Bible has been proven to be historically reliable. y The Old Testament has been shown to be historically reliable. Many times archaeology has confirmed the Old testament account. Not once has an archaeological find refuted the history recorded in the Bible. The only reason to reject the historical reliability of the Old Testament is an a prior bias against the possibility of God revealing Himself through propositional form, and, as has been shown, this bias is unwarranted.
Does anyone else see the deep, deep irony of people complaining that not accepting anceint reports of supernatural events at face value is "fanciful speculation"? Of course, the literalists are free from having to provide any objective (read, "external to the Bible") evidence that Moses even existed let alone wrote the Pentateuch. What a double standard. The ONLY thing that can be positively verified is that we have some Hellenic copies of a mish-mash of Hebriac mythological, historical and poetical writings. That's all, folks.
How is that an answer? In sum, you merely posted someone's conclusions that "the Bible is correct and has never been proven wrong" ... HOW is that an answer???
> the ark's dimensions as listed in Genesis describe > a vessel that would be virtually impossible to > capsize. And impossible to keep afloat. It is larger than any wooden ship every built (by 150 feet!), and it does not have the luxury of internal steel bracing that the 19th century ships needed or steam driven pumps to keep the water out (as ships that long twist and bend, causing gaps in the wood which floods the ship in even calm water). Not that it would have done much against that insane rainfall. 220 meters per day. It would sink a modern aircraft carrier, let alone a leaky hand-built wooden ship. And once they were thrown overboard, they would be dead. The energy imparted by that much falling water would have heated the water well past the boiling point.
Uhm.... the Chinese? The Americas? Southern Africa? Scandinavia? Where are the flood myths? The flood myths are universal to the near east. Later peoples borrowed the myths from earlier predecessors. Nothing supernatural about that. Straw man making of the lowest order. "Pagan" sources are only accepted as true where they deal with non-supernatural history that can be supported by the archaeological record and other, unrelated ancient accounts. I don't see Enki or Vishnu figuring too prominently in history books except as mythological figures. And much of Biblical archaeology was specifically aimed at "proving" the Bible is historical. It has only been after the finds were made and correlated that scholars have begun to abandon the idea that the OT is 100% historically accurate and even then scholars twisted themselves in knots to try to preserve a 100% historically accurate Bible. Go get a subscription to Biblical Archaeology Review. I double dog dare ya! Mostly, but not exclusively from the Hellenic era and afterwards. It has also significantly FAILED to confirm much in the OT. Wrong! Archaeologists are finding that the Israelite settlement of Canaan did not happen as the OT says it did. There is even debate raging about whether or not Solomon and David were real historical figures or composites. And then there are the dinosaurs... The only reason for accepting that supernatural events took place in the middle east is bias towards wanting these events to have happened. If the archaeolgical and textual record disagrees with fundie desires, I'll go with the archaeology and scholarship, not the fundies. Some of the OT is accurate history, some isn't, which is exactly what you'd expect from such a book.
Sargon http://www.tektonics.org/sargon.html Flood Myths http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html I find no evidence to support that Joseph Campbell ever existed.
All this says is that the Hebrews might not have taken the story directly from that of Sargon. So what? They did take it from one of the many earlier sources possible in the ancient world, specifically the near east. Uhm... Have you read the REST of that website? At all? Even a little bit? Then you haven't looked yet, Mr. Silly Solipsist.
From that website: Egypt: People have become rebellious. Atum said he will destroy all he made and return the earth to the Primordial Water which was its original state. Atum will remain, in the form of a serpent, with Osiris. [Faulkner, plate 30] (Unfortunately the version of the papyrus with the flood story is damaged and unclear. See also Budge, p. ccii.) Egypt believed the world began as one enormous sea (which I think you will agree differs from the Biblical version), and the main Egyptian god threated to rid the world of mankind and return it to its primordial sea-like state. That threat, though, was never in fact carried out - if it had been, there wouldn't have been anyone around today to post on Big-Soccer!!!! That myth did not HAVE a flood. The fact that a myth deals with WATER hardly counts as a "flood myth" equivalent to the biblical version.
The Egyptians also had a creation myth where the god Ptah literally WANKS the world into existence (I'm not kidding!) and there's no flood in that myth either.