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[quote=Wardendresden;36337430]Except for Matthew's generation to work, he had to skip several generations. It's as easy as checking Wikipedia. Whether Matthew did it deliberately to "skip" some intervening ancestors thought to be unworthy or whether he did it to make the numerology work makes no difference. It means as a history book the Bible is bogus. It's as easy as comparing the generations given by Matthew and those found in the OT.
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And this is what is popular with fundamentalists--conflating three gospel accounts of the crucifixion (or any other topic in the gospels) to create a new one that is nowhere written down. For God to have spent time "breathing" the words into the authors' ears, one would think He would do a better job than to leave it up to future generations to determine what order Jesus spoke from the cross.
Or maybe, it was simply gospel authors, telling the stories as they heard them. Surely John, the last gospel, had Matthew and Luke available so that he could write a comprehensive story---but he didn't--because his purpose was different than the other two.
This is why Christianity as we know it today will topple in the next 50 years at the rate people are dropping out of it.
People today are so much better educated than 100 years ago and with the Internet at their fingertips they can check these details out for themselves in a matter of seconds.
What emerges is a religion that is basically on life support. You have the old guard 40 and older who are conservatives and they are so busy running around putting out all these dogmatic fires they are like the little Dutch boy trying to plug a thousand holes in the dyke with only ten fingers and ten toes.
Once the old guard has died off and nobody from the younger generation comes in to replace them traditional Christianity will go down like a house of cards. Hopefully something that teaches the love of Jesus without all the hellfire and brimstone will emerge in its place.
Except for Matthew's generation to work, he had to skip several generations. It's as easy as checking Wikipedia. Whether Matthew did it deliberately to "skip" some intervening ancestors thought to be unworthy or whether he did it to make the numerology work makes no difference. It means as a history book the Bible is bogus. It's as easy as comparing the generations given by Matthew and those found in the OT.
Wikipedia
This is why Christianity as we know it today will topple in the next 50 years at the rate people are dropping out of it.
People today are so much better educated than 100 years ago and with the Internet at their fingertips they can check these details out for themselves in a matter of seconds.
What emerges is a religion that is basically on life support. You have the old guard 40 and older who are conservatives and they are so busy running around putting out all these dogmatic fires they are like the little Dutch boy trying to plug a thousand holes in the dyke with only ten fingers and ten toes.
Once the old guard has died off and nobody from the younger generation comes in to replace them traditional Christianity will go down like a house of cards. Hopefully something that teaches the love of Jesus without all the hellfire and brimstone will emerge in its place.
You are looking at Christianity "toppling." I see it as being cleansed. The ones who remain will be much more pure of heart and more inclined to put the actions of Jesus into practice, rather than memorize the words of the book which has recorded those actions.
You are looking at Christianity "toppling." I see it as being cleansed. The ones who remain will be much more pure of heart and more inclined to put the actions of Jesus into practice, rather than memorize the words of the book which has recorded those actions.
I see a cleansing as well. People returning to a faith that focuses on the outward expression of the teachings of Jesus, not on worshipping a book. In my view, let them go - they aren't Christians anyway.
Except the earlier documents available don't have Luke 23:46, indicating the strong likelihood of Tatian CREATING the verbiage--because later documents have the logion. That was what the whole paper was about. Did you not read it? Oh, of course not, because you wish to maintain a Sunday School view of the gospels rather than LEARN from scholars much wiser than anyone on these threads.
Again, it is not Luke 23:46 that is in question. It is Luke 23:34. You are dogmatically claiming that Jesus did not say, ''Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.''
And again, scholars have differing opinions about whether Luke 23:34 is an original saying of Jesus as has been pointed out in my quoting the Expositor's Bible Commentary.
And you simply cannot post without making accusatory comments.
Therein lies the problem with what I would call Bible worship. Belief in the Bible is not necessary for salvation. The Bible itself saves nobody. The Bible points us to God and Christ, through which salvation comes.
"The Word of God" is a highly misunderstood phrase among those that study the Bible. It seems that many Christians can know and understand deeper implications of any passage of scripture, study the Greek or Hebrew, study the cultural context, etc. But for some reason, "Word of God" gets applied to a library of books that would not exist until hundreds (if not thousands) of years after the passage in question is written -- then quite stubbornly hold that a passage referencing the "word of God" is a direct reference to the compiled 66 canonical books of the Bible.
"The Word of God" has definite reference to Christ. It also has definite reference to ongoing revelation -- something that every writer in the Bible was receiving. They all expected continual revelation from God to continue. The phrase "word of God" directly references this revelation.
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He only believes the part about God giving His spirit, that of course not being the words of ignorant barbarians; he claims that spirit and becomes .... well smarter than the Bible writers. Oops that can also mean that the words about receiving God's spirit are ........ not true either.
Yep changes whatever he doesn't like to what he believes/says is true.
The writers of the Bible were plenty smart. The mere ink and paper they left behind cannot fully convey the power of the Spirit they wielded, and the infinite wisdom available therefrom. They received answers specific to their own times. We have a finite number of questions and answers in the Bible. Their words remain relevant because humanity tends to make the same mistakes throughout the ages. But the real point is where their answers came from. They were the revealed will of God at the time.
With hundreds of thousands of manuscript discrepancies and numerous contradictions between parallel accounts of the same events, we are left to hope that modern day experts are guessing correctly. Do we have the correct wording in every case or were some mistakes carried over into our current Bibles? That is reality. You have to accept the Bible for what it is: A less than perfect record of God's dealings with ancient people. It gives us a tremendous amount of insight into the will of God. It tells us to see after him. It tells us what Christ did for us. But when we ascribe absolute perfection and spiritual purity to paper and ink, we are going to get a lot of things wrong.
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Jesus spoke of the men in his day who did that. They made the word of God invalid by .... their own thoughts and eventually they believed their thoughts were equal to Scripture so.... such people have lots of company today, according to what Jesus said about the pharisees.
You are quite correct, but not in the way that you're thinking. In the days of Christ, there were certain Jews who were called "scribes". They were experts at studying scripture and interpreting it's meaning for others. By the time Christ was born, these scribes were highly respected. The Jews looked to them to tell them what the already ancient scriptures had to tell them about problems in their own day. They were the ultimate authority on knowing the will of God in their day. They even took the very audacious title of "Master" aka "Rabbi" upon themselves. Pharisees were just one class of these scribes.
Those Rabbis would say, "It is written" as a preface to imparting their wisdom to their fellow Jews, a practice that continues down to modern times. They were offended by Jesus who said, "Thus saith the Lord" or "here is what God says right now." The Jews had mistakenly come to the conclusion that further revelation directly from God was a thing of the past. They believed that the accumulated written scripture was all the wisdom from God they could ever have. Their flawed conclusions effectively slammed the door on any further divine revelation, and that is how they offended God.
Ironic how Christianity would eventually made exactly the same mistake.
You are looking at Christianity "toppling." I see it as being cleansed. The ones who remain will be much more pure of heart and more inclined to put the actions of Jesus into practice, rather than memorize the words of the book which has recorded those actions.
That's actually what I was trying to imply. I may have worded it strongly but that was to give newbies a more graphic image of the crisis (and it IS a major crisis) facing Christianity today. The "toppling" was meant to suggest a "cleansing" of all the Medieval doctrine that corrupt churchmen have constructed around Christianity for 2000 years simply to further their own ends rather than Christ's.
Once the old guard has been swept away and is dust, and the few young Christians that remain are relieved of the shackles of conservative apologetics, they can begin to rebuild Christianity in its more humble, honest form. But that cannot happen until this business of apologetics constantly having to confront people like you and me who simply bring the truth to light comes to an end. You can see them battling us with smoke and mirrors and obfuscation to prop up their version of Christianity. This will gradually go away with the passage of time.
Again, it is not Luke 23:46 that is in question. It is Luke 23:34. You are dogmatically claiming that Jesus did not say, ''Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.''
And again, scholars have differing opinions about whether Luke 23:34 is an original saying of Jesus as has been pointed out in my quoting the Expositor's Bible Commentary.
And you simply cannot post without making accusatory comments.
No I'm not talking about Luke 23:34. I'm talking about what the scholars wrote were "the common modern homiletical order of the sayings is (1) Luke 23.34a, (2) Luke 23.43, (3) John 19.26-27, (4) Mark 15.34/Matt 27:46, (5) John 19:28, (6) John 19.30, and (7) Luke 23.46a"
They aren't even taking issue with the final part of Luke 23:46--"and having said this He breathed His last." They maintain THAT was in earlier manuscripts. So either Tatian thought it strange that the verse before had no saying by Jesus, or did not understand that it may have been referencing Jesus' words to the criminal "today you will be with me in paradise" a couple of verses earlier, OR as, they postulate a SEVENTH saying from the cross (Tatian would then have to be aware of the other sayings in the scriptures) was a fundamental (no pun intended--on second thought, maybe) need for early Christians.
The final statement in Luke 23:46 appears in no early documents PRIOR to Tatian's writing. It shows up in those AFTER.
The point being that an early church leader CREATED a SEVENTH statement so that it would be seen as early Christians were beginning to view all scripture as multiples of SEVEN. Just like Matthew who had to drop names from the OT genealogy to CREATE multiples of 14, and then screwed up on the last set and only listed THIRTEEN.
That's what happens when you fail to read links, look at the authors' credentials and even read the sometimes opposing views (which I might add they very well squashed).
I don't have a problem that early Christians wanted to see the events of their time in "sevens." I have a problem with latter day Christians who want to cry "Holy, holy, holy" with regard to some events which are obviously FABRICATED for spiritual palatability.
If you're 60 or older you were just a kid when Kennedy was shot.
Now try to imagine you're here in 2014 and someone says to you "We want you to write a biography of Kennedy", but there is no Internet, no libraries, no archives, no newspapers, absolutely nothing in print in order to draw upon for your sources. All you've got scattered around the USA are people in their 80's 90's who remember Kennedy as President. How do you begin?
You'll probably start asking around Hyannis Port and Boston to see if you can find anyone who remembers anything he said or did and how he was killed. Far as the "killed" thing goes, some will tell you the CIA did it, others will you the mob under Sam Giancana did it, still others will tell you Fidel Castro had it arranged in retribution for the Bay of Pigs, and others yet will tell you a lone gunman by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald did it. Then someone will jump in and say, "No, No, it was a guy named Jack Ruby. He shot Kennedy." Whereupon another person will say, "No, you confused. Oswald shot Kennedy; Ruby shot Oswald." Another will say, "No it's just the opposite." And back and forth they bicker while you walk away shaking your head. This is going to be tougher than you thought.
You try to get people to remember some brilliant things Kennedy said during his presidency, but most people shrug and say they can't recall anything specific, it was a long time ago. A few remember he said something about "Don't ask what your country can do." That doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense to you. You jot it down anyway just to ponder later.
Your first day and all you've got is a phrase and a lot of conflicting accounts of who killed Kennedy.
Not very promising. You decide you're going to have to fudge a lot of this in order to complete this assignment.
That's what Mark was faced with when he tried to write his gospel. And Kennedy was more famous than Jesus, given comparisons.
And forget about the Holy Spirit singing the gospel into Mark's ear while he sat there pondering. This is reality.
Thankfully, the Holy Spirit WAS inspiring them to write it. Nevermind the fact that the apostles had been preaching sermons about Jesus, retelling these stories all that time.
They compliment each other as has already been shown with the comparison of the recorded words of Jesus on the cross.
Of course each of the four gospels are different in certain aspects. Each gospel writer emphasized a different aspect of Jesus.
Matthew presented Jesus as King.
Mark presented Jesus as a servant.
Luke presented Jesus as the Son of Man.
John presented Jesus as the Son of God.
All of these are true of Jesus and so the four gospel accounts complement each other.
It is plain as day that these are just man-made caricatures to try to explain away the gaping discrepancies in the gospel accounts.
Picture a group of theologians "in the know" about the problem of the discrepancies in the gospel accounts sitting around a table:
"What do we do when people ask us why there are so many differences in the gospel accounts?"
"Simple. We say that one is designed to present him as "King of the Jews". Another is written to show his man nature. We can label Mark as Jesus being a suffering servant and John will portray Jesus as God from the beginning of eternity."
"But what about all these different accounts of his last words?"
"Simple again. We just combine them in logical order. Fortunately we have six. All we have to do is add one more and we have seven. We play the 'seven last words of Christ' as some kind of holy fulfillment of the number "seven" being perfection--the perfection of God."
Don't you find it intriguing that Jesus's last words total "7"??
It is plain as day that these are just man-made caricatures to try to explain away the gaping discrepancies in the gospel accounts.
Picture a group of theologians "in the know" about the problem of the discrepancies in the gospel accounts sitting around a table:
"What do we do when people ask us why there are so many differences in the gospel accounts?"
"Simple. We say that one is designed to present him as "King of the Jews". Another is written to show his man nature. We can label Mark as Jesus being a suffering servant and John will portray Jesus as God from the beginning of eternity."
"But what about all these different accounts of his last words?"
"Simple again. We just combine them in logical order. Fortunately we have six. All we have to do is add one more and we have seven. We play the 'seven last words of Christ' as some kind of holy fulfillment of the number "seven" being perfection--the perfection of God."
Don't you find it intriguing that Jesus's last words total "7"??
Plain ol' Bible numerology.
What's funny is that we'd be seeing guys like you complaining that they were TOO MUCH alike if they were more similar. As if they had copied off of each other. What it really comes down to is that some people will simply not allow themselves to believe.
So....we get endless nonsensical threads attacking Christianity on a Christianity message board.
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