The accuracy of the Bible

[Tarek Morgen]

uhm the answer "god created it that way" doent really work, since at the point of the flood the whole human population is reduced to the few survivors on the ark, that means that within 1000-2000 years all the different ethics we know have appeared, and all of them must be descented from noahs bands. Except god created new men right after the flood repopulate the earth.

[HistoricalDavid]

uhm the answer "god created it that way" doent really work, since at the point of the flood the whole human population is reduced to the few survivors on the ark, that means that within 1000-2000 years all the different ethics we know have appeared, and all of them must be descented from noahs bands.

Status: still drunk

"God created it that way" is a catch-alll work-all term, due to the dude's omnipotence. It's so effortless; the intellectual slog involved in the Big Bang is instantly counterable by the simple deductive assertion, "God did it".

[Tarek Morgen]

but that is...cheating...

[HistoricalDavid]

but that is...cheating...

w

Status: still drunk

Yeah, no sh-t. That's why God is, for all his supposed perfection, such a malleable and powerful force in the world today: nobody knows for sure what He says, and claiming Him gives you instant-cooked and logically unchallengeable (due to the nature of faith) authority, as Osama and to a lesser extent George know,


by the time I had finished that sentence, I had forgotten what I was talking about

[JAD_333]

I have skipped loads of stuff. However i thought i would jump in as people who have read my rambling over the years know i am keen to do.

If we are on the subject of accuracy, that pre-supposes that we are taking the Bible literally. So if we are to use it for the details of events and timings we can't allow the interpretation of "it's a metaphor in". Personally I am much more open to discussions about the metaphorical, algorical teaching nature of the bible.

However, for accuracy. We are told that a man lived in a desert and was given some inside information from God, to whit he commenced building a large boat. Very, very large boat. Not only that but he travelled thousands of miles (off the edges of the known world at that time) to collect two of every animal. As you can imagine the man laboured hard to fit this in one lifetime.

He managed, for example, to travel all the way from middle eastern desert to frozen pole to retrieve two white bears and managed to get said creatures back unharmed to the desert. Not only that but he managed to put them on the boat and stop them from eating the other animals (unless of course he, say, took dozens of sheep for the carnivores but kept two lucky ones aside).

This man who achieved in a short time what several men failed to achieve over the coming millenia : he crossed seas people did not know where there, survived extremes of temperatures that killed better prepared men, tamed the wildest animals for example and had advanced ship building skills.

And yet he was a failure. He forgot one of the favourite animals of the bible, he forgot the bloody unicorn.

lol...

If we take the story of Noah literally, we belong in a nuthouse. It's an impossible story. I took that to be your point. The allegorical part that you would prefer to delve into is fairly well documented in the Bible.

The story, as you know, is an allegory meant to convey some sort of knowledge, as is the case with many biblical stories. We westerners in the 21st century tend to overlook the fact that allegories and parables were the principal mode of communicating higher ideas in biblical times.

In the usual telling of the story a key part is omitted. Noah received not one but two commands: One was from God and another from an authority called the "Lord". The Lord told him "to take clean beasts and fowls by SEVENS, unclean by two, male and female; with the expectation of sacrificing the clean beasts and fowls afterward." (Gen 8). But God tells him something different: "to collect two of every sort, male and female", but does not distinguish between clean and unclean nor mention any sacrifice.

This contradiction is the basis of the allegory. As it was explained to me, the story was designed to convey a couple of ideas to people. The first was that there are two levels of commands or laws affecting man: God's commands and the Lord's commands. In God's commands we see an impersonal god without favorites (man or beast, male or female) and one not commanding sacrificial offerings.

Another idea, which I don't see in the allegory, but others apparently do, is that God's commands come in the form of "grace", and it's a mystery how that works, while the Lord's commands are in written form. It gets a little clearer if we see Noah as representing the man who follows the commands of both God and Lord. That could mean it's wisest to follow the commands of both for the sake of "survival". Perhaps this is an earlier version of the "render unto Caesar..." advice Jesus gave to people conflicted about whether to serve God or the government.

You can check out Genesis 8 for the differing commands and Galatians 4 for the mention of allegory. Romans 15:4 states it was "written aforetime for our learning".

[Arnold123]

I guess that after reading all of this all I can say is the same as a well known tennis player 'Yeh can't be serious!'. Best place for you to start at is the tower of Babel.

[Callmecur]

There is only one answer to "How accurate is the Bible?" and that is no-one knows because no-one alive now was alive when the great story book was written. We can all have our views and theories but in reality, we will never know.

[Triple C]

As an athiest I find the idea that Jesus did not die on the cross a tad far-fetched, since it is very un-Roman to let a percieved trouble maker sentenced to cruicifixion to live; the procedure is almost always deadly even if the victim was rescued. Besides that contemporaries of Jesus such as Peter were adamant that Jesus died and was reserected. As a rationalist I strongly doubted the later, but it is unlikely that the event of the Passion and the Death of Jesus Christ, so central to Christian theology from its infancy, is a conspiracy to cover up the survival of its leader. After all the apocraphal Book of Judas went so far as to say that Jesus not only anticipated his death by the Romans but indeed caused it to happen by ordering Judas to give him up. Not that I believe in this theory, but in terms of the death of Jesus there seems to be very compelling evidence in and out of the Bible to support the truthfulness of that claim.

True, little sects that differed from the orthodoxy existed, but sayings of of apostles, and those who were instructed by the apostals, should have greater evidentiary weight than those who were not. It is not very likely that such a consiprasy could be so successful, and it is unlikely that Apostals like Peter, a simple honest fisherman, would be so deceptive as to spend the rest of his life preaching what he knows to be a lie. This presumes a level of malignace and dishonesty that is not plausible for someone who clearly enjoyed moral authority within his congregation and wrote so movingly of his spiritual journenies. As a matter heuristics and historical method, the account of those who has witnessed an event should enjoy our confidence to a greater extend, unless it can be conclusively proven otherwise.

If we disbelieve the authenticity of primary documents, history in its most basic form, record-keeping, is impossible; such comprehensive skepticism would render all knowledge vain. Compounding that, the early Church leaders, such as Peter and Paul, would be by any standards applied some of the most spiritual and philosophical people of the age, and that they seem to enjoy what seems to be justly learned moral authority.

Nor do I, mind you, consider the Bible to be absolutely right, eternal, divinely incorruptable. The Bible as we know it is a collection of secondary texts that was not codified in its form and content until 125 AD, and went through a process of translations between three languages (aramaic, greek, latin) endured 2 millenia of corruption. Erasmus had found the Greek bible to differ from the Vulgate in significant ways and went so far as to suggest the Jerome might have erred in his Greek translation due to an unfamiliarity with the lange. He also found several passages essential to the doctrine of intercession and good works to be either wholey absent in the Greek version, or is based on an incorrect translation of key words.Martin Luther struck down James as non-canon apocraphal on philological issues of dating and usage of phrases, and many theologica points advnaced by James contradicted to the "main-stream" apostles such as Paul and Peter's in the same era. Clearly as a text the Bible must have went through a lot of changes through time, and any appeal to the 'right' and 'pure' kind of scripture is going to be contentious issues.

[Triple C]

The OT is far more difficult since we do not know enough of the Hebrews during the braonze age in OT. Noah's flood may very well be an offshoot of Mesopotamian mythologies in which world-destroying floods, divine intervention and survival of some humanity and creature due to God's favor is a common theme.

[Trooth]

The Bible can be used to "see if it is mentioned" as a sort of historical corroberation. After all, as per Noah's Ark, so many cultures or myths of a great flood exist (such as Atlantis) that it was clearly a powerful image for the times. However we have to accept that the world was much smaller "back then" in terms of known expanse so a big flood could easily be thought to have flooded the "world as they knew it". Of course we are dealing with an monotheism with an omnipotent God so marketing and exaggeration are also a factor.

Consequently you have to take it as metaphor and alegory and thus you have to accept that everything is open to interpretation and thus flawed as some sort of "life guide". You can't go around using it is as proof of world history because of the nature of it's assembly. The Bible is a "collected works" of third party writings and has gone through many, numerous and grievous editing and translations all of which have carried some sort of overt or hidden agenda.

This is where the current arguments are breaking down. Certain arms of Christianity feel threatened because they have chosen (they chose remember) to take the Bible literally and yet parts of it are patent bunk - the Earth is not flat nor immobile for example. The fact that some scholar chose to deduce the age of the Earth from the Bible (remember it doesn't say on page one that "In the beginning which was about 6000 years ago, at roughly 2pm on a Sunday lunchtime") was up to him and it is up to those that follow him. Creationists refer to, for example, evolution as the "theory of evolution" - quite correctly as it happens - but they also need to refer to creationism as "The theory of assumptive deduction of creationism" but of course they don't.

The other part of this debate i mentioned earlier about adding mist to smoke is that because some people have chosen to take the Bible literally and declare it not a collected works of stories but an Encyclopedia of world history, then it has become EDIT: self: -proving.

Let's take a religious style argument and apply it to a Dictionary and the spelling of the word Metre (SI unit of distance).

I spell it metre, no doubt my American friends on this board will spell it meter.

To back up my spelling i will look in my dictionary and it confirms it - metre. My American friends might do the same and they assert meter.

At this point i might take a rational argument, look up the derivation of the word, it's history, that it is French and "re" is a typical French construct and "er" is not, gather together a load of evidence to present to my friends. My opposition, we shall say, has taken the Biblical
"proof" and thus searched further through their dictionary to find that centimeter, millimeter, kilometer are all spelled "er" and therefore this "proves" that "er" is the correct spelling!

[Cromwell]

The sooner the non-theist accepts the proposition that science and religion are mutually exclusive and utterly un-reconcilable, and that the ability to believe in an intangible supernatural father creator being is an evolutionary coping mechanism designed to provide a psychological buffer against the fact that man is simply incapable at this stage of his intellectual development to even marginally comprehend the mysteries of the universe and life itself - the sooner those of us who have been fortunate enough to have evolved beyond the need for such comforting and rationalising devices as Gods and good books can move on from the debate.

My position on religion: I will always respect someones right to believe as long as they, in turn, respect my right not to... in equal measure.

I do however support the Christian Community, as Christianity is an important and inseparable component of my European heritage. Maybe it would be of some benefit if more of us non-theists at least went through the motions of identifying with our Christian roots. Especially in these dark times when the very future of the Occident is in doubt.

As for the accuracy of the Bible? One would indeed need to rely on pure faith when considering much of the content of this sacred volume -particularly Genesis. For a scientist it is largely dismissable.


-C.

[Trooth]

The sooner the non-theist accepts the proposition that science and religion are mutually exclusive and utterly un-reconcilable, and that the ability to believe in an intangible supernatural father creator being is an evolutionary coping mechanism designed to provide a psychological buffer against the fact that man is simply incapable at this stage of his intellectual development to even marginally comprehend the mysteries of the universe and life itself - the sooner those of us who have been fortunate enough to have evolved beyond the need for such comforting and rationalising devices as Gods and good books can move on from the debate.

The problem with the argument that "People believe in the Flying Spaghetti monster and similar deities until something better comes along" is that nothing better will come along if people are persecuted for trying to learn and understand.

I do however support the Christian Community, as Christianity is an important and inseparable component of my European heritage. Maybe it would be of some benefit if more of us non-theists at least went through the motions of identifying with our Christian roots. Especially in these dark times when the very future of the Occident is in doubt.

A rational person in support of a religious war?

[HistoricalDavid]

I do however support the Christian Community, as Christianity is an important and inseparable component of my European heritage. Maybe it would be of some benefit if more of us non-theists at least went through the motions of identifying with our Christian roots. Especially in these dark times when the very future of the Occident is in doubt.

Obviously I agree with the rest of your post, but for this. Christianity does indeed underpin much of the West - but not necessarily in a positive sense.

The West's current technological and scientific superiority, for example, would not have been possible without the scientific revolution. Yes, some of the men of it, principally Francis Bacon, Kepler, Galileo and so on were religious men - but even they admitted that while morality derived from God's book, the Bible, descriptive knowledge must come from God's other book - that of Nature. They said that descriptive knowledge cannot be sought by deduction from the Bible, but by rational and empirical induction from natural observation.

Yes, they praised God while doing their various works, thanking Him for the beauty of such laws as Kepler's. However, they irreversibly prepared the noose for their own beliefs by completely excising religion from the actual meat of the scientific method.

I do want to know which things you consider Christianity to have bequeathed the West - the last time I heard someone do that on an online forum, I literally rebutted every single example - and how they compensate for the burdens.

Our hand in the much-purported West-Islam conflict will not be strengthened by Christianity - not only did the West achieve its greatest strengths AFTER the Enlightenment and due to secular factors, consider this. I'm sure some idiots advocate Christianity as a means to survival against Islam. That would be selling our liberal, rational soul to the Devil, and thus we will fail to survive through our own hung noose, not Islam's.

A rational person in support of a religious war?

That's possible due to rationally good side-effects of the war, though I admit war seems to be short on those.

Status: hungover

[glyn]

[QUOTE=Triple C;410701]As an athiest I find the idea that Jesus did not die on the cross a tad far-fetched, since it is very un-Roman to let a percieved trouble maker sentenced to cruicifixion to live; the procedure is almost always deadly even if the victim was rescued.

The Romans were not that bothered one way or the other. The Sanhedrin had summoned Pilate to judge the matter as only he could award the death penalty. (The Sanhedrin could not). What the bible says of the affair is confusing. Take the crowds calling for Barabas. In Hebrew this is taken to mean bar abbas 'son of the father' - so who were the crowds calling for? And are we sure there were crowds at the trial in the first place? The statement that Pilate washed his hands (of the matter) has passed into lore, but for the Sanhedrin to Admit a gentile to the temple (such as the Procurator) meant they had in effect to create him a temporary jew! Pilate did not have to lose the 'end of his very best friend' to achieve this, but merely a symbolic immersion in water, in the form of publicly washing his hands BEFORE the trial started.

Besides that contemporaries of Jesus such as Peter were adamant that Jesus died and was reserected. As a rationalist I strongly doubted the later, but it is unlikely that the event of the Passion and the Death of Jesus Christ, so central to Christian theology from its infancy, is a conspiracy to cover up the survival of its leader. After all the apocraphal Book of Judas went so far as to say that Jesus not only anticipated his death by the Romans but indeed caused it to happen by ordering Judas to give him up. Not that I believe in this theory, but in terms of the death of Jesus there seems to be very compelling evidence in and out of the Bible to support the truthfulness of that claim.

True, little sects that differed from the orthodoxy existed, but sayings of of apostles, and those who were instructed by the apostals, should have greater evidentiary weight than those who were not. It is not very likely that such a consiprasy could be so successful, and it is unlikely that Apostals like Peter, a simple honest fisherman,

Peter was in the team before Jesus joined. He was no fisherman. It is an allegorical reference to recruiting converts for the organisation set up by Herod the Great. Jesus joined replacing his father when he was old enough to do so.

would be so deceptive as to spend the rest of his life preaching what he knows to be a lie. This presumes a level of malignace and dishonesty that is not plausible for someone who clearly enjoyed moral authority within his congregation and wrote so movingly of his spiritual journenies. As a matter heuristics and historical method, the account of those who has witnessed an event should enjoy our confidence to a greater extend, unless it can be conclusively proven otherwise.

If we disbelieve the authenticity of primary documents, history in its most basic form, record-keeping, is impossible; such comprehensive skepticism would render all knowledge vain. Compounding that, the early Church leaders, such as Peter and Paul, would be by any standards applied some of the most spiritual and philosophical people of the age, and that they seem to enjoy what seems to be justly learned moral authority.

Nor do I, mind you, consider the Bible to be absolutely right, eternal, divinely incorruptable. The Bible as we know it is a collection of secondary texts that was not codified in its form and content until 125 AD, and went through a process of translations between three languages (aramaic, greek, latin) endured 2 millenia of corruption.

The bilical texts were written during Jesus's lifetime. The codification came with Constantine at Nicea in 325.

[JAD_333]

The Romans were not that bothered one way or the other. The Sanhedrin had summoned Pilate to judge the matter as only he could award the death penalty. (The Sanhedrin could not). What the bible says of the affair is confusing. Take the crowds calling for Barabas. In Hebrew this is taken to mean bar abbas 'son of the father' - so who were the crowds calling for? And are we sure there were crowds at the trial in the first place? The statement that Pilate washed his hands (of the matter) has passed into lore, but for the Sanhedrin to Admit a gentile to the temple (such as the Procurator) meant they had in effect to create him a temporary jew! Pilate did not have to lose the 'end of his very best friend' to achieve this, but merely a symbolic immersion in water, in the form of publicly washing his hands BEFORE the trial started.

You are correct that only the Roman administration could approve a sentence of death, but I don't agree that the NT is unclear about how Pilate was manoevred into it by the ever-clever Caiphus, the chief priest at the time, or what happened at the judgement. Pilate's wife was uneasy about sentencing Jesus to death and told him so. Rather than stand firm and deny the chief priest's petition, Pilate tried to finesse his way out of it by offering the crowd a choice between a notorius criminal and Jesus. To ensure things went his way, Caiphus seeded the crowd with toughs who intimidated people into yelling out Jesus' name, much to Pilate's surprise.

As for Pilate washing his hands afterwards, he wanted no trouble from Jesus' followers so absolved himself of all blame. It's doubtful the washing of the hands was ritual cleansing. The Sanhedin agents would have gone to Pilate's HQ as protocol demanded, not Pilate to the temple as you theorize.

If one accepts, as I do, that Jesus was prepared to die to ensure the longevity of his message, he had the burden of proving he was a messiah. This could only be done by systematically fulfilling all the prophecies contained in the Bible regarding what would befall a messiah. The major prophesy was death at the hands of the people.

Jesus understood that his death must be officially recorded. To ensure this, it had to be carried out by a third party that kept records. This is was where the Romans came in. Had the Sanhedrin been allowed to execute him, they would likely have covered it up and not played along with Judas.

Judas, of course, knew exactly what he had to do and played his part perfectly. And when he went to turn Jesus in, the chief priest knew full well that unless he played his part in the prophecies, Judas would not lead him to Jesus. So he paid the 30 pieces of silver and later, when Judas recanted refused to take back the silver and instead bought a potter's field with them. So sure was Caiphus that Jesus was a false messiah that he felt it was safe to go this far.

Caiphus' real fear was the resurrection prophesy and he believed Jesus' followers would steal his body from the tomb. So, after Jesus' burial he sent guards to watch the tomb day and night. Thereafter, events become harder to understand. Did Jesus rise from the dead? Was he even dead to start with? The only evidence we have that he did rise from the dead is circumstantial, and it relies on the subsequent actions of the apostles for years afterwards. The question is, would these men who were taught that Jesus would rise after 3 days have gone out and laid the foundation for a great religion had Jesus NOT risen? Judging only for myself, if I followed a man like Jesus and something he predicted did not happen, I would go back to the farm and that would be that. Something powerful happened to the remaining 11 apostles 3 days after Jesus' death. What was it?

Peter was in the team before Jesus joined. He was no fisherman. It is an allegorical reference to recruiting converts for the organisation set up by Herod the Great. Jesus joined replacing his father when he was old enough to do so.

Perhaps, but if true what does that change?

The bilical texts were written during Jesus's lifetime. The codification came with Constantine at Nicea in 325. [/QUOTE]

It seems everytime you state this proposition that there is a negative connotation to it. Perhaps I am assuming what you mean. IMO, the people who worked in later years to consolidate the various texts had in mind preventing their adulteration and ensuring their endurance. Afterall, they knew perfectly well that the story of Jesus was the church's most compelling reason for being, and they weren't about to mess with it. What they probably feared were the many contradictory texts beginning to circulate. Every religious movement attracts independent contractors, so to speak, who aim to "cash" in on the original. Unless an authoritative body assembles all the authentic material and puts it seal of approval on it, people will not know which is which.