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I'd like to see you address my post in this thread, as you must not have read it.
In regards to your comments, one can believe whatever they want in the Bible without having to believe an extra-biblical teaching that God "wrote" the entire Bible using human hands. The two are separate issues that are not linked, for the Bible - as a whole - never claims this Divine Inspiration for itself. How could it? But again - see my post.
OK. I'm willing to throw out 2 Tim if you're willing to believe the other 65 books in the Bible are inspired.
QUESTION:
If it is claimed that God "breathed," authored, or inspired the Bible, how can it contain errors and contradictions unless God made those errors and contradictions?
If it is claimed that God "breathed," authored, or inspired the Bible, how can it contain errors and contradictions unless God made those errors and contradictions?
And just to add to this question:
If the Bible is the Word of God, how was it that priests were able to sit down and discard some books and keep others? When this picking and choosing occurred, the death of Jesus was closer to them in history than the American Revolution is to us right now. The ripples of the Messiah being killed and resurrected should still be rippling throughout civilzation.
It doesn't seem to be, though, since mere humans decided this goes and this stays. Did God randomly insert fake books into the Bible just to see if we would notice them?
Plus, the goat shepherd that found the Dead Sea Scrolls actually burned a bunch of the scrolls as fuel to heat and light his yurt (or whatever he lived in out there). Who knows what was lost? Who knows what sort of massive difference religion might have taken if those scrolls had survived.
For all anyone knows, the Bible was actually a script for a skit on the Bronze Age equivalent of Saturday Night Live - but the part that tells us that it's a script was burned.
John was a guy that actually walked and talked with Jesus. And his vision does not contradict the Bible.
You have been corrected on this multiple times yet persist on sticking your head in the sand and sustaining the pretense that no one has brought this to your attention.
Have you asked your pastor about this as suggested? You are advancing a claim that your religion does not advance, you are advancing a claim that the Biblical scholars have refuted.
You are making a mistake, and then making it over and over again. And you have responded to requests for your evidence by simply repeating the claim.
Ignorance is a correctable condition. Willful ignorance is just a shame.
Have you asked your pastor about this as suggested? You are advancing a claim that your religion does not advance, you are advancing a claim that the Biblical scholars have refuted.
Vizio is a pastor. Like a lot of fundamentalist pastors, he was vetted by some sort of pastoral board of review, who had their own ideas about what constitutes "correct" answers to such questions. They grilled him, he gave the correct answers, and he pretty much passes those concepts of orthodoxy onto his flock.
In my quarter century within fundamentalism, I never heard anyone question that John, the same John who supposedly walked with Jesus, was the one who penned The Revelation on the Isle of Patmos, in his dotage. There is some modern scholarship that disputes this. My guess is that Vizio discounts this totally but has never seriously investigated those arguments, either. It is easier to assume what "everyone" else does. I don't really understand why that matters, since exactly which John authored The Revelation has no bearing that I can see on dogma, doctrine, or textual validation. The book makes no specific claim which John is writing in the first person about himself, IIRC. I suppose it just calls into question the validity of the training he got if they've been choosing to ignore all available evidence / discussion on the authorship question.
The truth is, the authorship of The Revelation is a tempest in a teapot; proving authorship accomplishes nothing one way or the other.
Vizio is a pastor. Like a lot of fundamentalist pastors, he was vetted by some sort of pastoral board of review, who had their own ideas about what constitutes "correct" answers to such questions. They grilled him, he gave the correct answers, and he pretty much passes those concepts of orthodoxy onto his flock.
In my quarter century within fundamentalism, I never heard anyone question that John, the same John who supposedly walked with Jesus, was the one who penned The Revelation on the Isle of Patmos, in his dotage. There is some modern scholarship that disputes this. My guess is that Vizio discounts this totally but has never seriously investigated those arguments, either. It is easier to assume what "everyone" else does. I don't really understand why that matters, since exactly which John authored The Revelation has no bearing that I can see on dogma, doctrine, or textual validation. The book makes no specific claim which John is writing in the first person about himself, IIRC. I suppose it just calls into question the validity of the training he got if they've been choosing to ignore all available evidence / discussion on the authorship question.
The truth is, the authorship of The Revelation is a tempest in a teapot; proving authorship accomplishes nothing one way or the other.
The case for the apostle John being the same John who claimed to have written Revelation is composed entirely of...
"Tradition holds that...."
There is nothing which supports such a claim. The author does not make that claim. The apostle John would have been in his eighties, if still alive, when revelations was written. The apostle John would have been an Aramaic speaker, Revelations was written in Greek.
Beyond...Revelations was written by someone named John...and also, Jesus had an apostle named John....therefore they must be the same person....there is no logical reason to believe that it was the same fellow.
Also, Vizio has been claiming that the gospel of John also was written by the same John.
The case for the apostle John being the same John who claimed to have written Revelation is composed entirely of...
"Tradition holds that...."
There is nothing which supports such a claim. The author does not make that claim. The apostle John would have been in his eighties, if still alive, when revelations was written. The apostle John would have been an Aramaic speaker, Revelations was written in Greek.
Beyond...Revelations was written by someone named John...and also, Jesus had an apostle named John....therefore they must be the same person....there is no logical reason to believe that it was the same fellow.
Also, Vizio has been claiming that the gospel of John also was written by the same John.
I totally agree, it is nothing but tradition and my personal guess is that the author was really Fred of Patmos and he claimed to be "John" because he figured a lot of people down the line would assume it was "that" John, thus lending some slight pseudo-credibility to the book.
But I have no more evidence for Fred than for John and neither does anyone else. It's speculative and not even relevant, truly, to the book's authenticity or validity for anything. It is someone's fevered dream and a rip-roaring yarn to be sure. It is that, no matter who wrote it.
One of the interesting developments in recent years is that with the advent of computers, the concept of people receiving "the mark of the beast" is no longer impressive or compelling. No one needs a visible mark on their forehead to be tracked or controlled or regulated. There are a thousand invisible marks, in the form of inconvenienced electrons in a zillion databases with multiple cross references back to each one of us. These "marks" are used for both good and ill, but not by a supernaturally evil dictator. It is both worse and better than the vision in The Revelation.
I have heard strained connections between some of the visions in The Revelation and modern technology -- for example, the locusts with long white hair are said to be jet fighter planes and their contrails. Yeah, right. Nice imagination. They were just the first century equivalent of scary mutant monsters to keep people awake at night.
Ok here is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately and trying to come to a sensible conclusion. I'm aware many people believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired work of God. But there are two main things that do not make sense to me.
-The first is how the Bible says God created the Earth in 6 days, yet it is estimated that the Gospels were written upwards of 10-20 years after Jesus was crucified. It doesn't seem logical that the Bible would take longer to write if divinely inspired, than it would to create the Earth.
-The second is that most scholars agree that Revelation was written 60 years after the death of Jesus. Revelation was written by John, after having an angel appear to him. Joseph smith claimed an angel appeared to him, and he crafted the Book of Mormon about 1700 years after the death of Jesus. Why believe one over the other? I would guess that a lot of people rejected Revelation after it was first written.
I am not sure I can fully answer your question, except to say that maybe a literal view of things in the Bible may not be the way to try and make sense of it. You are taking a collection of works from antiquity, and trying to apply modern reading and logic techniques to understand it. When you find inconsistencies, it doesn't make sense.
The stories (parables) in the Bible are a writing technique of antiquity designed to describe beliefs, happenings, etc, in an allegorical sense. Remember, the vast majority (99%) of people hearing these were illiterate, and for a long time this stuff wasn't even in the written word. Just passed down orally. They are not meant to be interpreted strictly as the reporting of absolute facts, figures, or even events.
So with Genesis, telling someone who cannot read, much less have our modern levels of education on all sorts of things, how God "created" the world, it was likely related to the days of the week (which may have been more familiar to people), and with each day representing something being created.
Therefore, I would suggest your logic in trying to relate the actual chronilogical time spent physically writing books of the bible to the allegorical story of creation is misapplied.
I am not sure I can fully answer your question, except to say that maybe a literal view of things in the Bible may not be the way to try and make sense of it. You are taking a collection of works from antiquity, and trying to apply modern reading and logic techniques to understand it. When you find inconsistencies, it doesn't make sense.
The stories (parables) in the Bible are a writing technique of antiquity designed to describe beliefs, happenings, etc, in an allegorical sense. Remember, the vast majority (99%) of people hearing these were illiterate, and for a long time this stuff wasn't even in the written word. Just passed down orally. They are not meant to be interpreted strictly as the reporting of absolute facts, figures, or even events.
So with Genesis, telling someone who cannot read, much less have our modern levels of education on all sorts of things, how God "created" the world, it was likely related to the days of the week (which may have been more familiar to people), and with each day representing something being created.
Therefore, I would suggest your logic in trying to relate the actual chronilogical time spent physically writing books of the bible to the allegorical story of creation is misapplied.
The Allegorical School of Interpretation only arose in Alexandria and quite late at that. Other than that, the stories in the Hebrew Bible (and other ANE writings) had never been conceived of allegorically either by the author or his listeners. I'm not saying that they are true! I'm merely saying that the ancients did not allegorize these stories until the Alexandrian School began this approach - and even then it wasn't widely accepted by all. The real reason allegory became so popular was because the acceptance of the literal truth of theses stories slowly began to grow problematic both theologically and according to the tenets of simple reason.
Of course, the Bible wasn't divinely inspired. At 4:00 pm EST today on the Science Channel one can find out how the Earth was really formed.
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