11-30-2006, 09:22 PM | #681 | ||
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11-30-2006, 09:24 PM | #682 | |
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Thats what I wondered earlier... ...
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11-30-2006, 09:35 PM | #683 | ||
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11-30-2006, 10:03 PM | #684 |
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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That's not the point. The point is, citing one's own books is hardly credible.
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12-01-2006, 12:06 AM | #685 | ||||||||
Elf Lord
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You see, the return of Israel is strongly predicted in the scriptures. The current return of Israel appears to fulfill a certain batch of scriptural prophecies. However, there also is a large chunk of them that it does not fulfill, and in fact seems to go against. Because Israel doesn't seem to fulfill the prophecies of Israel's return from the scripture, I don't accept that this is the prophesied return in joy and peace, and full of the love of Christ, which many scriptures talk about. If I saw some prophet running around performing astounding miraculous signs, I would likewise reject such a person as the anti-Christ if he rejected scripture. The Jews functioned in much the same way as I do- we are alike in that way. Jesus didn't seem to fulfill the prophecies, and that made a huge difference. The Jews' whole faith was based around the innerancy of scripture, and there Jesus was seemingly breaking the role of Messiah. The Jews knew that demons had power and they believed Beelzebub also did, just as I do. I think that this is sufficient to make their rejection of Jesus, though tragic, not really "curious." Quote:
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My suspicion is that the Sadducees didn't care for the Christians, though. Jesus was as critical of their beliefs as he was of the Pharisees'. I'd like to know what your source is on that one. Quote:
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I'm not saying that any of this was written before Paul, but you don't have to be that early in your recording to be valuable as a corroborative source.
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 12-01-2006 at 12:08 AM. |
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12-01-2006, 11:45 AM | #686 | |||||||
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Also, a miracle may have started as a "true story": an apostle gathers a crowd and tells them how Jesus fed a huge crowd of people. Some might want to know how he fed them, and the apostle may say somehting about Jesus bringing bread and fish as a gift from the Lord (no specifics about how he obtained the foodstuffs) - as a part of a speech on the Kingdom of God or similar. Then the story of Jesus feeding a crowd of people wanders, spreads out through the lands, and by the time it's written down 30 years later, "the gift" has become a miracle and the crowd has become 5000. For example. We can't really know. Quote:
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12-01-2006, 11:47 AM | #687 | |
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12-01-2006, 03:06 PM | #688 | ||||||||||||
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What you're proposing the disciples could have done is just impossible. They were preaching to people who knew for a fact whether or not what they were saying was true, and they were preaching in the presence of people who longed to discredit them. They also weren't just speaking in poor areas- the Early Church was born in Jerusalem and stayed in Jerusalem, right under the noses of the highest circles of Israel's religious leaders, for quite a while preaching its message before it fanned out across Israel. But even out there there would have been other opponents of Jesus and Pharisees. Remember, he attacked them, the Sadducees, and the "teachers of the law." He attacked everyone in the education business, basically. They could not have made up many events (except those where they are telling about events that took place while they were alone with Jesus), and the record of NT accuracy shows this to be true. The idea that their message was purposely twisted or exaggerated in places also is just an outright ignoring of what I've already presented involving the content of the New Testament. They said things in the New Testament that they wouldn't have said if they were trying to attract converts, and didn't say things that would have greatly helped them if they'd spoken of them. These internal points from the texts themselves establish that they were seeking to maintain as high a degree of historical accuracy as they could. Archaelogical evidence and historical corroborative documentary evidence also shows that they did a very good job of it. Quote:
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My reason for citing all his credentials like that is just to show that though I don't have the exact quotes from the Talmud, he's probably right on this. Quote:
Also, when they take an ancient manuscript, they tend to automatically accept what it says unless proven otherwise, rather than reject it. So you see, the scholarly approach on this is entirely different from the one that you and many others mistakenly take. Quote:
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I talked with my history professor at college about the persecution of Christianity by the Roman Empire, and from what I recall of what he said, the primary reason people don't believe as much now that it was widespread (though they used to) was really that it spread so very fast. Modern scholars (unless I'm wrong in what I remember my professor saying) can't get their heads around the idea that Christianity could have spread so very rapidly in spite of ferocious persecution, so they assume the persecution was on a much smaller scale. Quote:
Besides, they corroborate the firsthand accounts, and we do have eyewitness accounts in the form of the Epistles and Gospels. Corroborative sources certainly don't have to be firsthand accounts to be useful information. But you won't accept either the firsthand accounts or the secondhand accounts, though most scholars tend to accept both. Not that non-Christian modern scholars accept the miracles, but they don't doubt the usefulness of those sources for gaining information about the Early Church and the history of that time period. They have proven to be highly reliable time and again.
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
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12-01-2006, 03:08 PM | #689 | |
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Falagar, I really think a lot of the problems you're raising are based upon certain faulty assumptions. I would like to outline three of them here, as I think that that would help us in this dispute.
One of the assumptions you're making is that 30 years is a long time, and even that three hundred years is a long time. By scholarly standards, 30 years is a very, very tiny period of time. A second thing you're assuming is that three hundred years is a long time, but scholars accept sources from much longer than that as generally accurate, anyway. A third thing you're doing, which I think is just a faulty approach because scholars don't do this, is come from the position that, "If there isn't sufficient evidence from other sources to back something written in this historical text, we can't trust it." Scholars, on the other hand, accept what is written in the text by default and only if evidence comes up that comes against it will they reject the source's information. Even if the source comes from hundreds of years later. That's how they deal with ancient historical texts, and it works for them. This is the process from which a lot of our knowledge of ancient history comes. Quote:
I want to see what the evidence is for the various claims that you have been making . Because it looks like while you're trying to present alternate possibilities to the case I'm presenting evidence for, and frequently fight the evidence I present, I think that so far, for the most part, you've done so by merely presenting questions and alternate possibilities rather than real data. I'd like to hear what the evidence is to support the suggestion that miracles in the New Testament came from a telephone game, or that the disciples presented one message to the people of Israel and then changed it for the Gospels and Romans, or that events in the scripture were exaggerated or purposely twisted, any evidence at all that supports any of these suggestions. I've provided evidence against these suggestions, but I haven't seen much of anything backing them, so I'm very curious to see what you have.
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 12-01-2006 at 03:33 PM. |
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12-01-2006, 04:48 PM | #690 | |
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Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. Nulla talem silva profert, fronde, flore, germine. Dulce lignum, dulce clavo, dulce pondus sustinens. 'With a melon?' - Eric Idle |
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12-01-2006, 06:22 PM | #691 | |||||||||||||||
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It's a interesting to note that the earliest jewish Christians, who actually had heard Jesus speak (as opposed to the gentiles, lead by Paul), wanted the gentiles to convert to judaism and follow the mosiac laws. They might also have had other divergent beliefs (I believe it was from here the Christianity in Egypt and the rest of the middle-east spread, and many of the forms it took differ with the ones the Christians in Rome and the West held to) Quote:
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Scholars never accept sources as completely accurate (there are lots of discussions on f.ex. Herodotes), but sources can be used in many different ways. Quote:
All I had time for now, could perhaps try to present some of my sources later (when I've recovered from this evening ). I rely much on the little I've read of the works by Bart Ehrman and Henry Chadwick + good ol' wikipedia (and try to add in what little I have of logic and sense in between). Got to run. Edit: Jesus this post was monsterous! (The worst being I could have written more o_O )
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Fëanor - Innocence incarnated Still, Aikanáro 'till the Last battle. Last edited by Falagar : 12-01-2006 at 06:29 PM. |
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12-01-2006, 06:49 PM | #692 |
Entmoot's Drunken Uncle
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Greetings all theologists!
I like religion. I am, by default, a Taoist, but I love Unitarianism. I'm gonna marry a Unitarian. |
12-01-2006, 09:07 PM | #693 | ||||||||
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Furthermore, I now have a quote from another expert who said, "The community would constantly be monitoring what was said and intervening to make corrections along the way. That would preserve the integrity of the message." This expert was Craig Blomberg. Here are his credentials: Quote:
"Yet look at what his opponents did say. In later Jewish writings Jesus is called a sorcerer who led Israel astray- which acknowledges that he really did work marvelous wonders, although the writers disputed the source of his power. "This would have been a perfect opportunity to say something like, 'The Christians will tell you he worked miracles, but we're here to tell you he didn't.' Yet that's the one thing we never see his opponents saying. Instead they implicitely acknowledge that what the gospels wrote-that Jesus performed miracles-is true." So I now have two experts who have made the point that the Jews claimed Jesus to be a sorcerer with magical powers. Do you think it's likely that they're both mistaken? On another issue, almost all the disciples ended up dying for their beliefs. You don't do that if you don't believe every word of what you're saying. Even if you're in charge of a large movement, if that large movement is based on lies, you wouldn't suffer torture and death just for that movement. Remember also what they said about liars going to hell . They'd just be the biggest and stupidest hypocrites imaginable. Quote:
What they wrote in the Gospels, they wrote at a time of strong division in the church over the issue of circumcision. There are a lot of ways they could have doctored the Gospels, if they weren't determined to stick to the exact events of what occurred. The fact that they didn't make the changes to the scriptures that would most have helped them to survive and would have helped other people to more easily accept what they were saying is a strong evidence that they were trying to be historically accurate. Remember also how they painted their own religious leaders! They made the disciples look like fools, never understanding what Jesus was saying and all running away when he was in trouble. These were the very leaders of their movement! There are a whole host of things they would have changed if they were not trying to stick to the history. Anyway, in view of all of these things that I've been posting about internal evidences from the scripture, will you at least agree with me that the Gospel writers were doing their utmost to preserve historical accuracy? Because that is one of the key points I'm trying to make, though I realize it doesn't respond to everything you're saying. Some of my earlier points in this post are more on topic to what your point is.
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
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12-01-2006, 09:09 PM | #694 | ||||||||||||||||||
Elf Lord
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Sir Frederic Kenyon, the former director of the British Museum and author of The Paleography of Greek Papyri, said that, "in no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest [ancient] manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament." Quote:
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And furthermore, we're still talking only about 60 years at the latest, and not hundreds of years as we are with other texts that are accepted as accurate. So the lateness is, in Craig Blomberg's words, "almost a nonissue." Quote:
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But it also is clear that Christian doctrines such as the Resurrection and crucifixion for the sins of the world are recorded as having clearly been around just two years after Jesus' death. You see, in Philipians 2:6-11, Paul says that, "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to the apostles." Now I'll shift into quoting Blomberg, again, where he talks about that creed I quoted above. Note that the creed says in the first line that Paul had taken it from some earlier source. Quote:
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
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12-01-2006, 09:12 PM | #695 | |
Elf Lord
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Jeesh that was a monster two-parter. I'm done on this thread for today .
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
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12-01-2006, 09:46 PM | #696 |
Entmoot's Drunken Uncle
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I don't really believe in Taoism, but my frame of thought falls into the category marked Taoist.
This means, I think that everything flows and any setbacks are not to be minded, because you will get back on top one day. My philosophy: "Work hard, smile at everyone, and life is your banquet." I like Unitarianism because their philosophy is basically "Believe whatever you want, but don't push your beliefs on others. Great. Awesome. Let's have a picnic." |
12-01-2006, 09:51 PM | #697 |
Fëanáro's Fire Mistress
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I know this is slightly off-topic but it DOES concern religion ....so there! anyhoo....I was thinking today, that the way things turn out is , indeed, strange! when I first joined Entmoot, almost 4 years ago (can you imagine?!)our dear Gwaimir was a non-denominational Protestant and is now, a Roman Catholic attending a Catholic collage. also, my wonderful hubby, who awas born into the Amish community and raised a non-denominational fundamental Protestant is now joing the Catholic Church (the Roman rite)! how strange! God indeed works in mysterious ways! I have always hoped that my children would attend Mass with BOTH their parents (instead of 1 like I always did), and now it shall be true!
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12-01-2006, 10:07 PM | #698 | |
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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I'm glad to hear the good news, Ari. I'll pray for your husband.
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12-01-2006, 10:14 PM | #699 | |
Fëanáro's Fire Mistress
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thank you! pray for me too, as I am his sponsor! it's a scary thought, but since as I'm the one who lives with hime, I thought I would be the best choice |
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12-01-2006, 11:07 PM | #700 | |
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No time for anything else right now, but...
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Fëanor - Innocence incarnated Still, Aikanáro 'till the Last battle. |
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