Ernie: Point well taken. Actually you could fine tune the vocabulary even further. But I was commenting on Beal's essay and he used the term "contradiction" throughout, and my objective was to find another term that might include contradiction but which made it clear that, while there are some of those, the far more typical problem consists of incongruities, simple mistakes of record ( odd references to historical people of the same or similar names but not exactly who was intended by the context ), questionable after-the-fact interpretations intrinsic to the text, etc. I don't see all that many contradictions, but I do see a good number of "inconsistencies." OK, some are discrepancies, some are dubious equivalences even if they make a valid point, some are simple mistakes that really should not be made an issue of, and so forth. Heck, I now have a fairly new book about copyist errors in the earliest known versions of the Bible. Yeah, a whole book about copyist boo-boos. Well, all right. But none of this gets me all bent out of shape. For some Atheists, of course, "hey, look here, a scribe did not dot an "i" or cross a "t" and therefore the whole Bible is corrupt. Gimmie a break. There IS such a thing as substance. My humble opinion. Anyway, for all my enthusiasm for Mesopotamian religious antecedents of the Bible ( maybe more than you ever wanted to know ), the scribes who wrote on cuneiform tablets were just as prone to mistakes and "inconsistencies" and the whole nine yards. Human nature is what it is. A human being may be spiritually inspired but he or she remains a "frail reed." We would be well advised to make reasonable allowances is how I look at it. Final note : How, many creation accounts are there in the Bible ? Was just thinking that the 3 already mentioned need to be added to. Wisdom of Solomon is part of the Apocrypha, but it is in many Bibles, and it has its own take on The Beginning. And Genesis, not counting chapter # 1, has additional stories about the Origins of Everything. I'll guess that there are other allusions to Creation that escape me for now. Billy ================================================= message dated 4/22/2011 11:12:00 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: Hi Billy,
On Apr 21, 2011, at 12:47 PM, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: Yes, there are inconsistencies throughout the Bible. You see them from start to finish, from Genesis to Revelation. Two creation stories in Genesis, four versions of the life of Christ in the Gospels, and all sorts of "mysteries" in Revelation that just don't seem to add up no matter how much "math" you do to try and understand it all. I mostly agree, but I would use the term "discrepancies" rather than "inconsistencies". Discrepancy is an observable fact, but inconsistency is a matter of interpretation. I fully concede that the Biblical texts are full of discrepancies, but I wouldn't say that makes it "inconsistent" in the usual connotations of the term. Some discrepancies are undoubtedly inconsistent, but not all of them are, and sometimes the difference is just a lack of imagination on our part. -- Ernie P. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: _http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism_ (http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism) Radical Centrism website and blog: _http://RadicalCentrism.org_ (http://radicalcentrism.org/) -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
