by Newborn 38 Replies latest jw friends
Oh, and this has been asked before, but when Paul said, "All scripture is inspired..."
what scriptures did he mean? Certainly the OT, but which ones were in his canon.
How about the NT? None of it was written yet, so can it be applied to future texts?
Would Paul have thought his own letters were 'inspired' ?
There are many fictional books that make some references to real events in real places. That doesn't make the books themselves true.
W
Snowbird:
...containing a true Message that, with the passage of time, has been corrupted, distorted, and embellished.
Why would god let that happen to "his" book?
[inkling]
I believe I saw a special on exodus where it could've been based on a group leaving Egypt. Did anyone else see this?
Truth or fiction -- that is an overly simplistic division if I ever saw one. Fiction expresses truth about life that is difficult to express with non-fiction. And non-fiction is filled with illusionary forms of reality like ideology. What the disjunct is doing is opposing a literary genre (fiction) with a truth value (truth). That already expresses an ideology that only non-fiction can express truth. In point of fact, the Bible contains a range of literary genres -- including fiction. The book of Jonah is pure fiction as I previously showed in the forum; it is a satire, and like any ancient satire it has a serious point. It uses comedy to give a searing critique of the prophetic profession. By giving us the improbable example of a prophet who is simultaneously the worst of all time and the most successful of all time, the author is able to show us what he considered to be the moral flaws of the prophets of his own day. In my opinion, fundamentalists who see in Jonah a story that must be defended as a literal 100% historical report (such as trying to prove that a man could really be eaten by a fish and survive) completely miss the point of the story.
In contrast to this, there are the more purely historiographical works like 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, 1 Maccabees (in the Roman Catholic deuterocanon), Acts, etc. These compare rather well with other exemplars of ancient historiography. But these two have varying elements of ideology and "spin"; the authors of all of these have an agenda, and they present history only in one particular light.
And what is a "fulfilled prophecy"? Do you mean instances in which a description of past events is attributed to a figure who lived centuries before (as in Daniel and pseudepigrapha like 1 Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the Sibylline Oracles, etc.)? Or instances in which an anonymous prophetic writing was later copied onto a scroll containing a much older prophecy like the case of Deutero-Isaiah in Isaiah (in which case the "fulfilled prophecies" weren't even intended to be predictions, but were simply references to the author's own time). Or instances in which later authors were literarily influenced by the older prophecies and composed their stories with an eye to "fulfill" the prophecies (such as the author of Aramaic Daniel making a Mede responsible for the overthrow of Babylon [cf. Isaiah 13:17-19] or the gospel writers freely taking passages out of the OT out of context to make them "prophesy" Jesus [cf. the use of Jeremiah 31:15 in Matthew 2:18, although the original passage has an entirely different meaning])? Or other "fulfillments" that are similarly created through eisgetical interpretation (such as the Society's references to the events of 1914, the League of Nations, etc. as "modern-day fulfillments" of prophecy)? When I look at the gamut of prophetic interpretation in Jewish and Christian tradition, I see a whole series of "unfulfilled prophecies" that are reinterpreted over and over again to make them fulfilled. Tyre is not uninhabited to this day, Egypt was not made completely uninhabited, Antiochus IV did not launch a third campaign against Egypt, the "end of the world" and the resurrection did not occur in the second century BC, the "end of the world" and the judgment of the righteous and wicked (with the Son of Man seen coming on the clouds of heaven) did not occur within the lifetime of those who heard Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and the fall of Rome did not occur in the lifetime of John of Patmos, etc. Although there is an Deuteronomistic ideology that true prophets must have their words come true, the reality is that unfulfilled prophecies by "true prophets" (i.e. prophets believed to have been genuinely commissioned by God on account of their moral or religious stance) were readily tolerated, as these could easily be taken as fulfilled in some other more obscure, esoteric way, or fulfilled at some later time in the future. This is especially the case with the prophets' failed hopes for the glorious restoration of Israel -- these are continually deferred to the future. The Society's paradise-earth eschatology is entirely made up of unfulfilled prophecies that have continually been deferred for over two thousand years and which can be deferred indefinitely as long as there are future days to come.
such as the author of Aramaic Daniel making a Mede responsible for the overthrow of Babylon
This is new to me... Who was actually reponsible, and how do we know?
[inkling]
The bible of course is fiction mostly based off the frailty of human ignorance from when Gods made so much more decisive sense
of why the world is what it is, the bible is not the word of God as Christian religionists state, to not acknowledge the history of human ignorance
is an abrupt lie in itself. Just in similar to the profound statement that each of the hundreds of Christian based faiths claim
that they are God's only voice here on earth.
inkling....Cyrus the Great (and his military officers and lieutenants under him, especially Gubaru, the governor of Gutium, who was the commander of the army) was the one responsible, and we know this from records from the era -- including by Cyrus himself (as well as later accounts, such as that of Xenophon). There have been many attempts to identify Daniel's "Darius the Mede" with a historical figure like Gubaru, but all of these imo fail because "Darius the Mede" is a confused amalgam of several different figures (Gubaru, Cambyses, and Darius Hystaspes). Daniel presents "Cyrus the Persian" as the successor of "Darius the Mede", and Darius as an autocrat over a vast empire of 120 satrapies -- whose kingdom intervened between the Babylonian empire of Nebuchanezzar and his grandson Belshazzar (whereas Nabonidus was a usurper and Belshazzar was his son) and the Persian empire of Cyrus and Xerxes. This just doesn't fit with any known figure. Gubaru was a Persian (as stated in the Behistun Inscription), not a Mede, and he did not have any kind of autocratic power over a large empire. The establishment of many satrapies fits very well with what Darius Hystaspes did, but he ruled quite some time later. The author may also have been influenced by the fact that prior to Cyrus the Great, there was indeed a Median empire that he had to conquer -- such that his Persian kingdom succeeded this earlier Median kingdom. But the Median kingdom of Cyaxares and Astyges was concurrent with the Neo-Babylonian kingdom in the west; it did not supplant it, as claimed in Daniel. This is just one facet of the overall picture that the author(s) of Daniel had a far more intimate and accurate knowledge of the second century BC than the sixth century BC when the prophet supposedly lived. When all the indications are all added together, the cumulative effect is very substantial.
Ahh, ok. Thanks for the enlightenment, as allways
According to me, it's fiction, and every word I say is true, because I say it is.
Others have addressed the false claims of "fulfilled prophecy." I want to add other reasons to doubt the veracity of the Bible. The lack of physical evidence and the lack of third-party corroboration of Biblical "events." Then there are the logical inconsistencies, like how did kangaroos get from Mount Ararat to Australia? They must have taken a cruise ship, because there's no evidence of the more than 63 different members of the kangaroo family anywhere but Australia and New Guinea. 'Tis a pity the middle eastern goatherds didn't know about the existence of Australia and kangaroos.
The bible tells us that millions of Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years. Why is it that we can find absolutely NO TRACE of their passage? Modern radar scanning has led to the discovery of ancient trade routes, dessicated rivers and small camps where a couple of people may have spent the night ages ago, but NOTHING indicating that millions of Israelites wandered, hunted, ate, threw away garbage, emptied their bowels and buried their dead anywhere in that desert. Jehovah must have been following after them with his anti-matter vacuum cleaner.
The Egyptians don't mention the exodus in their histories. Nations around Israel don't mention the magnificence of the sons of Jacob.
There may have been a time in the distant pass when the stories that goatherds told around campfires provided an evening's entertainment and passed on tribal cultural values.
When archaeologists of the Victorian era set out on expeditions based on the stories they learned in Church, they returned home empty-handed.
The primary message of the bible is that people will believe anything.
