Recent content by BWSmith

Define "inspired".

Sirach can be a little...well...misogynistic. Judge for yourself. Search the online text for instances of "woman", "wife", and "daughter"...

Actually, that's the problem. The "Christ" simply means the "anointed" king. There nothing in pre-Markan literature to suggest that the anointed king was necessarily divine (in fact, the Jews were expecting a new David). "Son of God" simply meant someone (like a prophet) who did the...

One thing that's been bothering me for a few months is my observation that the Gospel of Mark gives every indication that Jesus is the supreme prophet and priest of God, but not God himself. Given that Mark is the earliest gospel written, this is somewhat problematic, because it makes belief in...

He's a kook and a con man.

Are you assuming that Gen 1-3 and Revelation contain historically true details? Revelation is apocalyptic literature that describes the end in symbolic terms based on the beginning. However, the beginning in the Bible (Gen 1-11) is described in mythical terms. (The first real candidates...

Hi Thunderchild! Actually, Moses didn't write anything but the law itself and a few other things specifically attributed to him, according to the theory. In response to your "Eden not on earth" theory, that would be possible if the Hebrew stuck to the word "ground" (dama) throughout the...

So your own opinion (I would guess) is that the LXX omitted part of the original account in the MT?

So which is more likely, that the MT added or the LXX removed? What are the odds that any text could be removed and one still has a coherent account?

So given all you have said above, which is a more original reading of the David and Goliath story, the shorter LXX or the longer MT? Does the MT not contain an additional supplemental account that was spliced in, causing apparent contradictions? (Which shows that the process of combining...

Unified priority of a textual tradition over another is not something that should be assumed. Each appear to have readings in some areas that are more original than those in the other. Hence, the David & Goliath problem should not be dismissed on the grounds that "the MT takes priority".

> Whether the basic premise is correct is still debatable. However, there is no textual evidence (meaning manuscript evidence) to support the documentary hypothesis. Do you know of any manuscript evidence?  Or did you mean that the stylistic features of the Pentateuch tend to point...

JEDP in its classical formulation is a 19th-century answer to the issue of Mosaic authorship. Its basic premise is correct and justified in the textual evidence, but many classical details are essentially dead today. Many scholars would agree that there is priestly material that can be...

Much of what is written in the New Testament indicates that the earliest Christians believed that the end of the world was imminent. (Hindsight is 20/20, and today we can say that it didn't happen within their generation.) Question for the panel: If Jesus was fully human and fully divine...

> Interesting that the translators of the KJV themselves wrote in their "translators to the reader" that multiple translations are beneficial, and that their translation had errors in it like all translations. So when did people figure out that the KJV was without error? I guess the KJV...