Actually, Christian faith is not a "winner take all" primary. While there are no perfect analogies, politics comes about as close as things get. I'm sure you would agree that the Republican Party is not flawless. Therefore, since some of it is bad news abandon all of it ? Anyway, who said that since the Bible includes some errors therefore abandon Christian faith ? Jeepers creepers, a standard of perfection and no church would have a pastor, no denomination would exist, and no world religion could exist. For some odd reason I just don't see things that way. I will take something good even if it has warts, so to speak, acknowledge the warts, and be thankful for all that is genuinely good. This puts a premium on critical mindedness, on working to make my judgment as good as I can make it, and on a sense of responsibility in making decisions about spiritual things, but this is almost like saying that I take the Apostle Paul seriously. "Test all things, hold fast to what is good." He did not say, "test nothing, insist that there are no errors even when there are, and forget about the responsibility to make the best judgements open to you." Billy =============================== 3/6/2012 7:00:04 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, [email protected] writes:
So we should abandon Christianity because we cannot trust the Bible?? David _ "It seems as though you can't go a week without some idiotic myrmidon yelling, 'there oughta be a federal law!'"—Neal Boortz On 3/6/2012 11:13 AM, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: The following article is a typical Evangelical evasion ; accepted doctrine says that the Bible is error free, therefore any and all conclusions that one's "scholarship" arrives at will always take the view that the Bible contains no mistakes of substance, let alone moral failures --viz, God supposedly directing Joshua to slaughter the populations of entire city states. For sure, at least this is what scholarship of my own tells me, most of the Bible is as reliable as any ancient book gets. Compared to its competition the Bible is superior to just about everything else, especially to the Koran, even if we can debate the relative value of a good number of Buddhist sutras since while they are mostly ahistorical in character and do play games with history now and then, they are rather different and mostly are about human psychology. But to claim substantive inerrancy for the Bible is ridiculous and more than anything shows complete ignorance of the entire range of critical literature about the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Just a few examples : The Book of Joshua has the Sun stand still in the sky for many hours so that a battle can be concluded favorably. This is scientifically impossible and rests on the false assumption that the Sun revolves around the Earth. A contradiction is an error and here is a doozy that Atheists like to cite : Gen 32:30 states, "...for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." However, John 1:18 states, "No man hath seen God at any time..." Both statements cannot be true. Either there is an error of fact, or an error of translation. In either case, there is an error. --This is from a Free Thought website, but let me add that the author of John was making a strong theological point and in the process overlooked the fact that the OT --Hebrew Bible-- presents about 20 cases of God walking among human beings, face to face. Not getting facts strait is a common problem , for example : 2 Samuel 8:3-4 says "David smote also Hadadezer...and took from him...seven hundred horsemen..." 1 Chronicles 18:3-4 says "David smote Hadarezer...and took from him...seven thousand horsemen..." There are a good number of similar discrepancies in a number of Biblical books. Then there are "problems" that are unresolvable, like discrepancies in the genealogies in Matthew and Luke, and passages in Exodus that describe the Israelites as a mixed multitude needing rules for intermarriage but accepting it as part of the social order, vs Ezra and Nehemiah's condemnations of ANY intermarriage, etc Which is just a modest warm up. The Bible has literally hundreds of errors, large and small. Inerrant ? Not a chance. The task is to sort out the false from the true, even if there is far more true than otherwise. The Bible is a treasure. But it is not error free. What some Evangelicals are willing to concede, that there are trivial mistakes in some passages due to copyist errors in the Medieval era, really isn't a consideration. Even hard core Atheists are willing to give the Bible a pass on these minor issues. The problem is that there are errors of substance in the book, a lot of such errors, and we need to be clear about what these are so that we can focus on what is true and good. Pretense that the Bible is free from all errors of substance is no different than lying to one's self and then lying to others to compound the problem. Billy ============================================= Christian Post March 6, 2012 What to Say When Someone Says "The Bible Has Errors" By Jonathan Dodson Most people question the reliability of the Bible. You’ve probably been in a conversation with a friend or met someone in a coffeeshop who said: â €œHow can you be a Christian when the Bible has so many errors?†How should we respond? What do you say? Instead of asking them to name one, I suggest you name one or two of the errors. Does your Bible contain errors? Yes. The Bible that most people possess is a translation of the Greek and Hebrew copies of copies of the original documents of Scripture. As you can imagine, errors have crept in over the centuries of copying. Scribes fall asleep, misspell, take their eyes off the manuscript, and so on. I recommend telling people what kind of errors have crept into the Bible. Starting with the New Testament, Dan Wallace, New Testament scholar and founder the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, lists four types of errors in _Understanding Scripture: An Overview of the Bible’s Origin, Reliability, and Meaning._ (http://www.wtsbooks.com/product-exec/product_id/8193/nm/Understanding+Scripture:+An+Overview+of +the+Bible's+Origin,+Reliability,+and+Meaning+(Paperback)?utm_source=jdodson &utm_medium=blogpartners) Types of Errors 1) Spelling & Nonsense Errors. These are errors occur when a scribe wrote a word that makes no sense in its context, usually because they were tired or took their eyes off the page.Some of these errors are quite comical, such as "we were horses among you" (Gk. hippoi, "horses," instead of Ä“pioi, "gentle," or nÄ“pioi, "little children") in 1 Thessalonians 2:7 in one late manuscript. Obviously, Paul isn’t saying he acted like a horse among them. That would be self-injury! These kinds of errors are easily corrected. 2) Minor Changes. These minor changes are as small as the presence or absence of an article "the" or changed word order, which can vary considerably in Greek. Depending on the sentence, Greek grammar allows the sentence to be written up to 18 times, while still saying the same thing! So just because a sentence wasn’t copied in the same order, doesn’t mean that we lost the meaning. 3) Meaningful but not Plausible. These errors have meaning but aren't a plausible reflection of the original text. For example, 1 Thessalonians 2:9, instead of "the gospel of God" (the reading of almost all the manuscripts), a late medieval copy has "the gospel of Christ." There is a meaning difference between God and Christ, but the overall manuscript evidence points clearly in one direction, making the error plain and not plausibly part of the original. 4) Meaningful and Plausible. These are errors that have meaning and that the alternate reading is plausible as a reflection of the original wording. These types of errors account for less than 1% of all variants and typically involve a single word or phrase. The biggest of these types of errors is the ending of the Gospel of Mark, which most contemporary scholars to not regard as original. Our translations even footnote that! Is the Bible Reliable? So, is the Bible reliable? Well, the reliability of our English translations depends largely upon the quality of the manuscripts they were translated from. The quality depends, in part, on how recent the manuscripts are. Scholars like Bart Ehrman have asserted that we don't have manuscripts that are early enough. However, the manuscript evidence is quite impressive: * There are as many as eighteen second-century manuscripts. If the Gospels were completed between 50-100 A.D., then this means that these early copies are within 100 years. Just last week, Dan Wallace announced that a new fragment from the Gospel of Mark was discovered dating back to the first century A.D., placing it well within 50 years of the originals, a first of its kind. When these early manuscripts are all put together, more than 43% of the NT is accounted for from copies no later than the 2nd C. * Manuscripts that date before 400 AD number 99, including one complete New Testament called Codex Sinaiticus. So the gap between the original, inerrant autographs and the earliest manuscripts is pretty slim. This comes into focus when the Bible is compared to other classical works that, in general, are not doubted for their reliability. In _this chart of comparison_ (http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/02/08/earlier-fragment-of-marks-gospel-rumored-to-be-found/) with other ancient literature, you can see that the NT has far more copies than any other work, numbering 5,700 (Greek) in comparison to the 200+ of Suetonius. If we take all manuscripts into account (handwritten prior to printing press), we have 20,000 copies of the NT. There are only 200 copies of the earliest Greek work. * This means if we are going to be skeptical about the Bible, then we need to be 1000xs more skeptical about the works of Greco-Roman history. Or put another way, we can be 1000 times more confident about the reliability of the Bible. It is far and away the most reliable ancient document. What to Say When Someone Says “The Bible Has Errors†. So, when someone asserts that the Bible says errors, we can reply by saying: “Yes, our Bible translations do have errors, let me tell you about them. But as you can see, less than 1% of them are meaningful and those errors don’t affect the major teachings of the Christian faith. In fact, there are 1000 times more manuscripts of the Bible than the most documented Greco-Roman historian by _Suetonius_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suetonius) . So, if we’re going to be skeptical about ancient books, we should be 1000 times more skeptical of the Greco-Roman histories. The Bible is, in fact, incredibly reliable.†Contrary to popular assertion, that as time rolls on we get further and further away from the original with each new discovery, we actually get closer and closer to the original text. As Wallace puts it, we have "an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the biblical documents." Therefore, we can be confident that what we read in our modern translations of the the ancient texts is approximately 99% accurate. It is very reliable. -- -- 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
