by JH 59 Replies latest watchtower bible
In other words, if you can find a few errors in the bible, will you throw away the whole notion of the bible being "inspired by God"
Example: If you find any error in the bible, will it take away the notion that killing is wrong, or stealing is wrong,
So where do you draw the line, and accept certain biblical teachings and reject other biblical teachings?
I was almost 50 years old before I really knew anything factual about how the bible came into existence!
It is astounding.
I was reading it since I was a child never with a doubt in my head.
Why?
I was told by people I trusted (who had no reason to lie) that I could be confident the bible was the word of God Almighty.
And, it was as simple as that!
Even as a JW I had been given a peculiar way of thinking about the bible.
What way is that?
I was shown (in my first bible studies) how many errors had (here is the exact wording I was told) "crept" into modern translations. To resolve the contradictions, errors and subsequent doctrinal misunderstandings was necessary to get the PURE word of God out of scripture.
This was, I was assured, possible by consulting the early manuscripts.
Here is an important point to consided: As a JW I actually had been taught there were ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS. What was hidden from me by gobblety-gook and double-talk was the fact that they NO LONGER EXIST even if they once existed!
This means we have NO WAY POSSIBLE of determining the earliest (presumptively the purest) expressions, words, phrases and meanings of scripture.
Do you realize how vital this is??
Imagine a court trial where the evidence is unavailable and only hearsay remains. No lawyer would proceed and no court would allow such a hearing except in a preliminary venue. Why? Because the law requires BEST EVIDENCE.
People have been basing their belief system, their worldview, their confidence and their mindset on HEARSAY!
Don't take my word for it.
As you begin reading the history of scholarship from the 18th and 19th centuries (which I never did before) a clear picture emerges.
The Age of Reason overtook the world of Faith. A higher standard was demanded of religion. The Church had to present a logical presentation with something to back up their fundamental assertions. An argument (Apologia) explaining the authenticity of scripture had to be logical and the missing links filled in.
It is ironic that biblical inerrantists (people who declare the bible to be entirely free of error) complain that Evolution has missing links which render it unbelievable--and yet---base their belief on a document riddled with tens of thousands of demonstrable errors, gaps and contradictory renderings.
A theology student eventually faces the crucial moment in school when he/she discovers the truth about the bible. A crisis of faith depends on OVERLOOKING or EXPLAINING AWAY THE IMPORTANCE of the following.
1.New Testament word-of-mouth stories circulated by the thousands and were eventually written down.
2.To make these stories more acceptable/believable the name of an Apostle was attributed to them (which cannot be proved and was often disputed). The Gospel "according to" Matthew clearly reveals this attribution. Not the Gospel BY Matthew. etc.
3.Written Jesus stories ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, but, were circulated everywhere there was interest.
4.The Roman Empire had relatively few people who were literate. Religion stories were oral traditions as a result.
5.Scribes who copied gospel stories often were ILLITERATE themselves. Errors resulted. Copyists who could not even read were copying words incomprehensible to themselves. Many manuscripts were written with no breaks between words! Here is an example of how difficult this is to comprehend: thatthatisisthatthatisnotisnot. See? Imagine not being able to read and copying that by candlelight by hand. (It reads: That that IS, is. That that is not, is not.)
6.Deliberate changes in actual wording was the NORMAL way of things and not a mere accidental addition/deletion! If you were tired of losing arguments about a doctrinal matter you could simply add or delete words and put them in a bible character's mouth! (Think of the Jehovah's Witness trick of having Jesus say: "Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise." This instead of "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Pradise." Two different meanings. Well, there was NO PUNCTUATION to begin with!
7.The number one complaint in the early church was about scribal changes/additions/deletions and omissions!
8.So many variations in Christianity competed at the outset that a kind of war of ideology ensued. Scriptures sprung up to prove whatever variant wanted to prove Ad Hoc.
9.When the Roman Emperor became christianized he needed the conflict in his power base resolved for political unity. Orthodoxy demanded arguments over doctrine be settled. Councils were convoked to debate various issues of faith.
10.The declarations of these "official" councils split the church into fragments of warring belief systems. Even the Church of Rome split into two main religious bodies: Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox. This was over a single word concerning Jesus' substance!!
11.Whenever a Council declared something to be true (or false) manuscript copies were seized and burned that proved the other group's beliefs were true.
12.Censorship, oppression, arguments, persecution, exile, favoritism, political in-fighting and execution and torture became weapons of the majority body of Christianity.
You can read about all this if you go to your local library. You can catch the flavor of what kind of men created the Christian religion and be disabused of the colorful lies and false impressions you've grown up with.
Read Eusebius' history of the Christian Church. Figure out what kind of ass-kissing lackey he was. Even read what scholars say about the character and accuracy of Josephus and his twin versions of the same historical stories.
Honest scholars reveal these matters and lay them open to view. The word it out.
The Bible is a political result.
No intellectually honest person can truthfully hold the Bible to be inerrant.
Why?
Because an all-powerful God COULD PRESERVE an accurate book that reveals His divine word.
Now, follow with me here on this. Are you ready? Okay, here goes......
Since it is easily demonstrated that more errors exist in the New Testment alone than there are words IN the New Testament--it is clear that GOD DID NOT PRESERVE accuracy of rendering. Logically--God COULD--yet God DIDN'T.
Now what can you reasonably conclude from this?
IF GOD did not see fit to preserve what we call the bible as an ACCURATE rendering of actual words, events, stories of true happenings--then HOW can we base religious denominations on the translation of these errors and call it TRUTH??????
It is lunacy!
Think of how many doctrines of so-called pure truth come down to translating just one word or phrase "accurately" or according to some manuscript (which is from the Middle Ages and has been re-copied hundreds of times with variant renderings.)
Think of how the New World Translation alone manipulates the idea that there is a PURE rendering possible in presenting doctrinal variations from mainstream Christianity! John 1:1 is a clear example of diddling with the Greek language and pretending there is an absolute proof possible based on manmade rules of language.
Errors in the bible clear DO PROVE one thing which is obvious: THE BIBLE IS MANMADE from start to finish.
If we don't see that; if we don't understand that; if we don't comprehend the importance of that we are irrational ON PURPOSE!
Liars lie to steal reality. Good choices depend on reality. Bad choices are based on false reality.
The thousands of christian belief systems stem directly from the fact that the Bible can be anything anybody wants it to be--AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN MANIPULATED in its wording to prove manmade ideas.
The Apostles were not behind the words of scripture. God was not behind words of scripture.
The Bible is a tool of political power and it has conquered more people by disabling their minds than any weapon of technology ever created!
Only an honest consideration of the facts can wake us up out of our self-induced intellectual slumber to bring the consequences into view.
I implore anybody reading what I've now written to INVESTIGATE for yourself.
I suggest you begin with the highly readable book by Bart Ehrman: MISQUOTING JESUS.
In other words, if you can find a few errors in the bible, will you throw away the whole notion of the bible being "inspired by God"
You could believe that there's an invisible superman in the sky who used undetectable, unexplainable forces to manipulate the neural activities of a group of ancient tribal people so that they were compelled to write down the thoughts of said superman.
Or you could just believe that the collection of writings we call the Bible is the history, poetry, and mythology of the ancient Hebrew people, no more, no less.
If the latter is the case, then the question is moot. And if a person thinks that the former is the case, then I guess I don't really know what to say to them but, "ummm...okay"
Do you agree that, if there are errors in the bible, then it's all wrong?
Interesting question.
In other words, if you can find a few errors in the bible, will you throw away the whole notion of the bible being "inspired by God"
If the Bible is suppose to be inspired by God then assuming God is perfect like he claims to be then surely his Word the Bible would be perfect also. It makes no sense to me that he would go through the trouble of compiling & preserving this collection of writings written over hundreds of years only for it to be littered with errors.
The problem lies with the translation of it, its translation will be according to the relevant commitee and will interpret it how it understands it and therefore could unintentionally implant errors. So in my humble opinion its maybe not a good idea to be dismissive of this book if one finds inconsistencies or wording errors of any kind.
LFCV
A very similar question caused an issue for JS
12 Never did any passage of ascripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed bwisdom from God, I did; for how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know; for the teachers of religion of the different sects cunderstood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.
The problem lies with the translation of it,
How ironical that God himself established all these languages and doing so, his own word, the bible, can't be understood correctly.
Terry-Outstanding Post! Don't forget the equally insane notion that God ceased revealing Himsel/Herself to man because a bunch of religious polititians got together and decided to close the canon. The prevalent practice of "Bibliolotry" is a major impediment to the development of Spirituality. I've acturally run into people who believe that Jesus wrote the King James version of the Bible. Truth is Truth! There is much truth in the Bible. There is a bunch of other stuff as well. You know truth when you read it or hear it. Richard Bach, in the Master's Notebook portion of his work Illusions, says:
Learning is finding out what you already know
Doing is demonstrating that you know it.
Teaching is reminding others that they know as well as you.
Qcmbr, Lots of mistakes and errors in the book of mormon, thats for sure. Here is an article i enjoyed.
The trouble with the BOM
Despite 4,000 changes, Mormons maintain it is still the most correct book ever written - including the bible
Therefore, don't take our word for it, listen to how Mormon scholors explain away changes to the BoM while maintaining that it is the most correct book ever written:
"In 1837 Joseph Smith made several editorial changes in the Book of Mormon. Many are relatively innocuous, but one of them is much more substantial. In the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, the verse we know as 1 Nephi 11:18 reads:
And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of God, after the manner of the flesh.
For the 1837 edition, Joseph inserted "the Son of," so that the verse has read ever since:
And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh.
There is no way to know just what was on Joseph Smith's mind when he made that change, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people from trying.
However, when we focus on the fact of the change, we inherently begin to ask the wrong questions. Several authors have discussed this change as evidence of an evolving LDS theology of God. That very question implicitly supposes Joseph Smith as the author of the Book of Mormon by assuming that the Book of Mormon is evidence of Joseph's early thought. If we believe the Book of Mormon, it isn't. The Book of Mormon doesn't represent Joseph's theology--it represents Nephite theology."
To read the complete text please go to FAIR LDS.
-----------------------------
We at Life After Ministries wish to thank Mormons like Brant Gardner who wrote the preceding "defense" of his faith. We also wish to thank "FAIR" for publishing it on their site. We are happy to see Mormon Scholors so willing to give Joseph Smith, the proprieter of Mormonsim, the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, we call on FAIR to act in a manner consistent with its name, and instruct all Mormons, via its website, to be as pragmatic about judging the intentions of early Christian theologians as they are about the judging the intentions of their own.
Moreover, we are shocked that scholors from an organzation calling itself by the name of FAIR would start with a conclusion that the Book of Mormon is necessarily true and then reverse engineer the data to meet that conclusion (please note the underlined text above). Instead, we call on all Mormons to start with a hypothesis of "The Book is Mormon is Another Testament of Jesus Christ" and reasearch forward, letting the data prove or disprove the hypothesis of their theories.
In The Final Analysis
It would seem that sometimes the Church of Latter-day Saints is its own worst enemy. By making such unsubstantiated claims that "the Book of Mormon is the most correct book ever," they leave themselves completely open to criticism. It's almost as if the Mormon Church invites the criticism, likes the criticism, is more comfortable playing the victim rather than facing the obvious and confounding issues that dog the Country's 4th largest dominiation. Instead, time after time, it has been our experience, whether we're dealing with members, missionaries or leaders of the Mormon Church, that despite the "prophectic" claims from their founder that they would confound their enemies, the Mormon church as a whole, runs away from defending their faith despite the claim that they are "true church." We should think that members of the 'true church' could do as much. But such is not the case leaving themselves open to criticism.
So we thought it would be helpful to point out some of the changes to the BOM and also show where the Bible, in the Mormon's eyes, gets a bum rap.
Terry-Outstanding Post! Don't forget the equally insane notion that God ceased revealing Himsel/Herself to man because a bunch of religious polititians got together and decided to close the canon. The prevalent practice of "Bibliolotry" is a major impediment to the development of Spirituality. I've acturally run into people who believe that Jesus wrote the King James version of the Bible. Truth is Truth! There is much truth in the Bible. There is a bunch of other stuff as well. You know truth when you read it or hear it. Richard Bach, in the Master's Notebook portion of his work Illusions, says:
To even bring up this point open a can of worms why doesn't he just say things directly or through an angel so that it is undeniable.
Why even bother with the human element in the first place.
Oops ! I think you agree with me.
Since all religions are structured on human ignorance and understanding, the writings of the bible are a typical proof of that fact, the belief in gods was an element of strength and power
for men and you might say it gave men a sense of security. If you read the bible in its whole you'll find that god was the most leading cause of death and destruction and could hardly be
considered a god of love. You could say the bible is a history book of human ignorance and no its not the word of god, it was in written by imperfect men with the intent to possibly spiritualize
themselves. The bible in my opinion are written words of fable. mysticism with some placed history, but if you take in account when it was written in its era of human history it becomes
understandable of its content.
