A lot of people think that the prophesy of the virgin birth in the Greek that Matthew cited is a mistranslation. *shrug*

I also remember hearing that the story of Christ is the perfect story line for all stories to model:

From the mysterious birth, difficult childhood, being forced to flee home, growth, return to seek out on an adventure, be betrayed by a friend, fullfill the goal, tie it all in at the end...




If this were true, what a dumb thing to try to use it to somehow prove something that it fails miserably to achieve...

a lot of people thought the codex Sinaiticus failed to even mention the resurrection of Christ...

I think it's fair to say those people were lazy and/or biased.

Isiah 7:14

Yeah this is basically Joseph Campbell's thesis in "The Hero With a Thousand Faces". There is a basic universal story structure of the hero myth that has all these elements... unusual or virgin birth, initial alienation, the call to adventure, initially refusing the call, finally leaving to go out and discover the truth, facing trials and tribulations, finding the golden fleece or holy grail whatever at the end. Every culture tells this story in one way or another, and pretty much all of our most successful movies do too.

(George Lucas explicitly modeled Star Wars on this structure)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

Yeah but at the same time, there is no mind.










I totally just blew your...fuck, never mind.

That would be it.

I used to have a good friend who was a liberal atheist but he liked cigars so we would sit out on the porch for hours smoking cigars, arguing religion etc. He first turned me onto the book Sacred Blood / Sacred (something), which was what Dan Brown totally plagerized for his movie the Davinci Code. His poor wife would have to come out and tell us to quiet down. Good times.

I had a lot of good nights with Tony. But I always enjoy arguing with people who are smart but can accept that disagreeing about something doesn't necessitate the need to dislike them. Plus Tony was a member of the NRA, and thought homosexuality was an obomonation against nature, so he was ostersized by the liberal crowd who are so closed minded about the idea of disagreeing.

"Master, master! I understand!"

"What is it that is on your mind, monk?"

"Nothing!"

"WELL THEN THROW IT OUT!"

agreed.



What is the point of this post? To show you lack basic understanding in Biblical theology?

richard carrier and thomas l. thompson are 2 i've read that come to mind. will think of a 3rd if it really matters.

i assume you're just calling me out for sounding like a blowhard or something and not actually doubting that it's a consensus position

of each other/Q /non-canonical gospels, and/or ultimately of oral tradition. i'm sure you've read as much about the synoptic problem as i have. you apparently just aren't in the habit of
reading non-apologetic scholars if you think your position is accepted to have some sort of "scientific" high ground among all scholars.



that the majority of secular scholars believe the gospels are of dubious origin doesn't seem like a statement that needs defending.

that's part of it in terms of possible origin of jesus mythology that spawned the gospels.

i didn't see anything on that site that contradicts anything i've said. you'll have be more specific what your purpose was, since it just looks like a neutral reference site.

Just wanted to see a counter to particular academics.

No, everybody already knows I'm no biblical theologian. I just wanted to tease you guys for living by an ancient text that mostly consists of such important advice as

"If an animal that you are allowed to eat dies, anyone who touches the carcass will be unclean till evening. 40 Anyone who eats some of the carcass must wash his clothes, and he will be unclean till evening. Anyone who picks up the carcass must wash his clothes, and he will be unclean till evening."

I know, I know, this is in one of the sections of your perfect book that was retracted, right? Still, you gotta love this stuff.

yeah, but if the whole thing is borrowed and stolen, why would anyone think its meaning held any relevance?

Just was looking at all the responses today. Thanks for the posts that show the CNN story is clearly inaccurate and this version of the bible does indeed include references to the resurrection.

However, for other scholars that hold that the New Testament is full of inaccuracies, etc as claimed by others in here, they are numerous, and in the majority when it comes to scientific debate on the issue. Just a few: Hemer, Benoit, Baillet, Aland, Roberts, and Fee.

To be fair, the CNN article never said that this bible didn't contain references to the resurrection.

However the story jumps right into the notion that this 'oldest' Bible is different than the one we use today.

Which fosters this same notion that so many people buy into without any research, or in the case of crow, with bad research, looking only for the things that support what 'they already know to be true.'

Truth is it's boring job, to judge the accuracy of an ancient writing, but the people that have done it exhuastively, give us more than enough proof to see that we can judge anything new that comes up because we have enough data to know what the original letters said.

It's like the common knowledge that there are thousands of translation, which is supposed to imply that there are conflicting translations. Which there really aren't. Over 1,000 translations and the message of the Bible is pretty consistant through each one of them.

But looking into that is not as easy as just 'knowing' that 'mos't secular scholars have already proven that the Bible is unreliable.

that's a pretty funny accusation coming from you




i didn't claim anything of the sort. it definitely takes a lot of reading various sources on both sides to begin to understand what's going on and judge who is and isn't being objective.

what i said is your statement "textual criticism is the greatest scientific strength of christian apologetics" is bunk. "scientific strength" implies that there is objective evidence relevant to the truth of christianity that both apologist and non-apologist scholars agree on, which is obviously false.

the only objective strength of apologist textual criticism is showing that the bulk of text in books chosen for the canon hasn't been altered much since the late 1st or 2nd-century - which to someone trying to form an opinion on the historicity of the gospels is irrelevant information.

It is different.

The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections -- some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.

Perfect book, now with corrections!

Biblically, it's very likely that Satan was the cause of other stories happening in other places. He's the master of chaos and confusion. What better way to trick VB than to make it appear that the Jewish God is just made up?

It wasn't the Bible, so it matters not.

In his Easter letter of 367, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, gave a list of exactly the same books as what would become the New Testament canon,[8] and he used the word "canonized" (kanonizomena) in regards to them.

Different order of books, with handwritten entries on the side, is different in the sense of not being the same.

But in a culture that buys into misguided truths about the validity of the current Bible, like crow who I am about to answer, this type of inferance is done with intent...and it wasn't a good intention.

Funny how you can make a completely dishonest 'claim to authority' statement like "We all know that all secular (read real ) scholars think a certain way" but if I make a generalization, you see it for it's wrongness. ( which by the way isn't wrong in a world without morality )





So you admit there is objective strength that the canon hasn't been altered since the 1st century. That goes completely against what you've said before.

Now just produce the original texts so you can show why the copies we have today aren't accurate an you can then make the statement that the evidence relevant to the truth of christianity that both apologist and non-apologist scholars agree on is false.

Until then you are dancing around trying to convince yourself that you have proven some point that not only have you not even made the least effort to prove, you've consistantly shown that your requirement for truth is only "Does it say the Christians are wrong? Then it's true!"

Yeah, CNN always pushing the atheist agenda, those bastards.

Ahh, or maybe Satan created the Bible as a lure to test those who would eschew their natural faculties of reason! Once he's got you in his 'heaven' you will be helpless....

Isn't this Lacsap's theory?

Thought that was disproven with a poorly thought out spagetti monster simile?

another mischaracterization. i'm simply saying apologist textual criticism can't be a scientific strength of christianity if most non-apologists disagree with their conclusions about the evidence, and they obviously do if you open your eyes. the apologist position on the evidence is clearly subjective opinion, not scientific strength.



what exists in the earliest extant NT artifacts doesn't appear to have been altered much, but those artifacts don't start until decades after the fact after christianity was well established.



everything i've said is about the authenticity of the gospels as historical eyewitness accounts, which is all that matters. for a scholar who thinks textual criticism indicates otherwise (the non-apologist consensus), the fact that the accounts themselves haven't been changed much over the centuries is irrelevant. fictitious accounts accurately passed down through centuries are still fictitious accounts.

None of the old testament is retarded. It's brilliant that many of the laws of the OT that God 'imposed' on Israel were safety issues that the scientific community wouldn't know until 4,000-5,000 years later.

- Don't eat uncooked shellfish
- Wash your hands before every meal

etc etc etc

There are something like 612 food laws that Jews have to abide by and thank goodness Jesus fulfilled the law so we don't have to keep up that charade.


That God... always knowing stuff.

Yeah it took science 5000 years to discover that one.

The rules are not 'retarded', they are simply out-dated.

You can't disprove ReverseSatan! He works in mysterious ways... don't you think he could make it look like he didn't exist or was the opposite of what he said?

cult speak.


besides all people who can ride a bike agree that there has never been a reversesatan or anything that could be remotely assumed to be reversesatan. its so obvious to all smart people. everyone knows this and only you simple idiots who buy books like cattle from the lying authors of the books that you quote could possibly think that everyone doesn't already agree with what i think is true.

besides you once again got the definition of the word disprove wrong. it doesnt mean what you think it means. neither does is.

I don't know if you are being sarcastic or not... but when were germs discovered? It had to be post 1600 at least. I'm guessing the 1800's.

There is a really good book called None of These Diseases that delves deeply into the radical ideas that this new God was proposing regarding sanitation, medical and dietary rules. They were completely out of left field and ran contrary to all the customs that their neighbors employed. They also just appeared all at once.

Well, just because the medical field rejected this stupid notion of washing your hands after you examine a dead corpse, before you examined a pregnant woman, would reduce the mortality rate of pregnant women...

It's not like they didn't 'know' that washing the hands was a good idea..Only 4,900 years off vb

I'm a bit lost in the layers of sarcasm here, but clearly people knew that washing hands was a good idea long before they knew the mechanisms of germ transmission. All you had to do was notice the correlation between touching corpses and getting sick, you didn't need a microscope.

Many cultures had concepts of 'clean' and 'dirty' spreading like the Old Testament does, pre-germ knowledge. This is big in India as we've talked about before.

(in fact some of it is probably genetic... apes have the same thing we do where they won't eat 'contaminated' foods, like if a hair falls in your soup and its disgusting to you even though you have removed the hair)

The Egyptian medical book called the Papyrus Ebers reveals the common medical practices of Egypt in about 1552 B.C.. The Israelites left Egypt about 1400 B.C..

This is an example of Egyptian medicine.

"To prevent hair from turning gray, anoint it with the blood of a black calf which has been boiled in oil, or with the fat of a rattlesnake." When hair falls out, one remedy is to apply a mixture of six fats, namely those of the horse, the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the cat, the snake and the Ibex. To strengthen it, anoint with the tooth of a donkey crushed in honey...to remove embedded splinters apply worms blood and asses’ dung."

Moses was reared in the house of Pharaoh. He was educated like any king’s son.

How do we explain the contrast in the things Moses wrote?

In Leviticus 17:11-14 he writes of life being in the blood. In verse 14 he speaks of the danger of eating blood. The diagnosis of leprosy is explained in Leviticus 3. Leviticus 13-15 talks about the principles of quarantine. According the Leviticus 11 some animals carry diseases and should be quarantined. Leviticus 15:19-33 speaks of bacterial contamination and how to avoid it.

These are just a few examples of medical knowledge found in the writings of Moses. Did Moses learn these things in his Egyptian Education? How did he know these things? How did any Egyptian know these things?

By observation.

the answer is because moses is a fictional character and leviticus was written by unknown jewish preists around 400 BC.

He just said that Egypt's teachings were different.

Yea..because 2400 years ago they had such a better grasp of sanitation laws...

I wonde if you realize that you are making the case for the bible to be incredible by your accidentil admission that Leviticus was written so long ago?

Nah, I dobt it.

Besides, I'm sure every serious scholars knows you to be right, so I guess I lose again.

But only about every aspect of dietary, medical and santitation practises.

Let's not get nit picky here brvheart

I am sorry I really don't understand what you guys are getting at.

The fact that these things were written so long ago is evidence of the state of medical knowledge at the time. It was no doubt a pretty shoddy science, which got some things wrong and some things right. Different cultures had different knowledge that sometimes agreed and sometimes didn't.

What's the issue here?

they did have 1000 years experience on the egyptians you're comparing them to. if you can show that contemporary greek
civilation didn't know any of the laws of sanitation and health in leviticus i would be more impressed.



doesn't matter. my point was your questions are only hard to answer if you assume the OT is historically accuracte. to someone who doesn't
start with that assumption they are easy to answer.

I completely agree. Trying to state that sanitation ideas somehow gives credence to the bible being the word of god is beyond ludicrous. But so is a virgin birth, a resurrection, demon possession, etc., so I'm not exactly surprised. When all you have are straws to grasp at, it doesn't leave much else.

also i'm pretty sure leviticus doesn't mention bacteria

You're right. It just mentions how to not get sick from said bacteria.

So a large group of people are living in a society that says if you have a cut, you should rub donkey dung mixed with straw on it. This cure was standard, practised for centuries, and taught as correct, by the most advanced civilization of it's time.

They leave this society suddenly, and are given a new set of rules to live by, rules that are completely new, have no equal in any other society of the time.

Thousands of years later we find these rules they were given were extremely accurate for the best way to live in those conditions. And in fact they are near flawless. These rules were introduced all at once, all together, and all from a source that claimed to have superior knowledge. No gradual introduction through trial and error.


And you want to say big deal, they probably figured out that running water on a wound was better than animal feces.



I guess there is no issue.