Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
You refuse to accept that there may be no scriptural evidence for the trinity--and there might not be according to textual critics I've read--but I still believe in it. There is a high probability of no virgin birth--and to me it is an issue like the snake handlers for you--a non-issue. I simply don't know and will let the experts battle it out. Finally, and I say this carefully, there is LIMITED evidence concerning the resurrection--which I believe in to the very core of my being.
Maybe I am misunderstanding. Are you saying that there is a high probability that the virgin birth story was not in the autograph scriptures? Or are you saying that there is a high probability that the virgin birth did not occur in reality? Sounds like the latter. The former would be amazing.
It is debateable as to whether or not there is agreement on this one. Preparation Day could mean Friday. According to Sir Robert Anderson, it would have fallen on the Friday, April 15th, 32CE.
I'm not referring to the actual day of the week i.e. Friday, Wednesday, Thursday. Since we don't know the actual year Christ was crucified we cannot determine what day it actually was.
I'm referring the fact that Preparation was always a day BEFORE the Passover meal. If the synoptics say Friday, then John says Thursday. If the synoptics say Thursday, then John says Wednesday.
However you slice the pie John's date is always 24 hours before the synoptics date and this is a clear conflict as to when Jesus was actually crucified.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alt Thinker
On the contrary, Mark, Matthew and Luke all incorporate Paul's Eucharist formula, which has Jesus symbolically be the korban pesach. It is entirely possible that Paul intentionally linked to Dionysian bread and wine rituals since this would be a familiar meme to the gentiles he was championing as Jesus followers. But his imagery is explicitly Jewish as are his other images – sin atonement, blood sacrifices, first fruits etc. Much of Paul’s writings are addressed to Jews, attempts to justify gentiles being accepted into the Jesus movement without converting to Judaism, so Jewish imagery would be appropriate for that audience. (These diverse images do not fit together very well but that is another story.)
It is interesting that Paul uses the image of bread rather than an actual roasted lamb. For those Jews of the Diaspora who were not able to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover, the Seder would presumably not include the sacrificed lamb, since Deuteronomy forbids sacrifices outside of the Temple. Paul is framing the Eucharist formula in a way familiar to his primary audience, Jews of the Diaspora.
The Synoptic Gospels use Paul’s Passover/Eucharist scenario and expand on it, leading into the Passion and Resurrection stories. Typically, John changes the story as he does in so many other ways. Maybe he just wanted to do something different from the three already circulating Gospels. Or possibly John was aware of the confusion resulting from the Synoptic adaptation of Paul, that Jesus could somehow become a sacrifice that had already happened the day before. But for whatever reason, John omits any reference to the Last Supper being a Passover Seder or even the Eucharist formula. And so he is free to tie the death of Jesus even closer to the sacrifice of the lambs by having them happen simultaneously. As a byproduct of this, John avoids the problem of the Sanhedrin holding a trial after sundown on Passover when they should all be at Seder.
John does indeed seek to raise Jesus to “a higher level of godhood” than the Synoptics do. But he does not really say anything that Paul has not already said about Jesus having come from heaven and temporarily put aside his divinity.
Well, Paul always had his own idea, based on "revelations" he supposedly got directly from God, on how the gospel of Jesus actually worked. So if he said the focus should be on Jesus as "the Bread of Life" and that bread should be used in the Eucharist rather than the "Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world" and the consumption of lamb he will vigorously defend his position in the face of John who says otherwise.
The issue for me is the nerve, the "moxie" to change the story as the writers and leaders see fit in order to resolve obvious errors in text. Our God is perfect and what we have to read, autograph or not, should also be perfect. If it is not; if all these thousands of obvious errors surface as we are witnessing and arguing about, then Christianity went "off the rails" fairly quickly in its early history. The church has been engaged for the last 1800-1900 years in "damage control" trying to fix and patch the "inerrant" word of God and has so blundered through it that Christianity is in the mess it is in today because one lie begets another, which begets another which, over the course of two millennia results in a web of deceit so tangled that once the information age came and we could look all this up on the computer instead of blindly taking our preacher man's word for everything the only recourse for a rational thinking adult would be to conclude that the Bible, far from being "inerrant", is just a good book like the Bagavad Gita or the wise saying of Confucius filled with some good suggestions on how to live, but certainly NOT the inspired Word of God.
Mike's obsession with defending the inerrancy of the scriptures in face of the fact that the scriptures are NOT inerrant will go on, and while he and Wallace and others struggle to make people believe the scriptures are perfect millions of people will continue to quietly slip out of Christianity and church attendance will continue to dwindle. Thousands of once-thriving churches have already closed their doors and thousands more will close as well. And, as I and others have repeatedly echoed the words of reputable scholars, Christianity in its present form will continue to die a death by a thousand cuts because of all the lies and deceit Christianity was built upon.
Last edited by thrillobyte; 09-24-2014 at 03:30 PM..
No it's not. It's explained if you adopt all the theological presuppositions that you and the people in the video adopt, but I and most textual critics do not adopt all those presuppositions. The claim is hardly addressed at all.
As I said in an earlier post, I am not going to play 'Yes it is, no it isn't, yes it is, no it isn't' with you. That is nothing but your opinion.
Quote:
And I never said the short ending of Mark complicates the resurrection, did I?
Okay. I see. You are referring to ''the post-resurrection traditions''. Not a problem as Matthew, Luke, and John provide details about Jesus' post resurrection appearances.
Quote:
No, that's just your modern and manipulative hermeneutic. The Bible clearly references multiple gods as real and effective. There are not three that are identified as YHWH, and to presuppose that God exhausts the category of deity is to completely reject the Bible itself in favor of your Nicene dogmatism.
The Bible says that there is only one true God (John 17:3). Therefore any references to other 'gods' are excluded from the Trinity that is the true God. Only the one true God has the incommunicable attributes which only God can possess. Only the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit possess these incommunicable attributes. Attributes such as eternality - having always existed, omnipotence - God is able to do all that He desires to do, or omnipresence - He is everywhere present.
Quote:
How many Old Testament manuscripts do we have?
I haven't looked that up. That is not the issue. The fact is that it is widely known that the 20 to 30 thousand New Testament manuscripts contain 300,000 to 400,000 variants. And you also know that Wallace is a professor of New Testament studies. And you know that the interview pertained to the New Testament. Not to the Old Testament. You are being dishonest in attempting to imply that Dr. Wallace and Dr. Bock were including the Old Testament in their interview.
Quote:
I absolutely can. Here are all the places where the Trinity is taught:
An empty argument.
Quote:
You cannot provide any scriptures that promote a trinitarian view of God and Jesus, you can only triangulate a series of scriptures and then impose a strict and manipulative hermeneutic so that the many verses that complicate the Trinity are forced into silence.
Happily. You cannot point to a single verse that demands a trinitarian reading.
Your argument is fallacious since doctrine is not based on any one verse, but by comparing Scripture with Scripture. While the Bible teaches that there is one true God, there are three, and only three 'Persons' who are identified as God.
The Father obviously is God.
Jesus is God. Psalm 102:25-27 refers to God. But the author of Hebrews 1:10-12 which quotes Psalm 102:25-27 applies it to Jesus. The pre-incarnate Jesus laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning. The heavens are the works of His hands.
The Holy Spirit is God as stated in Acts 5:3 compared with Acts 5:4. And the Holy Spirit is distinct from the Father as shown in Romans 8:27.
These are the three who are the one true God. Only the triune God is omnipotent and without beginning.
While the formal doctrine of the Trinity was not spelled out until the fourth century, the claim that the early Church invented the teaching of the trinity without regard to what the Bible teaches is simply not valid. As questions pertaining to the nature of God began to be asked in the early Church, there came various and diverse ideas which had to be addressed. ''Church leaders had to hammer out a doctrine of God that would be faithful to the evidence of Scripture, and they did so.'' [Our Legacy, John D. Hannah, p. 73] It took hundreds of years for the church to completely delineate the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
While certain groups continue to deny the deity of Christ, and the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity was delineated based on what the whole of Scripture teaches. It was not an invention.
No, you did not disprove the reality of the Trinity, and you cannot. You can only deny it as many do.
Okay. I see. You are referring to ''the post-resurrection traditions''. Not a problem as Matthew, Luke, and John provide details about Jesus' post resurrection appearances.
And as I said, there is instability between them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
The Bible says that there is only one true God (John 17:3).
And dozens of times it refers to many gods as real and existing beings. There are even scriptures that insist they are God's children, and that he put them in their places of authority. You're making the mistake of presupposing that I'm going to be ok with you asserting the univocality of the Bible. Doesn't work that way. The Bible is full of contradiction and argument. John's statement was not a theological argument, though, it was a bit of hyperbolic praise. There are other pagan sources that are far from monotheistic that refer to specific gods as the "one god," or "the true god," or things like that. It's rhetoric, not a sober statement of ontological belief.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
Therefore any references to other 'gods' are excluded from the Trinity that is the true God.
And this prioritizes the value of the scriptures. You pick the verse you like and you subjugate anything that complicates it to that verse. You're making the Bible serve your dogmatism, not the other way around.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
Only the one true God has the incommunicable attributes which only God can possess.
This is not a biblical paradigm. You're speaking the language of the ECFs, not of the New Testament.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
Only the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit possess these incommunicable attributes. Attributes such as eternality - having always existed, omnipotence - God is able to do all that He desires to do, or omnipresence - He is everywhere present.
Omnipresence is nowhere found in the Bible. It is flatly precluded from beginning to end. That's a purely post-biblical philosophical construct. Omnipotence is also a philosophical construct, not something the Bible promotes. The eternality
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
I haven't looked that up. That is not the issue. The fact is that it is widely known that the 20 to 30 thousand New Testament manuscripts contain 300,000 to 400,000 variants. And you also know that Wallace is a professor of New Testament studies. And you know that the interview pertained to the New Testament. Not to the Old Testament. You are being dishonest in attempting to imply that Dr. Wallace and Dr. Bock were including the Old Testament in their interview.
They constantly referred to the Bible, and they nowhere said what they're saying does not pertain to the Old Testament. Are you saying that the variants in the Old Testament are indeed a big deal, and that they do indeed affect cardinal Christian doctrines?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
That's it? That's all you've got? Nothing?
Your argument is fallacious since doctrine is not based on any one verse, but by comparing Scripture with Scripture.
That's called the hermeneutic circle, and that's a fallacy. Most people just let the laypeople get away with it, though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
While the Bible teaches that there is one true God, there are three, and only three 'Persons' who are identified as God.
The Bible nowhere has anything to say about any "person" of God.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
The Father obviously is God.
Jesus is God. Psalm 102:25-27 refers to God. But the author of Hebrews 1:10-12 which quotes Psalm 102:25-27 applies it to Jesus.
That author also applies an explicit reference to David to Jesus. Does that mean Jesus is also David?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
The pre-incarnate Jesus laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning. The heavens are the works of His hands.
The Old Testament has absolutely no references whatsoever in it to Jesus.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
The Holy Spirit is God as stated in Acts 5:3 compared with Acts 5:4.
That's a juvenile eisegetical puppet show. The text doesn't identify the Spirit as God, it just states that Ananias lied to the Spirit and lied to God. Since the Spirit is a divine agent, that has no bearing on their identification with each other.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
And the Holy Spirit is distinct from the Father as shown in Romans 8:27.
Divine agents always are.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
These are the three who are the one true God. Only the triune God is omnipotent and without beginning.
This is not a biblical principle.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
While the formal doctrine of the Trinity was not spelled out until the fourth century, the claim that the early Church invented the teaching of the trinity without regard to what the Bible teaches is simply not valid. As questions pertaining to the nature of God began to be asked in the early Church, there came various and diverse ideas which had to be addressed. ''Church leaders had to hammer out a doctrine of God that would be faithful to the evidence of Scripture, and they did so.'' [Our Legacy, John D. Hannah, p. 73] It took hundreds of years for the church to completely delineate the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Using philosophical constructs and rubrics. The scriptures just had to be able to be made to fit the conclusion. The scriptures were not the driving force. They never are.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
While certain groups continue to deny the deity of Christ, and the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity was delineated based on what the whole of Scripture teaches. It was not an invention.
It absolutely is an invention.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike555
No, you did not disprove the reality of the Trinity, and you cannot. You can only deny it as many do.
I don't need to disprove anything. You can believe whatever you want. The trinity is not represented in any way whatsoever in the Bible, though. Your attempts to show otherwise appeal to naive hermeneutics and juvenile eisegetical games.
I've had discussions with McClellan before. He is mistaken despite your claims to the contrary. And so are you. No cardinal doctrine is affected by the variants. And certainly not the virgin birth. Only a fool would say that the virgin birth is a non-issue. McClellan has not bested me and he has not bested Dr. Wallace or Dr. Bock, their interview being what this thread concerns.
And again, for all the good it will do, New Testament textual criticism is not concerned with establishing inerrancy. It is concerned with attempting to identify the reading of the original New Testament autographs.
As for you, you can't discuss anything without making it personal and attacking those with whom you disagree. Anyone who has read enough of your post knows that.
I am attacking your false ideas. Anyone who reads the posts knows that. What you are doing is personalizing those attacks. You are a nameless, faceless entity to me, and there is less to know about the real you on CD than there is me. So get over it.
Textual criticism has uncovered numerous, numerous issues with regard to cardinal doctrines. Now the apologists among them, who are few and far between, like Dr. Wallace, try to make "internal" spins on the messages. But then you have to make the spin as holy as you do the scripture. That is the weakness of fundamentalists. They have to spin dozens of stories of how things "MIGHT" have happened in order to keep the DOCTRINES they are trying to protect by claiming "meaningless" textual variants, intact.
No, the textual variants themselves question the Trinity--I didn't say prove it is false--but enough so that no one should question the Christianity of someone who DOESN'T hold to the Trinity. Evangelicals, by and large DO question the Christianity of those who don't hold to the Trinity. That is misuse of the scripture as determined by the variants.
With regard to Mary, the word virgin has always meant "young woman" in Hebrew. The birth stories themselves are not connected except for being in Bethlehem, and are the result of creative thought to meet the prophecy about Bethlehem. The stories concocted by fundamentalists trying to "mesh" the two are convoluted and ignorant.
If God is able to dictate what men should write, then He's able to make them say the same thing. But He doesn't. Instead He inspired then and men and women now--to express their faith--as humans do, with weakness and sometimes error.
Your faith is in a book, when Christianity is about faith in Christ. The book doesn't need protection from you or anyone else. It does need discernment which fundamentalists have been loathe to do, taking it at face value when it is frequently allegorical.
400,000 textual variants may have only a one percent SIGNIFICANCY, but one percent of 400,000 is still 4000---and that IS significant. Stick to tangling with an amateur like me, McClellan is far more than you've shown you can handle in a debate.
Maybe I am misunderstanding. Are you saying that there is a high probability that the virgin birth story was not in the autograph scriptures? Or are you saying that there is a high probability that the virgin birth did not occur in reality? Sounds like the latter. The former would be amazing.
I don't know that I would say a "high" probability, but there is absolutely no certainty that Mary did not have relations with a man (sorry my Catholic friends). Saying "God made her pregnant," can be likened to a Joan of Arc story where she was repeatedly "raped" by a devil while in prison---not her prison guards, of course, but a supernatural entity. Because she had been consorting spiritually with demons.
I don't know what to believe concerning the virgin birth. It isn't a cardinal doctrine for me and I don't think it makes one whit of difference about the divinity of Jesus. There were certainly a large number of gnostics that believed the Spirit of God came upon Jesus at His baptism. Depends on which textual variant you read!
Well, Paul always had his own idea, based on "revelations" he supposedly got directly from God, on how the gospel of Jesus actually worked. So if he said the focus should be on Jesus as "the Bread of Life" and that bread should be used in the Eucharist rather than the "Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world" and the consumption of lamb he will vigorously defend his position in the face of John who says otherwise.
What is interesting here is that Paul wrote while the Temple still stood yet he does not explicitly mention the sacrificed lamb. Why? Because his audience was in the Diaspora and could not celebrate Passover with lamb sacrificed in the Temple. John wrote after the Temple was destroyed and no one celebrated Passover with lamb. But John does not reference the Seder. When John wrote there was already more of a separation of the Jesus movement from Judaism. Paul has Jesus symbolically be the lamb consumed at the Seder, which was perforce absent in the Diaspora. John has Jesus be the lamb as it is sacrificed but omits the Seder entirely, Jesus being already dead in his version. Both have Jesus being a substitute. There is lots of symbolism going on in much of the NT.
BTW the “Bread of Life” is part of a complex analogy involving among other things the “leaven of the Pharisees”, leaven being a symbol for impurity. And the "Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world" is a product of Paul’s merger of several disparate references. The Passover sacrifice was not a sin atonement sacrifice.
Quote:
The issue for me is the nerve, the "moxie" to change the story as the writers and leaders see fit in order to resolve obvious errors in text. Our God is perfect and what we have to read, autograph or not, should also be perfect. If it is not; if all these thousands of obvious errors surface as we are witnessing and arguing about, then Christianity went "off the rails" fairly quickly in its early history. The church has been engaged for the last 1800-1900 years in "damage control" trying to fix and patch the "inerrant" word of God and has so blundered through it that Christianity is in the mess it is in today because one lie begets another, which begets another which, over the course of two millennia results in a web of deceit so tangled that once the information age came and we could look all this up for ourselves the only recourse for a rational thinking adult would have been to conclude that the Bible, far from being "inerrant", is just a good book like the Bagavad Gita or the wise saying of Confucius filled with some good suggestions on how to live, but certainly NOT the inspired Word of God.
The various writers of the NT were already changing the story to put forth their own versions for their own purposes. John is the most obvious example. But I see Luke mounting a major campaign to reverse Matthew. There were a few fairly small interpolations in the early years. But I do not see anything on a large scale that could be labeled damage control until Luther removed several books. And of course lots of translations custom tailored to particular viewpoints.
I don't know that I would say a "high" probability, but there is absolutely no certainty that Mary did not have relations with a man (sorry my Catholic friends). Saying "God made her pregnant," can be likened to a Joan of Arc story where she was repeatedly "raped" by a devil while in prison---not her prison guards, of course, but a supernatural entity. Because she had been consorting spiritually with demons.
I don't know what to believe concerning the virgin birth. It isn't a cardinal doctrine for me and I don't think it makes one whit of difference about the divinity of Jesus. There were certainly a large number of gnostics that believed the Spirit of God came upon Jesus at His baptism. Depends on which textual variant you read!
So it was reality that you were talking about as questionable, not the autograph scripture. Regardless of what you may believe - and I try not to challenge beliefs, just interpretations of scripture - Matthew 1 is a really impressive example of tying together the several parallel traditions about the Messiah. On the one hand there is the tradition that the Messiah will be a descendent of David, i.e., born as a human being. On the other hand, there is the Son of Man in Daniel who descends from heaven. Paul has Jesus having come from heaven and calls him the Son of God, obviously meaning more than the ordinary meaning of a righteous person.
So Matthew has Jesus be the adopted son of Joseph, thereby inheriting the Davidic descent, perfectly legal according to Jewish customs of the day. But Jesus is also the literal Son of God, not having a human biological father. (Matthew loves literal interpretations.) He can therefore also be claimed to have come from heaven. And Matthew gets to reference scripture, which he loves to do, extensively in the genealogy and also in the virgin concept, courtesy of Septuagint word choice. Unstated but obvious (to me anyway) is the reference to Philo’s scripture based imagery of several women conceiving great men in Jewish history via the power of God. Not exclusively by God of course. No virgin births in Philo.
And dozens of times it refers to many gods as real and existing beings. There are even scriptures that insist they are God's children, and that he put them in their places of authority. You're making the mistake of presupposing that I'm going to be ok with you asserting the univocality of the Bible. Doesn't work that way. The Bible is full of contradiction and argument. John's statement was not a theological argument, though, it was a bit of hyperbolic praise. There are other pagan sources that are far from monotheistic that refer to specific gods as the "one god," or "the true god," or things like that. It's rhetoric, not a sober statement of ontological belief.
That you don't believe the Bible to be the Word of God is obvious. The Bible says there is only one true God and you dismiss it giving it no more value than pagan sources.
Sad.
Quote:
And this prioritizes the value of the scriptures. You pick the verse you like and you subjugate anything that complicates it to that verse. You're making the Bible serve your dogmatism, not the other way around.
I certainly prioritize the value of the Scriptures. The Bible teaches that there is only one true God. I believe it. You don't.
Quote:
This is not a biblical paradigm. You're speaking the language of the ECFs, not of the New Testament.
Not true. God has certain attributes that belong only to Him. Such as God's omnipresence which will be shown below.
Quote:
Omnipresence is nowhere found in the Bible. It is flatly precluded from beginning to end. That's a purely post-biblical philosophical construct. Omnipotence is also a philosophical construct, not something the Bible promotes. The eternality
Again, not true. The word omnipresence is not in the Bible but the fact that God is everywhere present is clearly stated in the Scriptures.[indent] Jeremiah 23:24 Can a man hide himself in hiding places So I do not see him?" declares the LORD. "Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?" declares the LORD.
1 Kings 8:27 “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!
The word omnipotence is also not found in the Bible but the fact that God is what the word means is declared in the Bible. God is able to do all that He wills to do.
[indent] Jeremiah 32:27 "Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh; is anything too difficult for Me?"
Matthew 19:26 And looking at them Jesus said to them, "With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."
Quote:
They constantly referred to the Bible, and they nowhere said what they're saying does not pertain to the Old Testament. Are you saying that the variants in the Old Testament are indeed a big deal, and that they do indeed affect cardinal Christian doctrines?
Again you are being dishonest. They were referring to the New Testament manuscripts.
I have said nothing about the variants in the Old Testament.
Quote:
That's called the hermeneutic circle, and that's a fallacy. Most people just let the laypeople get away with it, though.
The fact that doctrine is built by comparing Scripture with Scripture is not a fallacy and theologian who recognize that fact are not laypeople.
[quote]
The Bible nowhere has anything to say about any "person" of God.
[quote]
It is language of accommodation. The Bible speaks of three as being God. Terminology must be used to describe the 'Person's of the Godhead.
Quote:
That author also applies an explicit reference to David to Jesus. Does that mean Jesus is also David?
Provide chapter and verse.
Quote:
The Old Testament has absolutely no references whatsoever in it to Jesus.
You've just been shown that the author of Hebrews applies Psalm 102:25-27 to Jesus meaning that before He incarnated He pre-existed as God and created the heavens and the earth. That Jesus is the agent of creation is stated also in John 1:3 and Col. 1:16-17. That Jesus is the Messiah is a fact and the Old Testament contains many Messianic prophecies.
Quote:
That's a juvenile eisegetical puppet show. The text doesn't identify the Spirit as God, it just states that Ananias lied to the Spirit and lied to God. Since the Spirit is a divine agent, that has no bearing on their identification with each other.
This is simply a dismissive statement on your part. The Holy Spirit is indeed identified as God and as I also stated, the Holy Spirit is shown to be distinct from the Father and that the Father knows the mind of the Spirit - Romans 8:27.
Quote:
Divine agents always are.
Simply another dismissive statement. The Holy Spirit is God but is distinct from the Father, as well as from the Son - John 16:12-15.
Quote:
This is not a biblical principle.
Yes, it is. And the Church recognizes this. That being - There are the three who are the one true God. Only the triune God is omnipotent and without beginning.
Quote:
Using philosophical constructs and rubrics. The scriptures just had to be able to be made to fit the conclusion. The scriptures were not the driving force. They never are.
Your opinion only. The Trinity is based on what the Bible teaches.
Quote:
It absolutely is an invention.
Again, just a dismissive statement. You don't want to believe what the Bible says concerning the trinity, so simply call it an invention.
Quote:
I don't need to disprove anything. You can believe whatever you want. The trinity is not represented in any way whatsoever in the Bible, though. Your attempts to show otherwise appeal to naive hermeneutics and juvenile eisegetical games.
As I stated, you are UNABLE to disprove the reality of the Trinity. You can only deny it. And by accusing me of appealing to naïve hermeneutics and juvenile eisegetical games you make the same accusation of all the theologians in the early Church who strived to understand the nature of God based on what the Bible reveals about Him, as well as all believers whether scholars, pastors, or oridinary believers who are Trinitarian. Your accusation is nothing but arrogant dismissal.
You have nothing with to argue against the Trinity except dismissive comments devoid of anything with which to back them. I am simply wasting my time even trying to discuss this with you.
So it was reality that you were talking about as questionable, not the autograph scripture. Regardless of what you may believe - and I try not to challenge beliefs, just interpretations of scripture - Matthew 1 is a really impressive example of tying together the several parallel traditions about the Messiah. On the one hand there is the tradition that the Messiah will be a descendent of David, i.e., born as a human being. On the other hand, there is the Son of Man in Daniel who descends from heaven. Paul has Jesus having come from heaven and calls him the Son of God, obviously meaning more than the ordinary meaning of a righteous person.
So Matthew has Jesus be the adopted son of Joseph, thereby inheriting the Davidic descent, perfectly legal according to Jewish customs of the day. But Jesus is also the literal Son of God, not having a human biological father. (Matthew loves literal interpretations.) He can therefore also be claimed to have come from heaven. And Matthew gets to reference scripture, which he loves to do, extensively in the genealogy and also in the virgin concept, courtesy of Septuagint word choice. Unstated but obvious (to me anyway) is the reference to Philo’s scripture based imagery of several women conceiving great men in Jewish history via the power of God. Not exclusively by God of course. No virgin births in Philo.
As I said, I don't think it's possible to know, and for me it isn't that important. Certainly I would agree that the authors of both Matthew and Luke had a specific purpose in mind when they wrote their birth stories---they needed Jesus to be born in Bethlehem rather than born in Nazareth which is much more likely. For me, what difference does it make? It just shows that men in that time were as prone as men today in trying to make things "fit," whether it be prophecy or in conflating the two birth stories to become a third that includes all elements but doesn't represent the thought processes of either. It's one of the more interesting things to compare between the two authors. Obviously neither aware of what the other wrote, and no third source for any kind of commonality.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
