kochman
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Not necessarily, only if they contradict each other.
Ask a Protestant Christian
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timtofly
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How many religions would last if they proclaimed they were the Truth, but everything is based on a lie? Once again the dichotomy comes from the fact that looking back 2000 years creates an undeniable fact that a book that is supposed to be infallible has contradictions. Contradictions that have come from 2000 years of speculation and the input of human error. The contradictions will never make sense to those who are removed by that amount of time span. Now you can say that the "church" through it's splits and schisms and reformations just add to the contradictions, but you cannot say that the contradictions make the Bible fallible. Another thing is going from manuscript to manuscript, if the canon had not been closed when it was, and left as a living and changing manuscript, where do you think it would be today? IMO all of the "discrepancies" were worked out and closed. Obviously to us today there are some passages that do not make sense, but it would not have been called the New Testament at the time it was connonized, unless the "church" accepted it as the Word of God. I believe that there is a GOD and that the incomplete parts were made perfect, and when the logos was made perfect the incomplete parts were discarded. Now you may not accept my view, but until you can bring forth manuscripts that reject that is what happened, that is the only logical conclusion I can come up with.
@ Leoreth Are you a follower of Zoroaster? Do you think that he may be a synonym of Noah?
Sure, but neither of us is claiming to be infallible. And if you say A happened and after that B, and I say B happened first and A was later, one of us must be wrong and cannot be infallible.
timtofly said:
I am not sure what you are trying to say. Is your position that the "orginal" text was infallible, and the source of the contradictions are errors introduced later? Or what text is the infallible one? It surely cannot be the current one, as these contradictions - as minor as they are - prove that there have to be mistakes in there.
Don't get me wrong - these contradictions do not make the story as a whole invalid, but they do make the assertion invalid that every single word is infallible.
But what if they do? Wouldn't you consider that at odds with infallibility?
So it's all a misunderstanding of the term infallible?
To me that means I can accept everything in the bible as literal truth.
No, I'm a follower of the great question mark
Why do you think so? And I'd like to know the parallels between Zoroaster and Noah, I've always found those interlinks between religions very interesting.
Bibles took a long time to copy (two months) so the point was to have Bibles with a shelf life of N/A and could be used in a rather far range of places. Furthermore Bibles required the hides of hundreds of calves, in the case of three Vulgates (the Codex Amiatinus survives because it was gifted to the pope at the time) it took 1,600 claves
People weren't prevented from owning a Bible in vernacular, however all Church instruction was done off the Vulgate.
The Venerable Bede, a Doctor of the Church, translated the Gospel of John into English and would have translated more, but he died (at age ~62 in AD ~735). The Gospels were translated into English by AD 990. Peter the Devourer (of books that is) had made a French Bible in the early 14th century.
timtofly
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But what if they do? Wouldn't you consider that at odds with infallibility?
So it's all a misunderstanding of the term infallible?
To me that means I can accept everything in the bible as literal truth.
No, I'm a follower of the great question mark
Why do you think so? And I'd like to know the parallels between Zoroaster and Noah, I've always found those interlinks between religions very interesting.
Infallible would be anything that was written down and included in the canon. There may be parts that were infallable but not included. IMO the canon could not contain the infallible logically, because the infallible would have been "cut" out. Now you can say that when the canon was completed, they did not have the perspective we do 2000 years later. They would of had documents, accounts, eyewitnesses that would have been taken into consideration a lot closer to the happenings that we have. They also may have missed things that due to the "slowness" of collaboration may historically be "off". The earlier the consensus was the more likely the actual happenings. The later consensus would be more sound historically.
Ironically one must ask why they did not put lets say two accounts together and compare them like we point out today. Obviously they have not escaped our attention. Wherein lies peoples doubts of infallibility. I say that when the canon was complete, those discrepencies made "sense" and were not "corrected" therein lies the infallibility. I ask for documentation from those people that shows the dispute between "facts" at the time, and then I will retract my views. In other words, the only thing we can go by is the end document, until external sources are revealed to change that.
To take everything as literal... There are stories that are figurative. There are stories that are the truth. The Holy Spirit is the one that guides one into what is the truth and what is figurative.
Your sig led me to that point. Upon reading about him it said that he had 3 sons and 3 "daughters". He was said to have lived between 1700 and 500 CE. 1700 is getting close to the Flood. The gnostics mention both him and Noah as prophets. He would have predated Moses and possibly Abraham. He also preached monotheism it seemed.
classical_hero
In whom I trust
No it does not. It is perfectly natural for people to remember certain things about event as they took place and they would also emphasize certain thing depending on who there audience is. It is when you put them together you see that there is no conflict and that they agree with each other. Here is an example. What were Jesus' final words?
f we were to treat other historical biographies like we do to the accounts of Jesus, then we basically would have to say we know absolutely nothing about history, since we are using methods that are never used in criticising other. Also see this link and do take your time to read the whole article and whole series, since it gives you a good idea why your line of thinking is so wrong.
http://tektonics.org/harmonize/lincoln01.html
Honestly, if there were a non-Christian, direct source that backed the Resurrection up in any meaningful way, I'd suspect that it was a forgery. It was a relatively minor event in a corner of the Roman Empire that was barely associated with the Romans themselves at all. Why should there be any more textual evidence, and why would non-Christians have given a damn?
@C_H, I don't think we're disagreeing about the historical accuracy/inaccuracy aspect...but what you see as infallible, I see as different accounts by people of the same thing. Meaning either one is wrong or one missed something. Again, that is perfectly fine and doesn't mean that any account is lying about what thought they saw, but for something to be infallible, you expect that to be complete and accurate. The same problem arises with what happens at the tomb. Different accounts say different things.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
This makes no sense.
The Roman Empire also rose rapidly, so a couple of hundred years before Jesus came onto the scene, their mythology was correct? Popularity is no argument for the validity of something.
We also don't use just 10% of our brains.
What people believed 2,000 years ago by the hundreds should be considered by us as fact? Would you care to notify the medical profession of this?
Well, since no one seems inclined to explain the contradictory genealogy question, are we expected to believe that Noah's family built the Pyramids? They are believed to have been built around 2400 BC or so, which is when I believe that the Great Flood is alleged to have taken place.
I'm struggling to make sense of this paragraph.
I don't mean omissions or things that make no sense but would if put in a better context. I'm talking about literal contradiction, i.e. one part of the bible state fact A and the other states B and those are in no way reconcilable. It must follow that either A or B, i.e. one part of the bible, must be wrong, which means the bible isn't right on everything.
My problem is that it is often cherry-picked what is literal and what is figurative. The same paragraphs that are defended with "don't take it literal" on one occasion are used as a moral imperative on another.
Exactly, and this is where the fallacy kicks in. Of course there are accounts of the resurrection, but only by those who believed in it in the first place, while the others didn't care to write down "during Passover 33 AD nobody was resurrected."
MikeL49NYVI
Warlord
Everyone:
I spent quite a bit of time reading through all 25 pages of this thread, to get caught up. Yes, I'm unemployed, and need something to do. But I don't want to restate something that has already been brought out.
There is one aspect of basic Bible interpetation that has not been discussed, or at least I missed it.
I am referring to taking things in the correct context of the times and the way the Bible was written. For instance it was written in paragraphs, not in seperate verses. So to understand what was being said you cannot take out one little bit and say that proves or disproves your point. This has been the cause of many, many distortions and misuse of the Scriptures for one's personal benefit.
Arakhor, I went back and read both Gospel accounts of Jesus' genealogy, and I must have missed something, because I don't see what you are calling a contradiction. I may not be a bright as many here, so if you can explain that I would be grateful.
However taking the context approach, and looking at the Gospels:
Matthew was one of the 12 disciples, he was a Jew and an eyewitness of what happend. He wrote to his fellow Jews, in such a way as to show them why Jesus was the Messiah. That is why he emphasised many of the things he did, in the way he did.
Mark was not one of the 12 and actually was a follower of and the scribe for Peter. His writings are not so much an historical narrritive, but more of a collection of the preachings and stories that Peter told over the course of his ministry, put in a book form.
Luke was a doctor, a Greek, who became a companion of Paul. He writes more from an intellectual standpoint. Much like a doctor would, stating facts. He is writing to the gentiles, not so much the Jews.
John wrote his Gospel last of the 4. He was called "The one who Jesus loved" And when he wrote, many of the original 12 and the other 500 who saw the ressurected Jesus, were now gone. His Gospel was written to show the divinity of Jesus, to compliment what the others had written.
Incidently, by calling John "the beloved" does not mean that Jesus didn't love the others, it only means that John was known for his particular devotion, and Jesus recgonized that, and responded to it. A different slant on the same idea, and not a contradiction.
Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament was a lawyer, and that is exactly how most of his letters read, just as if a lawyer wrote them.
When you take an honest look at the Bible, in the context of it's time and authors, many of the so-called contradictions show themselves to be nothing more than different people looking at the same thing from their view point, and writing to illustrate their points of view.
If all anyone is doing is just trying to find fault with something then you will not be objective, and you will find something wrong. Each of us has to ask how honest are we with ourselves? And nobody can really answer that for any other person.
I spent quite a bit of time reading through all 25 pages of this thread, to get caught up. Yes, I'm unemployed, and need something to do. But I don't want to restate something that has already been brought out.
There is one aspect of basic Bible interpetation that has not been discussed, or at least I missed it.
I am referring to taking things in the correct context of the times and the way the Bible was written. For instance it was written in paragraphs, not in seperate verses. So to understand what was being said you cannot take out one little bit and say that proves or disproves your point. This has been the cause of many, many distortions and misuse of the Scriptures for one's personal benefit.
Arakhor, I went back and read both Gospel accounts of Jesus' genealogy, and I must have missed something, because I don't see what you are calling a contradiction. I may not be a bright as many here, so if you can explain that I would be grateful.
However taking the context approach, and looking at the Gospels:
Matthew was one of the 12 disciples, he was a Jew and an eyewitness of what happend. He wrote to his fellow Jews, in such a way as to show them why Jesus was the Messiah. That is why he emphasised many of the things he did, in the way he did.
Mark was not one of the 12 and actually was a follower of and the scribe for Peter. His writings are not so much an historical narrritive, but more of a collection of the preachings and stories that Peter told over the course of his ministry, put in a book form.
Luke was a doctor, a Greek, who became a companion of Paul. He writes more from an intellectual standpoint. Much like a doctor would, stating facts. He is writing to the gentiles, not so much the Jews.
John wrote his Gospel last of the 4. He was called "The one who Jesus loved" And when he wrote, many of the original 12 and the other 500 who saw the ressurected Jesus, were now gone. His Gospel was written to show the divinity of Jesus, to compliment what the others had written.
Incidently, by calling John "the beloved" does not mean that Jesus didn't love the others, it only means that John was known for his particular devotion, and Jesus recgonized that, and responded to it. A different slant on the same idea, and not a contradiction.
Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament was a lawyer, and that is exactly how most of his letters read, just as if a lawyer wrote them.
When you take an honest look at the Bible, in the context of it's time and authors, many of the so-called contradictions show themselves to be nothing more than different people looking at the same thing from their view point, and writing to illustrate their points of view.
If all anyone is doing is just trying to find fault with something then you will not be objective, and you will find something wrong. Each of us has to ask how honest are we with ourselves? And nobody can really answer that for any other person.
MikeL49NYVI
Warlord
Leoreth:
I was writing while you were posting, so I didn't have your post in front of me. You mention literal contradictions in the Bible. But do not name any. Maybe you can please refer to one or two that we can all focus on.
When you do please refer to the original language in which the Bible was written. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and New Testament was written in Aramaric and ancient Greek. Any honest reader or scholar will tell you that in translation from these languages to modern German, English, etc something can be lost. However, in true meaningful, and doctrinal substance based upon the 20,000 ancient texts and portion of texts, the New Testament as we have it today is essentially what was written 2000 years ago. The message and doctrine has not changed.
I am not being argumentative here, I seriously would like to know what contradictions you or anyone can find that will conclusively disprove the teachings and main message of the Bible, in particular the New Testament.
I was writing while you were posting, so I didn't have your post in front of me. You mention literal contradictions in the Bible. But do not name any. Maybe you can please refer to one or two that we can all focus on.
When you do please refer to the original language in which the Bible was written. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and New Testament was written in Aramaric and ancient Greek. Any honest reader or scholar will tell you that in translation from these languages to modern German, English, etc something can be lost. However, in true meaningful, and doctrinal substance based upon the 20,000 ancient texts and portion of texts, the New Testament as we have it today is essentially what was written 2000 years ago. The message and doctrine has not changed.
I am not being argumentative here, I seriously would like to know what contradictions you or anyone can find that will conclusively disprove the teachings and main message of the Bible, in particular the New Testament.
kochman
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When it was translated, the Church frowned upon it. The fact that you can't stop humans from translating something is what you seem to be ignoring.Bibles took a long time to copy (two months) so the point was to have Bibles with a shelf life of N/A and could be used in a rather far range of places. Furthermore Bibles required the hides of hundreds of calves, in the case of three Vulgates (the Codex Amiatinus survives because it was gifted to the pope at the time) it took 1,600 claves
People weren't prevented from owning a Bible in vernacular, however all Church instruction was done off the Vulgate.
The Venerable Bede, a Doctor of the Church, translated the Gospel of John into English and would have translated more, but he died (at age ~62 in AD ~735). The Gospels were translated into English by AD 990. Peter the Devourer (of books that is) had made a French Bible in the early 14th century.
The Church did not want people knowing the word... deny it all you want, you love to change history to make the RCC out to be this completely wonderful thing, when its history is far from wonderful.
I get what you are saying, but lots of non-major events at the time were written down.
Ummm... think about this.
Two major issues in what you are saying.
1) If you followed Roman myths under Roman power, you didn't face persecution and death. If you followed Christianity, you did face those things. Again, I already explained this, it has NOTHING to do with popularity. It was highly unpopular to become a Christian... I won't be explaining it again.
2) Also, no Roman myths were making such statements as Jesus did, that He would die, and rise again... Jesus said it, and the OT said it would happen too. Does Roman mythology do anything of the sort? Nope.
Do you really not see the difference?
I guess Jesus summed it up best when He spoke of those who would understand His parables and those who wouldn't.
Oh, I'm not trying to be argumentative as well, and would even agree that the main message, i.e. the aspects of central significance to Christianity, at least can't be disproven.
But for me the claim that the Bible is infallible extends to everything, even minor contradictions. Unfortunately I didn't memorize these minor points, but iirc something related to genealogy cropped up a few pages ago. I'll see if I can find something when I've got more time.
1) The persecutions were certainly bad, but don't exaggerate: being a Christian didn't mean you were on constant risk of death. And besides, Christianity was a hugely attractive religion in the Roman Empire because of its egalitarian message. There's a reason it spread to the lower social classes first - if it was just because everyone accepted the resurrection at face value, why didn't it spread equally through all parts of society?
2) You're using a reasoning that is intrinsic to Christianity and therefore couldn't have played a role for non-Christians. An adherent to Roman polytheism could say quite the same along the lines of: "My myths say if I sacrifice to the Gods, they will bring me favorable weather, so I sacrificed three goats last year and got an amazing harvest. Does Christianity do anything of the sort? Nope."
And what do you mean with Jesus' parables exactly?
The Church didn't care about private copies of the Bible in vernacular, Peter the Devourer became the equivalent of the NYTimes Best Seller and he was given the pope's blessing to to teach it.
Could you please provide evidence that the Catholic Church frowned on private vernacular Bibles?
Prove your grave accusation that the Catholic Church "did not want people knowing the word."
kochman
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1) In many places, it did. In the Roman empire, there were Emperors who persecuted Christianity and tried to destroy it... that means the might of the entire empire was at odds with you. Martyrdom happened quite frequently in the early days, but yet it spread. It wasn't a popularity contest.1) The persecutions were certainly bad, but don't exaggerate: being a Christian didn't mean you were on constant risk of death. And besides, Christianity was a hugely attractive religion in the Roman Empire because of its egalitarian message. There's a reason it spread to the lower social classes first - if it was just because everyone accepted the resurrection at face value, why didn't it spread equally through all parts of society?
2) You're using a reasoning that is intrinsic to Christianity and therefore couldn't have played a role for non-Christians. An adherent to Roman polytheism could say quite the same along the lines of: "My myths say if I sacrifice to the Gods, they will bring me favorable weather, so I sacrificed three goats last year and got an amazing harvest. Does Christianity do anything of the sort? Nope."
And what do you mean with Jesus' parables exactly?
2) I disagree. Weather, though they believed it to be run by the Gods, was a constant. People rising from their tombs was not... much less after centuries of prophecy foretelling it.
Give me a break. Everyone knows this, and yet you keep denying it.
The RCC didn't search homes looking for the bible in the local tongue, but it certainly didn't want it.
My accusation is proved in that it insisted the services be held in Latin, which few understood, especially in the Germanic language areas...
Anyhow, I am not going to argue with you over this... this is one of the reasons ML was excommunicated, because he translated the bible into German... the proof is in the pudding.
If you insist on arguing about it more, don't expect a response from me.
yeah, well everyone knows people in the Dark Ages thought the world was flat and look at the veracity of that.
Blame Charlemagne for the standardization of the Mass.
There were German translations before Martin Luther, but they included the deutrocanonical books.
kochman
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Blame Charlemagne for mass being in Latin hundreds of years later, despite having Popes who ruthlessly enforced it, including waging war...
Nah.
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