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For the most part it's self-evidential. Is there a particular part of the Bible that you think is difficult to categorise?
At the risk of derailing a thread, I just want to make the point that not all people who say they are Christians actually are. But at the same time I don't deny that real Christians have made grievous mistakes in the past.
That's not an either/or. Scripture is human and divine by source, and in any case is to be understood by humans. Human communication is inherently imprecise, ambiguous, formed according to what it is trying to communicate not peripheral details, etc.
The reason it was not originally meant to be a book for the masses was because of the expense to reproduce, the low literacy rate, and the idea that if scripture was kept in the church then in addition to what was written the oral traditions/customs would also be passed down. even well after the bible went into print there was much debate as to whether it should be recalled or not, because people simply did not have the context or inclination to fully comprehend what was and why things were written. It seemed to do more harm than good. (many divisions in the church)
In both accounts Judas is dead, but at the same time both accounts describe two very different scenes. Now unless you are arguing that Judas did not die, or that He did not kill himself, that the potters field that he died in was not purchased with the blood money of Jesus.. then one must conclude that these two seeming separate accounts do indeed describe the same event, with time being the only variable. So, one account describes how He took his own life, and the other describes how he was found and why no one came to bury him.
I am fully aware of your point. Although it seems you have missed mine:
Lets look at Exodus 3:
Again to whom would this book be written? (Given your recent education of the History of the bible) Who could understand it except these last few generations? what if God had planned for another 2000 years before his return? What of all of those who are to come after us? How will they be included in the writing of your version of the bible? Or should scripture be written directly to them? If so how will we and those that have come before us hope understand what was written to those who will be born 4000 years after Christ?
It does indeed. If you compare what i wrote in that post and what i just wrote in the last paragraph you will see that all I did was I condensed and reworded all that you did not wish to acknowledge. I guess you were just not ready to hear what i had to say yet.
Same way you decide the genre of any other text - you read it and compare it with other similar texts.
Yes and no. It's meant to be a lifelong source for involving one's self in the story as part of a community doing the same. Not an "Idiot's guide to salvation" to go off into a corner somewhere with and come out knowing all you need to know.
Why is necessary to suppose that what the bible is there to teach is so simplistic and propositional as to lend itself to that sort of document?
The bible is a bunch of stories from ancient times. Our job is to make it our story and improvise the next bit of that story in continuity with what has gone before.
Anyone who can read competently can pick up a bible and read some of it and get something out of it, but its a book to apply all our talents, reason, mediation and imagination to without exhausting it. And, while reading it in private is important, reading it and studying it in community is essential - Christianity is not an individualistic religion.
Go read it aloud - it's quite blatantly highly structured poetry (almost certainly written for liturgical purposes). Short of saying "this is poetry" at the top it could hardly be more obvious!
1. says who, since God is also involved in inspiring it?
That did happen, particulary in Western Europe, but it was a relatively late phenomenon (and thankfully one that every church as completely got over).
If the message you want to communicate reduces to something that trivial, and you are trying to produce a book to be read by individuals in isolation, perhaps. But given how significant culture is in the way we read things, if that is possible at all it is only possible for extraordinarly trivial ideas.
All texts - indeed all human communication - is a complex mix of metaphorical and literal happening at different levels. The only way you avoid this is to avoid language altogether.
It's mythological. You can't reduce any non-trivial text to "entirely metaphorical" or "entirely literal".
There's pretty much always other similar styled texts discussing similar things and other clues we can use. Scripture is no different from any other text on that score - you have to bring some other information (like what the words mean) in order to read any text.
Some of scripture is recounting historical events. (But even when recounting historical events the meaning the author wishes to give those events shapes the way they tell the story. Again, that's true of all accounts of events. Almost nobody sets out to write about events simply to convey meaningless facts).
Yes it does - the New Testament was written for reading aloud in congregations. The bulk of it is addressed to congregations directly or implicitly and that is always how it has been used. At one point one letter even says as much directly. Mainstream Christianity has never been into secret knowledge, and that was one of the big complaints it could level at Gnostism.
It includes everybody at their level within a community and takes them further. The object of the exercise isn't to get every individual to learn 7 (or whatever) facts, but to enable communities to become places where the Kingdom of God is anticipated. Christianity is the follow-on from Israel - it works first and formost at the level of "People of God" and individuals only within that; and what it is trying to achieve is primarily (appropriate) growth, not getting each individual over a pass/fail benchmark.
Says who? What its about is an ongoing story of something being achieved, not simply the transmission of some propositional statements.
That's got absolutely nothing to do with the point being made.
Yeah, its just what I mentioned before about the repetitiveness. Each day ends the same: "the evening, the morning, the n-th day"
The chinese whispers idea of translation is something of a myth. All significant modern translations go back to the original languages. In the case of Genesis 1 its structure and rhythm is so obvious you'd have to be an exceedingly poor translator not to recognise it.
You are still thinking of God and people as an either/or, not a both/and. That's not surprising - the western world has been thinking that way since the seventeenth century - but unless you get your head around it being a both/and you are nowhere near historic Judeo/Christian thinking.
I wasn't using Timothy to support the truth of the assertion, but to show more correctly what the assertion should be. "Infallibility" is a relatively modern, and IMO fairly meaningless, concept. The historic concept is reliability for purpose - so that's the standard the bible should be measure against to see if it measures up or not.
Then I can only suggest you aren't reading good sources.
Could God create a square circle?
I suggest that's because you have the wrong view of what it should look like if God was involved as well as people.
All language is, to some extent, metaphoric. I can provide citations for that from people who study the relationship between language, symbol, metaphor and myth if you want.
Myth is a superb medium for teaching truth. We just happen to have grown up in a highly unusual culture that has grossly devalued the effectivness of narrative in teaching, treating it as something suitable only for young children.
Not entirely, no.
Of course working in secondary languages looses some nuances. So does hearing/reading a text starting from a different culture and all the other presuppositions. But the thing is robust enough that we can do a reasonable job - particularly if we are in a community that has access to wider skills in the original languages, in historical understanding, etc.
Because we aren't working alone.
I don't know what you've been reading. Go read Paul's epistles - all the major ones are addressed and written to congregations. Read the end of Colossians that talks about "when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of Laodicia, and see also that you read the letter [from/to] Laodicea [probably Ephesians]" Go read some good early church history. The whole idea of canon - the list of books - was to settle which books should be read in worship. Go read some of the early church apologetic against the gnostics. Go read some mainstream scholarship on how Mark or Luke's gospel works.
One of the beauties of narrative is that it can work on lots of levels at the same time.
That's not what I said. The goal however, is not "getting at the [facts] about what happened long ago", the goal is carrying on the story. Understanding the previous story is important to do that, but is not the end in itself.
Some of the "events" in the bible are describing things that happened, some are not. But any account of things that happened is not a straightforward list of the facts in chronological order - when people tell of events that happened they shape the way they tell it according to what they aim to do in their telling. That's true even in our culture that values facts above meaning, but is even more so in a culture that places a higher value on meaning and a lower value on factual precision.
To some extent that's true, and yet to some extent the message is dependent upon at least some things having actually happened. If Jesus' didn't rise form the dead the message "Jesus rising from the dead establishes him as Lord and anticipates our rising from the dead" vapourises somewhat. But it's not dependent upon our being able to reconstuct the precise chronological events of Easter morning - that's not what any of the Gospel authors are trying to do.
They are two different creation myths written at different times by different people to teach different truths (or aspects of the same truth, depending how you want to phrase it). Neither is intended to be a set of facts of about what actually happened but both are profoundly true - amongst the truest texts ever written.
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I'm not sure why you think what you've posted contradicts anything I've posted. But either way you need to read the forum-specific rules for Exploring Christianity.
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Many of them recognise it's poetic in structure, they just think its still literal.
The Jewish tradition, continued in Christianity, has never seen "I can explain this in other terms" as ruling out God; that's really a seventeenth century notion. Judeo/Christianity as always seen God as working through natural processes, normal human behaviour, etc, just as much as through the exceptional stuff. If I have a friend who is ill, and he gets better, one still attributes that to God even though we can explain the mechanism by which his body and/or medical science fixed up the issue. When Isaiah spoke of God using King Cyrus to execute judgement on Israel, or when Jesus hinted at Rome doing similar, that doesn't displace the normal human motivations going on in the head of Cyrus or the Roman Emperor.
They didn't talk about it on those terms until now. An obsession with facts over meaning is relatively modern, and formulaic labels like infallible and inerrant are relatively modern terms. Previously people were interested in the reliablility of the bible, but didn't express that in the same ways.
What counts as a mistake depends on what the intention of the text is. If a text claims to get all the architectural details correct (as the front page of the DaVinci Code does, for example) and then getting the architectural details of Westminster Abbey grossly wrong (as the book does) could reasonably be called a mistake. But without that claim and read as fiction Dan Brown would be under no obligation to get that right. A text is only obliged to accurate on the things it is trying to talk about, not on the medium. So, for example, John isn't interested in telling us exactly which women were at the tomb on easter morning, but he is very interested in telling us this is the New Exodus so the only woman he mentions is Mary (Miriam) Magdalene.
That kind of naive thinking about infinity is always self-contradictory.
If all the books you have looked at have been written by people, and you don't know what one would look like if God had also been involved, that doesn't sound like a very scientific assessment to me.
I know, we drifted a bit. But the point was that metaphor and literal are not black-and-white categories that we can place a text in one or the other, but texts usually have both going on at various different levels simultaneously. So that saying "is this text literal or metaphoric" often becomes an exercise in forcing simple boolean answers to questions that demand much more complex nuance.
A fable could be truthful. Whether Aesop's are is something I'll leave you to judge. I would say there is a good deal of truth to, say, the Illiad because what it has to say about the tragedy of war is something few, if any, other texts say half as well. The ability for myth to be truthful is not confined to the biblical texts - rather I would say some of the Genesis texts are the perfect example of the genre. On the other hand there are some other myths that I would say are decided untrue, not because they aren't history but because the messages they are designed to teach are profoundly un-true.
There are enough independent translations out there, and footnotes, commentaries, dictionaries and other tools to be able to do a good deal without being able to read greek, to have a high degree of confidence in the translated text. No translation is perfect, but we work with good-but-not-quite-perfect tools all the time. Yes, it's better to work in the original languages if you have the tools to do that, but one can do a very good job without.
By checking against what other people are coming up with when they come at the text from other starting-points and directions. By reading the work of scholars who are in-touch with the original languages and do study the cultures in which texts were produced, etc. And by doing so within a community doing the same so our learning bounces of each other.
I don't expect you to assume anything. When I said "we aren't working alone" I was referring to the fact that we are working in a community, not to the Holy Spirit.
We are limited people. Any non-trivial text is harder for some people than others - though I would suggest that pretty much everybody who can read can get something out of it. But the goal isn't reading the bible, the goal is growing as christians within a People of God that is also growing.
To a degree that's your personal problem that you've acquired from your particular (and highly unusual) culture.
Both.
A little bit of understanding of parables, reading in context, and checking the different synoptics, quickly shows up that its an enacted parable of judgement on the Temple.
Why not. If a significant event happens, but you get 4 different witnesses to describe it, each of which has a slighly different take on its significance, you will get 4 different accounts. There are studies out there noting this - not least on Wittgenstein's Poker.
Not all of the facts of all accounts may be exactly factual, but the four accounts may still all be true in the meaning they are giving. People don't tell accounts to get the facts perfect, they tell accounts to convey the meaning.
That's a very different question to that which we have been discussing.
As I've said, I don't think "infallible" is a meaningful concept.
That's their problem, not mine.
As a non-Christian you can carry on a conversation with Christians in your thread (so long as it doesn't reduce to debating - its supposed to be a conversation about questions you have). What you are not allowed to do is participate in any way in threads you did not start.
I don't think I did. I think that was somebody else.
It's a large proportion in North America, but not so large a proportion globally.
I didn't say it proves God exists. 99% of Jewish and Christian thought is not about proving that God exists - that's taken as a given.
The terms you use show the sort of thinking you are doing. The ideas that underly words like "infallibility" and "inerrancy" come out of a modernist way of thinking. That's not true for ideas like reliability. One needs to realise that the modernist worldview is not the framework most people for most of history have thought within.
And so would four independent contempory reports on, say, the bombing of Hiroshima. Not because they are fabrications, certainly not because Hiroshima was not bombed, but because they meaning the reports are giving to that bombing are different and any storyteller tells the story to bring out the meaning they attribute to it. So, for example, in the resurrection accounts John only has Mary Mags (Miriam) there because he wants to make clear this is the New Exodus. Luke, Mark and Matthew tell it differently because they want to bring out different aspects of its meaning. None of them are primarily concerned with the actual trivial facts of exactly which women were then - an obsession with that kind of detailed fact over the meaning is not something that existed in their worldview or most others. It doesn't even exist in ours to the degree people pretend except when they want to find a reason to reject something. If you get 4 separate independent accounts of an event you will always get that level of discrepancy - when you don't its taken (quite rightly) as a sign of collaboration.
"Omnipotence" is not a biblical word - its an (intrinsically flawed) Greek idea. Its a convenient shorthand for saying "God is very, very powerful" but press it on detail and it doesn't work. To ask "can God do X" where X is self-contradictory is a meaningless question. To reject all possible ideas of God because you've manage to construct a meaningless question to ask about God is, frankly, silly.
We can't. I didn't say we could. If you insist on taking every statement I make as though its supposed to be a proof of the existence of God this discussion gets very tedious.
God works with people and their particular talents and styles, he doesn't override that.
As it should.
Did what exactly actually happen? Did God create -yes. Did it take 6 periods of 24 hours - no. Did God create people - yes. Did he literally do that by molding some clay with his hands and puff air into it - no. Does he breath life into his creatures (us), yes. Did God create Adam - well the word Adam means man and is a pun on the word for dust or earth. Are the early chapters of Genesis an historical account in the same sort of what that "The Pellopenisain War" or the Gospel of Luke is an historical account - no.
There's no "just" about stories. Stories are powerful things - they change the way people think. Lists of facts are not more important nor more true than stories.
And that's your problem!
If the message of Harry Potter is really important, and true, and the story tells it in a really powerful way, then yes. (I don't think it is those things, but that's not a discussion we need to have).
They have seen the original language texts.
There wouldn't be much point in learning in community if I wasn't willing to learn from others, be challenged by their viewpoints, etc.
No, because we have historians, and other ancient texts, to keep pulling us back if we allow them to. There's actually been a huge amount of work over the last 50-100 years on how texts would be heard in 2nd Temple Israel, say.
And the earliest church deliberately chose not to because it would remove clarity meaning from the texts.
Again, your bring your bias of what one should be doing when one tells a story to a world that did not share that bias. John, or Luke, or Mark, or Matthew, or Paul is telling the story for a reason, and (like any other person recounting an event) they allow that reason to shape the way they tell the story. And I've given you an example of that from John; he's not interested in telling us what women were there then - he is interested in telling us this is New Exodus so he only mentions one of them and puts all the focus of his story on her - Mary Magdalen, Miriam. If you want to call that "having an agenda" and "manipulating" then so-be-it, but its what every story teller does whether they are John, a modern historian, or a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald. It's even what you do if you try to tell the bare facts - you have to be selective (what other agenda then drives your selection), and you have to ignore meanings to concentrate on those facts.
Western modernisms obsession on facts over other sorts of truth is highly unusual.
What do you want - people to invent things just so you can verify by your rules if they are true or not?
Again, that's a loaded question.
Not a tiny fraction as much as the real event would damage the local environment when it came in AD70.
There are quite a few enacted parables in the gospels. It's just that people have tended to reserve the word for the spoken ones.
You'll get a fair degree of discrepancy if they are genuinely independent accounts written close to the event, and thats even within a culture starting to get this obsession with the factual detail. Now its not likely to look quite the way you put it, but one account might simply say something like "he was shot by Booth in Ford's Theatre" and another saying "he was shot by John Wilkes in the Main Street Theatre", even to the point where there is disagreement about the number of shots, who witnessed it, the exact order of events, and so on. A process of reconciliation may iron out those details if allowed to and if there is a desire to. Go read about Wittgenstien's Poker - some of the (supposedly) greatest thinkers of the time witnessed the event, they all agreed something had happened and that it was significant, but none of them could agree on exactly what.
No, because in this case they are all accounts of a real event (or, at least, are supposed to be). But the way they tell that event will depend on the meaning they are bringing out in it - just as the historian telling the story of Lincoln's death will tell the story in a way that brings out the meaning he wishes to give it within certain boundaries.
The post is quite long enough without going off on extra tangents.
We don't need scientific evidence to tell us people don't come back from the dead. People in the 1st century knew that just as well as we do. The Resurrection is supposed to be an exceptional event, so looking at what normally happens is a category error.
The issue of whether the bible is reliable about the sorts of things it is supposed to be reliable about is meaningful. The issue of whather Song of Songs makes a good recipe for Black-Forrest-Gateaux is not.
There are a whole heap of reasons why I (and outside of N.American most of Chrisitanity) think the early chapters of Genesis are essentially myth - albeit true myth. Is anything served by going through those?
If all you are interested in is collecting what 20th century science calls "objectively verifiable facts" then we are probably wasting our time.
