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Why? If they believe the things you think are necessary for salvation, why are you so concerned that they believe the bible is literally true in every other aspect? Why would you even put the term "Christian" in quotes like that, as if they aren't really Christians? Do you think it's faith in the inerrancy of the bible that makes people Christians and saves them?
If you mean me, I don't claim to be a Christian, so no worries on my part.
Was not referring to you on the claim.
As far as the Bible being true, the crowning miracle is the resurrection of Christ. It is THE basis on which Christianity stands both today and in the future. It is imperative that this event really happened - and that believers have faith (not evidential proof) that it took place. So some in this thread have trouble with the Red Sea. To me, if you are having trouble believing that - how can you believe that the resurrection took place? And if you don't believe the resurrection actually occurred - you are not a Christian and Christ is not in you (or whomever).
Christian in quotes? - People who claim to be a Christian. I claim to be Christian. Arequipa claims to be a Christian. Does the faith match the claim? For me - yes. For Arequipa - no.
Faith in inerrancy? - It's faith in God that is responsible for the content. God is responsible for the content in the Bible. God is the One who put the plan in place for Christ to die for our sins. It's NOT the book. It's the God behind the book in which I put my faith.
You are going to get different accounts from different people - just like when a news story occurs - you will get an account from Chicago, a different take from Houston, which would be different from San Francisco.
You are stretching the 'Witnesses don't always agree' excuse as far as it will go. I in my turn could have these reporters turn up up in court and see their testimony dismissed as hearsay. So we have gone beyond news-reports in Houston or San Fransico - they are a red herring and an irrelevance - to the supposed eyewitnesses, who one can suppose were in the same place when they saw the same thing.
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Different accounts does not imply it didn't happen - it does mean that it probably DID happen, since they all wrote about it.
Now I can see coming the argument that if they all agreed I would accuse them of collusion. In fact they do agree in the order and wording so much that I do suspect a common provided story. In fact it is provable. It is also provable that they altered this common story - in the Luke example, I even showed why he altered it.
You can also appeal to eyewitness discrepancy, but there comes a stage where it goes beyond credibility. I can just about accept that Luke might have forgotten that Thomas was away, but I cannot credit that he knew nothing about his demanding to investigate Jesus' wounds and being allowed to. In addition to knowing nothing of a spear-thrust, in a court case this would be considered casting damning doubt on his story. And remember, it is just one of many such problems.
The 'Witnesses error' argument will not wash. Not to anyone not determined to believe despite the evidence.
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They wrote about Christ rising from the dead - no one denied that. Paul wrote about it. Peter wrote about it. Give me the biblical author that said it didn't happen.
They did. And I believe I know why. Read Paul and you will see that the risen Messiah he is talking about is a spiritual one. That is why his accounts of Jesus appearing do not match the gospels, though Luke tries to fiddle in the first appearance to Simon - which is another remarkable event that NONE of them describe. That Mark doesn't have a risen solid Jesus suggests that there wasn't one or he would (as one of the earliest gospel accounts) surely have described it. There was an empty tomb and the body gone. That I must accept on evidence. That is all we got. Not even the angelic explanation (which John knows nothing about) is credible.
Thus Paul is not writing about a risen bodily Jesus, but the evangelists are trying to make it one- by inventing three accounts that would get them done for perjury in any court other than one staffed by kangaroos.
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For me, I don't need to comb through the details. I believe in God and His Son - period. Even if it stretches the realm of reality - He doesn't lie. It's not an issue for me.
That is your right. I'm only interesting in how reliable the gospels are - on the evidence. If you want to believe what's in them on Faith, that is up to you.
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But for those who base their belief, or unbelief, on physical evidence - that say they don't believe God parted the Red Sea - but say they are Christians - that seems totally inconsistent because to be a Christian you have to believe Jesus rose from the dead. How do you verify with evidence someone rising from the dead over 2,000 years ago? How do you have evidence of a virgin birth?
Well, you have an uphill task in selling what goes against nature, but of course with miracles, they would But frankly with such contradictions and discrepancies, trying to get them looking even half -ways credible is flogging a dead horse. As you seem to accept in that Faith and never mind the evidence is the way you approach it.
As to those who do have doubts about the more unbelievable stuff but still consider themselves Christians. That I can't speak to. I would be interested to hear from some like that. We already heard from a few on the Creation and flood discussions where they said they could not buy either the Creation or Flood story as it appears in Genesis. They were willing to say they were metaphorical or approximations of what happened or just the best guesses of people who didn't really know.
But to say that about the Jesus story is more tricky. I think it more likely they may try to 'interpret' or 'understand it correctly' in order to make it work. I have seen the efforts to shrug off that John had never heard of the transfiguration as not very important Really?
Or weaving together the disparate accounts to make them work as one. That however, leaves you with difficult choices or including two evidently identical events but claimed as two different ones because they are so different. The Temple cleansing of John vs the Synoptics one is an obvious example. The anointing Bethany -style in Galilee (Luke) is another.
One effort (posted here) at this required extensive re-writing of the resurrection story so as to lift out the Mary and angels account in John from after the Disciples had been to the tomb and shove it in at crack of dawn to make it match the synoptic angels-which it didn't, very well. I don't know whether the effort did more to harm Gospel credibility than to leave it where it was.
I have seen some attempts to make the resurrection story look credible by picking the bits that could be fitted together, having a few double events (a second angel popping out to help the first one to recite the same message to another Mary turning up a bit later than the first) and shrugging off the odd problem (if there was only one angel mentioned, it doesn't mean there was another one there), but the fact is that this requires cherry picking of the story.
I say that, if you look at all of it, the contradictions become so inexplicable to anyone other than those determined to believe it on Faith or willing to try to fiddle it into credibility, that it cannot be regarded as reliable or credible eyewitness testimony. And that the story is there at all can also be explained - it was invented because it had to be.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 03-29-2014 at 10:45 AM..
As far as the Bible being true, the crowning miracle is the resurrection of Christ. It is THE basis on which Christianity stands both today and in the future. It is imperative that this event really happened - and that believers have faith (not evidential proof) that it took place. So some in this thread have trouble with the Red Sea. To me, if you are having trouble believing that - how can you believe that the resurrection took place? And if you don't believe the resurrection actually occurred - you are not a Christian and Christ is not in you (or whomever).
I'm not talking about people who don't believe the resurrection literally took place. So, your whole point is irrelevant to what I asked you... Why are you pushing that people must accept accounts other than the resurrection to be literally true? Are you of the opinion that they must believe those things in order to be saved? If not, why are you so up in arms about it?
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Christian in quotes? - People who claim to be a Christian. I claim to be Christian. Arequipa claims to be a Christian. Does the faith match the claim? For me - yes. For Arequipa - no.
Where did Arequipa claim to be a Christian?
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Faith in inerrancy? - It's faith in God that is responsible for the content. God is responsible for the content in the Bible. God is the One who put the plan in place for Christ to die for our sins. It's NOT the book. It's the God behind the book in which I put my faith.
That's also irrelevant to what I asked you. If someone has faith in God and considers themselves a Christian, then who are you to judge that they are not Christians simply because they don't agree with your view of some of the accounts in the various books of the bible?
Real events have real consequences and ramifications.
For example - if you do not have a real virgin birth, you do not have a sinless Savior, and if you do not have a sinless Savior, then there is no resurrection, no eternal life, no Christianity.
What you guys don't get - it that Christianity is a faith based endeavor. We are not asked to PROVE anything. We are asked to have FAITH in what was written by God through the 40 men that physically wrote the material through their own testimony.
I am pushing this because I am tired of the spirit of unbelief of this board from people who call themselves Christians - but really have no faith that God created the world, or that He does not have the ability to part the Red Sea, or more importantly, He did not raise Christ from the dead. So I want to know where people stand.
Do you believe God raised up Christ from the dead? If yes, then what is the problem with God parting the Red Sea? Both are equally miraculous.
Dear jc,
Who asked you to "have FAITH in what was written by God through the 40 men that physically wrote the material through their own testimony"? I thought God and Yeshua had asked his people to keep his Commandments". (Mt 19:17)
I think Yeshua wrote in Mt 7:24 to heed "his" testimony, and to do to others as you would want them to do unto you, as a summation of the "Law and the Prophets". (Mt 7:12) Per the testimony of one of your 40 men, whomever wrote Luke, he was not a witness to anything, and he didn't receive his information from God, but from various unrevealed sources. This kind of flies in the face of the testimony of Yeshua (Mt 18:16), Scripture (Dt 19:10), and even from the mouth of the self proclaimed prophet Paul (Cor 13:1). Yeshua also wrote to leave the tares among the wheat (Mt 13:30). Can you point out the tares and how you came by your analysis, or does Yeshua provide the measuring stick? (Mt 7:20) Who determined what is Scripture and what is not for you, and when was this determination set? Is it the same as referenced to by Yeshua?
And what defines "Christianity", and who set that standard? Is that the same standard set for those who are sons of God (1 John 3:9), or is it different? What are the "Christian" articles of faith, and by what body determined their prominence?
And since when was heeding the Commandments of God a sin? (Gen 1:27,"..be fruitful and multiply...")
I thought everyone had sussed me. I am indeed a wolf in Sheep's clothing, well, leaning casually againt the sheep-pen gate without much of a disguise.
Yes, I am one of those atheistic atheists who occasionally parachute into Christianity which normally I studiously avoid until something that seems to chuck down a gauntlet requires me to drop in..
Rob, sooner or later you have to wake up and face the facts:
The Exodus as described in the Bible just plain could not have happened because of the sheer logistics of leading two million people across the Sinai and then having them wander around out there for 40 years. Do you have any inkling how much rubbish and debris two million people would leave behind over a 40-year period and yet modern archaeologists have not been able to come up with the slightest shred of evidence that even a small band of a few thousand Hebrews, let alone TWO MILLION were anywhere near the Sinai. Plus the fact that the entire region including Canaan were heavily garrisoned by Egyptian armies so Moses and 2 million Hebrews would have been regularly running into checkpoints all along their journey. Plus the fact there is no Biblical record they ever warred against the Egyptians who owned Canaan as part of their empire, or the Philistines, who we know now because of recent archeological digs occupied a large part of Canaan in the northern part.
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No archeological evidence has been found to support the Book of Exodus[4] and most archaeologists have abandoned the investigation of Moses and the Exodus as "a fruitless pursuit".[5]
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The consensus among biblical scholars today is that there was never any exodus of the proportions described in the Bible.[13]
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wives, children, the elderly, and the "mixed multitude" of non-Israelites would have numbered some 2 million people,[16] compared with an entire Egyptian population in 1250 BCE of around 3 to 3.5 million.[17]
This large a departure of people from Egypt would have crashed the economy of the Egyptian emire the next day, yet records show not only NO departure of such a large number of people from Egypt any any time during this period, but that the Egyptian economy flourished all through this time.
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Marching ten abreast, and without accounting for livestock, they would have formed a line 150 miles long.[18] No evidence has been found that indicates Egypt ever suffered such a demographic and economic catastrophe or that the Sinai desert ever hosted (or could have hosted) these millions of people and their herds.[19]
I could go on and on piling archeological evidence upon evidence that Exodus just plain never happened as it is recorded in the Bible and Fundamentalists would just close their eyes and ears and say, "Yes, it happened exactly as described." I am aware of this salient fact, so I write all this for the lurkers out there who want the truth and not the fictions written by Jewish scribes some thousand years after the time all this is alleged to have taken place.
I thought everyone had sussed me. I am indeed a wolf in Sheep's clothing, well, leaning casually againt the sheep-pen gate without much of a disguise.
Yes, I am one of those atheistic atheists who occasionally parachute into Christianity which normally I studiously avoid until something that seems to chuck down a gauntlet requires me to drop in..
'smack' ....'excuse me, is this yours?'
And he huffed and he puffed and he blew the house down.... Oh wait, wrong story. If you were that big, bad wolf, the good guys in story would be pigs, and sheep don't appreciate being likened to swine. That label is reserved for those of us whom they think are wolves.
....
Faith in inerrancy? - It's faith in God that is responsible for the content. God is responsible for the content in the Bible. God is the One who put the plan in place for Christ to die for our sins. It's NOT the book. It's the God behind the book in which I put my faith.
Where did God promise to provide us with a perfect book?
The LORD your God will raise up for you a bible like this one from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to it.
Good 'un, pcamps.
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But frankly with such contradictions and discrepancies, trying to get them looking even half -ways credible is flogging a dead horse. As you seem to accept in that Faith and never mind the evidence is the way you approach it. 
....'excuse me, is this yours?' 
