Some looper claiming to be God?

wolfsbane

Depeche_Mode said:

Well you are just going to have to convince the majority of Christians that they are wrong in their interpretation. Most Christians interpret: "the Gods said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26) as referring to the physical body and use this to claim sanctity of the human body. I don't know of too many Christians who would claim that the human form was not divinely sculpted.

Just to confirm that it is not the physical that is meant, but the spiritual. Our friend is correct about that, but mistaken about evolution being consistent with the Bible. I'll return to that shortly, DV.

Fanny Cradock

Ohhh! Please let's not turn this into another 'Bible, Creationism and Prophecy' thread.

wolfsbane

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

Ohhh! Please let's not turn this into another 'Bible, Creationism and Prophecy' thread.

OK, I won't - unless someone wants to know why Theistic Evolution is incompatible with the Biblical account.

Fanny Cradock

That fine just as long as you guarantee that this doesn't turn into another 8000+ post thread

PDN

robindch wrote: »

I believe I've only mentioned it once or twice before, and I do recall your last comment (which I would have responded to, had I been able to find it again in the rush of catching up that happens when I travel).

It's of course perfectly correct to say that a reproachful marginal note shows that a viable quality assurance system was in place. The presence of the note suggests equally strongly that there was a problem with the quality of copying to start with.

It's all a bit like a medieval king's food-taster. Granted, the presence of the food-taster is probably good for the king, but does rather suggest that -- for whatever reason -- the quality of the food's not all that it could be.

Wouldn't you agree?

I would agree that human error is always a factor that needs to be taken into account. For example, after I finish typing this post I will quickly check it over for spelling mistakes etc. That is a simple quality control check. Other posters evidently do not bother to do this. We are all prone to human error and anyone, Christian or otherwise, who denies that is living in fantasy land. However, where a quality control system is in place you can minimise the effects of human error.

Any educated Christian acknowledges that there are slight variant readings in different manuscripts. (This is one reason why the idea of one English translation being absolutely perfect is such bunk). The fact that the variants are so few, and that they affect no major point of doctrine, is testimony to the incredible care copyists took with the Scriptures.

I presume you are aware of the Adultery Bible - a version of the KJV printed in 1631 that omitted the word "not" from the seventh commandment? Even with the printing press such mistakes happen, but the lesson is that it was spotted and corrected. It's not as if all subsequent copies of the Bible declared "thou shalt commit adultery".

PDN

Depeche_Mode wrote: »

So they misinterpreted what Jesus meant to say with respect to his second coming (which was surely not unimportant) but they got all the rest right, or could it be that they might have been equally fallible with other aspects of his message?

You are confusing two separate issues. Whether the early Christians misinterpreted something that Jesus said is very different from whether they accurately recorded the words that Jesus spoke.

I don't believe that they did necessarily misinterpret Christ's teaching. They understood that the Gospel would be preached to all nations and then the end would come. Their problem was more one of underestimating the extent of that task. First century Christians were only familiar with the nations around the Mediterranean. They had no idea that it would be necessary for the Gospel to preached in China, the Americas etc.

Is there not some debate about whether the heretical sayings Gospel of Thomas was written before, or contemprary to, the canonical Gospels? It isn't certain either way but still...

There is debate over many things. I find the evidence for a later date for the Gospel of Thomas to be very convincing. For example, no early writers mention it until the Third Century, whereas Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all referred to by earlier writers.

Please, if I said something inaccurate then pick me up on the point. Don't try and discredit it by tarring it as being a bit of populist fiction. I may not be an expert but I do try to read reputable historical accounts of areas such as early Christianity and Gosticism. Do you deny the process of destruction of Gnostic and Heretical books by the Christian Church? The burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, which held numerous Gnostic and heretical writings, by Orthodox Christians? What about the Codex Theodosianus which stated numerous methods of punishing heretical Christians including:

C. Th. XVI.v.iii: Whenever there is found a meeting of a mob of Manichaeans, let the leaders be punished with a heavy fine and let those who attended be known as infamous and dishonored, and be shut out from association with men, and let the house and the dwellings where the profane doctrine was taught be seized by the officers of the city. Valentinian and Valens Augusti.

There have always been those who burn books. However, there were so many different varieties of Christians, and under so many different types of leadership and jurisdiction, that the idea of an all-powerful Church utterly destroying every book that contradicted them is a laughable myth.

We have plenty of copies and records of the kind of Gnostic books that were destroyed, and guess what? Far from contradicting the accounts of the miracles, they actually contain more fanciful miracles.

Some would call it "getting their stories straight".

Only those who are unduly prejudiced. I think more people would find it eminently reasonable that anyone writing a historical account of an event should do research and confirm the facts.

robindch

PDN wrote: »

Any educated Christian acknowledges that there are slight variant readings in different manuscripts.

I'd say "well-informed" and not the judgmental "educated", but the point stands. There are, as I'm sure you know, posters in this forum who deny that such variant texts exist.

PDN wrote: »

The fact that the variants are so few, and that they affect no major point of doctrine, is testimony to the incredible care copyists took with the Scriptures.

As I pointed out elsewhere yesterday, Erhman claims that there are more variations in the text of the NT than there are words in it. I don't have his source data and can't therefore comment on how reasonable this claim is, but it certainly doesn't sound all *that* unreasonable to me.

But in an area where people become obsessively interested acquiring the precise meaning of every word -- witness the recent debate about adultery -- is it not a reasonable position to bear in the back of one's mind that we cannot be sure that the text is authentic (ignoring, for the moment, the question of accuracy)?

Pompey Magnus

PDN wrote: »

You are confusing two separate issues. Whether the early Christians misinterpreted something that Jesus said is very different from whether they accurately recorded the words that Jesus spoke.

But I don't think the two should be considered sperate. If the people who wrote the Gospels were eyewitnesses and did misinterpret at least part of Jesus' message then I feel it compromises the trustworthy nature of the entire work. I don't believe it is possible for someone to accurately quote conversations from about 40 to 60 years in the years in the past.

Imagine being in the crowd during Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. It was a rhetorical masterpiece and without doubt one of the greatest speechs in the 20th Century. I assume it would at least have had a comparable impact on the crowd that Jesus would have had when speaking to his followers. Now imagine having to rewrite his entire speech 40 or 50 years in the future, without the advantage of having electronic recordings of the event or written transcripts. And then imagine having to do the same for an entire 3 year period of King's sermons and talks. Honestly just how accurate would you expect your memories to be after all that time? No doubt you would get the general message of racial equality but you would miss finer, more subtle points.

I believe the same applies with the Gospels, and I feel that Christians use the Gospel accounts for very specific moral issues like a doctor would a scalpal when in fact I see the Gospels as being the equivalent of a sword. Good for the broad message but entirely unreliable for the specifics. I honestly don't think that issues such as Jesus' views on homosexuality or abortion could possibly have been accurately portrayed by the Gospel writers unless he made an extremely specific, impossible to misunderstand, reference to them, which he didn't.

I suppose this is why it is pretty critical for Christians to believe that the Gospel authors were eye witnesses. Broadly speaking as it stands there are currently perhaps (off the top of my head) "only" five stages for errors to arise:

(1) Misunderstanding of Jesus' message by the eye-witness
(2) Misremembering aspects of the message by the eyewitness 40 years later
(3) Poorly relaying that which he did remember when writing it down
(4) Slight mistranslations from the originals
(5) Misunderstanding the eye-witnesses intentions by later scholars.

If it turned out that the authors were not eye-witnesses but rather got the message from someone who got the message from someone else who got the message from someone who knew an eyewitness then the whole NT becomes pretty much worth sod all because the chances for errors to arise become so much more numerous.

However, there were so many different varieties of Christians, and under so many different types of leadership and jurisdiction, that the idea of an all-powerful Church utterly destroying every book that contradicted them is a laughable myth.

They didn't destroy every book that contradicted them, but they did a pretty good job. You can't really defend their actions because they didn't succeed, you have to consider their intentions. If someone said in 2000 years time: "There were so many Jewish communities worldwide, and under so many different government types, that the idea of the Nazi Party trying to utterly destroy the Jewish race is a laughable myth." would their argument be valid?

PDN

robindch wrote: »

I'd say "well-informed" and not the judgmental "educated", but the point stands. There are, as I'm sure you know, posters in this forum who deny that such variant texts exist.As I pointed out elsewhere yesterday, Erhman claims that there are more variations in the text of the NT than there are words in it. I don't have his source data and can't therefore comment on how reasonable this claim is, but it certainly doesn't sound all *that* unreasonable to me.

But in an area where people become obsessively interested acquiring the precise meaning of every word -- witness the recent debate about adultery -- is it not a reasonable position to bear in the back of one's mind that we cannot be sure that the text is authentic (ignoring, for the moment, the question of accuracy)?

Erhman's claim sounded pretty dodgy to me the moment you mentioned it. However, maybe that is because, as a skeptic, I am suspicious of unverified claims.

I think the question of textual variants would be more worrying for Christians if we viewed the Bible as a collection of isolated magical texts that you can quote at random and divorced from their contexts. However, that is not the case. The vast majority of scribal errors are easily detectable by the context. For example, a poster may include typos and spelling errors in his posts, but we know what he is trying to say. If he refers to "rosary beeds" - then we all understand that he means "rosary beads". Even if he was posting about Catholic prayer and typed "rosary heads" - we would still assume, correctly, that he was talking about rosary beads and not advocating a new form of prayer that involved the devotee counting the severed heads of babies.

So, context and common sense immediately enables us to correct the vast majority of variants. Other variants are in relation to subjects where no point of Christian doctrine or faith is at stake. For example, we may be unsure whether a particular Old Testament king had 400 or 4000 horses in his stables. That might make for an interesting (to some of us, anyway) debate, and it may be that future research or archaeological discoveries will clarify the question, but it doesn't actually affect what I believe about God or how I live my life as a Christian in the 21st Century.

So, while textual criticism will always be needed, I think that it is reasonable for Christians to say that the Bible we have today is both authentic and accurate.

PDN

Depeche_Mode wrote: »

They didn't destroy every book that contradicted them, but they did a pretty good job. You can't really defend their actions because they didn't succeed, you have to consider their intentions. If someone said in 2000 years time: "There were so many Jewish communities worldwide, and under so many different government types, that the idea of the Nazi Party trying to utterly destroy the Jewish race is a laughable myth." would their argument be valid?

I'm not quite sure why you want to muddy the waters by suggesting that I'm defending their actions. It is these kinds of tactics that make discussion on these boards so frustrating. I never defended their actions.

Evidently you share my disdain for Godwin's Law, so let's continue with your Nazi/Jewish analogy. It would be invalid to argue that the idea of the Nazi's attempting to destroy the Jewish race is somehow a laughable myth. However, it would certainly be a laughable myth to suggest that the Nazis succeeded, and that our understanding of history (of either the Nazis or the Jews) is somehow irreparably damaged.

There were undoubtedly sections of the Christian Church that attempted to suppress works they saw as heretical. Nobody, despite your implication to the contrary, is defending that. However, it is unhistorical nonsense to suggest that some great body of evidence that would contradict the Gospel accounts has somehow been wiped off the face of the earth.

Pompey Magnus

PDN wrote: »

Evidently you share my disdain for Godwin's Law, so let's continue with your Nazi/Jewish analogy.

I was worried someone would bring up Godwin alright but I couldn't think up anything else that fit so I risked it and hoped no-one would notice .

Ok, you didn't defend their actions, but it does seem like you trivialised them as being just one of those things that people did. Surely you admit that it looks like they only wanted people to hear their side of the argument? If the Orthodox religion was so convincing and so obviously based on truth then why feel the need to burn books which suggest otherwise?

PDN

Depeche_Mode wrote: »

I was worried someone would bring up Godwin alright but I couldn't think up anything else that fit so I risked it and hoped no-one would notice .

It's OK. I think Godwin's Law is a load of crap and is based on a false premise. So you can ignore it when talking to me.

Ok, you didn't defend their actions, but it does seem like you trivialised them as being just one of those things that people did. Surely you admit that it looks like they only wanted people to hear their side of the argument? If the Orthodox religion was so convincing and so obviously based on truth then why feel the need to burn books which suggest otherwise?

No, I'm not trivialising it. I'm simply saying that the burning of books shows that the people who did it were intolerant bigots, as were most of the political or religious systems of that day. I believe it was part of the corruption of Christianity into the political power structure of Roman Catholicism. The fact that they burnt books has no implication as to the character or accuracy of the books that they burned.

robindch

PDN wrote: »

I think Godwin's Law is a load of crap and is based on a false premise.

You messed this one up the last time too -- Godwin's law doesn't invalidate the comparison between the topic-du-jour and Hitler, it simply states that as time moves onwards, the chances of such a comparison being made approach one. The implication being that if all arguments tend towards a common point, in this case a (valid or invalid) comparison with Hitler, then why bother discussing?

Do you understand what Godwin's saying now?

PDN

robindch wrote: »

You messed this one up the last time too -- Godwin's law doesn't invalidate the comparison between the topic-du-jour and Hitler, it simply states that as time moves onwards, the chances of such a comparison being made approach one. The implication being that if all arguments tend towards a common point, in this case a (valid or invalid) comparison with Hitler, then why bother discussing?

Do you understand what Godwin's saying now?

What do you mean by "approach one"? Is that being used in some mathematical sense to refer to inevitability, or simply that the longer a thread becomes, the greater the chance of the comparison being made? If so, wouldn't that apply to almost anything? If a thread lasts for 8000 posts then there is a greater chance that someone will compare a rhino to a dinosaur than if the thread lasts for five posts.

Soul Winner

robindch wrote: »

As somebody else pointed out elsewhere in the last day or so, there are two issues here in establishing whether the books we have today are reliable. The first attribute is their accuracy (ie, were the books originally accurate descriptions of what happened) and the second is their authenticity (ie, were the books unchanged from the time they were written).

And how does one measure the accuracy or inaccuracy of the documents in question? By what system can you adjudge the oldest extant New Testament documents to? No matter how far you go back they all have what modernity would deem superstitious or fantastically unreliable accounts of the events. How can we know when we were not there? Modernity assumes (a priori) that these events could not have happened because they are impossible so therefore they didn't happen and thus the New Testament has to be wrong. I bet even if we had the originals they would contain stories about the resurrection of Christ. Common sense alone will tell you that. Even those documents might not agree on certain aspect of the events (which by the way would be proof that the writers did not collaborate). The fact that they seem to disagree on some things adds weight to their authenticity. It just might be due to the simple fact they were written from different points of view, but that does not negate what they are reporting on. E.g. A newspaper reports on a story of a bank robbery in Bray and that four robbers drove off in the getaway car. And another newspaper reports that there were only 3 robbers. 2000 years after these two articles are found. The debate would be over who is telling the truth about the events? When in fact they both are. One newspaper got its report from an eye witness from inside the bank who stated that there were three robbers. The other newspaper got its story about the same event from somebody out side the bank who seen the three robbers and the get away driver hence there was four robbers. Nobody debates the fact that the bank got robbed though. Like wise with the New Testament Documents. None of them state that the resurrection did not happen. They all agree on that one at least, even if their reports might differ ever so slightly in the telling, which like I said adds weigh their authenticity because it rules out collaboration. If they were collaborating and making up a lie they would have made sure that all their reports were identical wouldn’t they? Its intrinsic evidence like this that tips the scale for me.

robindch wrote: »

If the books' authenticity could be guaranteed beyond any reasonable doubt -- and I can't imagine how one could realize your hypothetical, but for the sake of argument... -- then I would assume that the books are as about accurate as any other ancient text. Which is to say, quite possibly not very accurate at all, as even a brief survey of ancient literature will show you. Ancient literature, even serious texts, are filled with all kinds of weird and wonderful stories that nobody gives much credence to these days. The text of the bible is treated as an exception because it has the sanction of tradition, which, of itself alone, should make you suspicious.

No, what gives the Bible texts (especially the New Testament accounts of Jesus) validity and authenticity is the fact that the disciples paid with their lives by simply refusing to deny their testimony and thus suffering horrific deaths as a result.

robindch wrote: »

So, if you achieved your hypothetical, no I wouldn't believe the stories, because you haven't either addressed or resolved the more important question of whether the authenticated accounts are accurate.

Again how does one do that if you already have the most reliable documents affirming the events?