Let us discuss HOLY

by Terry 57 Replies latest watchtower bible

Terry

If the autographs were not valued in their time so as to be discarded, why would anyone have valued them enough to make copies of them? If your assertion were true, we should have no manuscripts, no copies, no record at all that they ever existed.
You miss the point yet again!
My friend Richard bought a brand new Mustang in 1965 for under two thousand dollars. He got rid of it a few years later.
Somebody would gladly pay twice the original amount for that car today. Why? Because the car HAS ACQUIRED collector's value. It has accumulated a reputation.
What is it about that you cannot or will not understand?
The writings of Paul were just letters from a guy that contained useful information. Period. He was a helpful mentor, teacher and fellow believer.
Those writings were copied because they were useful. Nothing more. The originals were handed around and wore out or lost. No big deal. Why?
Because they had NOT YET acquired a reputation as INSPIRED! That came only with time and exaggeration and enhanced storytelling being pumped into the legend.
Marilyn Monroe was sort of cute, chunky and weird. Now she is a goddess and an icon. Same person. Time and legend-making have been at work.
We have copies allright. Copies that differ. The difference can be traced to alterations in text by "helpful" translators who thought they already KNEW what the text was TRYING to say. They "clarified" it and passed it on. Families of manuscripts contain telltale clues.
Thousands of helpful errors!
Terry

An interesting theory, but it strikes me as being ad hoc. It certainly fits the position you wish to advance. Have you any historical evidence for this process among the Jewish Christians? Because all of the early church history with which I am familiar tells a very different story.
What you have is Eusebius.
What you have is Josephus.
What you have has been addressed for a thousand years again and again and again by critics and apologists.
It has been honed, perfected, glossed, retrofitted and "fixed" with tens of thousands of scars and sutures, bandages and ointment.
Remember, it is the official history of the Catholic Church (the only "true" church) which gave us two thousand years of proof that God was guiding them alone with infallible truth.
Look at the history of what Catholicism actually DID and tell me you find them credible, honest and believable.
Judaism has suffered incalculable indignities, persecutions and violent blows which is proof enough in the Holocaust itself that God wants nothing whatever to do with them as a "chosen" people. Yet, they endure!
That which endures does not prove anything other than that it endures.
NeonMadman

So my question still is: how did the existence of supernatural evolve from something purely natural?
That, in itself is a presupposition, and a presupposition that turns all your other arguments into circular reasoning. You are presuming your conclusion by asking the question. Here's a thought: what if the events surrounding the life of Jesus actually were supernatural?
By the time the story is written down and recopied the transmission is subject to "pious fraud" whereby a perfectly honest persom with no malice aforethought tries to "correct" something and make it more understandable. Scribes did this constantly. The "clarification" makes the new copy changed. Any change is aberration. Aberration is counterfeit. With no originals we cannot possible weed out the layers of centuries of pious fraud by unintentional "helpers".
Well, then, by that standard, we should completely abandon the study of history, since absolutely nothing that has been written down in the past can be relied upon. Most people that I've heard make such an argument would never think of applying it to Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon or Hitler. THOSE histories are assumed to be accurate. Yet the same process you describe would have taken place in all eras of recorded history. It's only the history surrounding Jesus that people want to bring into question. And that goes back to the presupposition I pointed out a minute ago.
And, by the way, the science of textual criticism has gone a great distance of the way toward determining exactly what was written down in the original autographs of the New Testament. Even Bart Ehrman's work attests to this, if you examine his data apart from the conclusions he draws, which seem clearly agenda-driven. So while we don't actually have the originals, we do know with about 99% certainty what was in them, and the 1% does not affect any major doctrine of Christianity.
The apostles didn't understand a thing Jesus said or taught! That is continuously obvious.
No, that is obviously absurd. There were certainly things they didn't understand, but to say they "didn't understand a thing" is hyperbolic at best. John was present at the crucufixion. Do you really believe that he didn't understand what was happening. Do you think the apostles sat through the Sermon on the Mount and learned nothing at all? Have you ever been in a teaching situation where your student fully understood EVERY SINGLE THING you taught him/her?
What was written came AFTER. The were NOT present for the events in question. Take the garden of Gethsemane, for one instance. They were ASLEEP. Every one of them. Who was listening and copying down Jesus prayer to his father?? Nobody. Nobody at all. It is a fictional construction of a writer and nothing more.
You've cherry-picked a few events that would have had to be filled in either by eyewitness testimony (the apostles, for example, may not have been present when Pilate spoke to Christ, but certainly others must have been from whom they could have heard what was said) or, as the Bible writers would have us believe, by inspiration. But the apostles were present for most of the events recorded about Jesus' life, and they were certainly present at the post-resurrection appearances. The oral tradition that so concerns you was written down within the lifetimes of the apostles and their contemporaries, who could certainly have pointed out any embellishments. Paul at one point stated that there were 500 witnesses to the resurrection, some of whom had died, but most were still alive - in other words, 'go ask them'! It would be pretty hard to get a consistent story out of 500 witnesses if the story had no truth to it.
We have copies allright. Copies that differ. The difference can be traced to alterations in text by "helpful" translators who thought they already KNEW what the text was TRYING to say. They "clarified" it and passed it on. Families of manuscripts contain telltale clues.
Exactly. And that's why we can be virtually certain about the content of the original text. Scholarly studies of the differing manuscripts and comparisons among them show where the alterations occurred, and point us to the wording of the original. And I might point out that these differences are, for the most part, very minor - spelling errors, alternate wordings of the same idea, things like that. One text might say "Jesus Christ" while another says "Christ Jesus," and a third might say "the Lord Jesus Christ" - in the latter case, the word "Lord" would likely have been a scribal insertion, and in the first two, there is no difference in meaning. Only a very few variants actually affect the meaning of the text. There are no manuscripts out there in which Jesus was a Buddhist flute-player who lived in a tree house and wore a cape.
We are obviously not going to get anywhere with this discussion, because you have presumed your conclusion before you started. Your scenario that the Bible texts were not preserved because they were seen as of no value, yet were copied because they were "useful" is self-contradictory. Either the texts were seen as valuable by their original audience - the ones who held the autographs in their hands and read them - or they were not. If they were worth copying, they were certainly worth preserving in the original. Remember, these were documents that claimed to be inspired, to have their origin with God. Surely the original readers understood that and would have preserved them, if they believed the claim. If not, one would think they would have destroyed or suppressed them, as the Romans and Jews tried to do. But someone valued them enough to make thousands of copies and to distribute them widely. However, persecution and the ravages of time did not allow the originals to survive. That's why we don't have them.
Your illustrations about a 1965 Mustang or Elvis memorabilia don't really work, imho. We live in a time of mass communication now. Everybody knows who Elvis was (and everybody knew who he was when he was still performing). People in France, South Africa, and Japan all know who Elvis was, because of mass communication. The only way people in Spain, for example, would have know who Jesus was would be if someone traveled there, through great effort, to tell them about Jesus. That is the way the Gospel spread to the world. Numerous people within the lifetimes of those who knew Jesus personally, within the lifetimes of those who could call out any falsehoods or embellishments, believed the message enough to devote their lives to spreading it, and to die for it if necessary, as many tens of thousands did.
Terry

Well, then, by that standard, we should completely abandon the study of history, since absolutely nothing that has been written down in the past can be relied upon. Most people that I've heard make such an argument would never think of applying it to Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon or Hitler.
I'm sure you know that your analogy is a bad one because SECULAR history differs 180 degrees from SACRED. The stakes and claims are much higher.
The more outrageous a claim (miracles, angels, demons, resurrection, etc.) the greater the burden of proof. ARE YOU IGNORING THAT?
tec

The more outrageous a claim (miracles, angels, demons, resurrection, etc.) the greater the burden of proof.
Why? (Not being a smartass - sincere question)
Tammy
Terry

The oral tradition that so concerns you was written down within the lifetimes of the apostles and their contemporaries, who could certainly have pointed out any embellishments.
I've heard this one time and again it is quite ridiculous!
The Apostles did not have laptops, internet, newspapers, telephone, cellphones, skywriting or other technolog TO MONITOR WHAT OTHERS SAID, DID OR WROTE for corrective purposes!!
These stories circulated everywhere that people traveled. Strangers went from town to town doing business and told jokes, wild fish tales, news and the Latest Jesus story!
Try thinking about that. You are sure to change your mind.
NeonMadman

I'm sure you know that your analogy is a bad one because SECULAR history differs 180 degrees from SACRED. The stakes and claims are much higher.
The more outrageous a claim (miracles, angels, demons, resurrection, etc.) the greater the burden of proof. ARE YOU IGNORING THAT?
You demonstrate your bias even in the way you phrase your premise. Claims of the supernatural are "outrageous"? According to whom?
In fact, I suspect there is no threshhold at which there could be sufficient evidence to satisfy you as to the authenticity of the NT. Your mind has already been made up; no need to bother you with facts. You are proceeding from a completely naturalistic set of assumptions - that the supernatural does not and cannot exist. That being the case, it doesn't matter how much evidence there is for a supernatural occurrence; you will automatically dismiss that evidence as insufficient. I'd be willing to bet that if Jesus Christ appeared in your living room and sat down with you to explain things, you would convince yourself within a few minutes of His departure that you had been hallucinating.
A good example of this bias is your original premise that the ONLY REASON possible that we do not have the autographs of the NT is that they were regarded as of no particular value and discarded by those who possessed them - a claim which you later modified when I pointed out that if they were seen of such low value as to be discarded, it hardly made sense that people would make and circulate copies of them. You completely ignored the suggestion that the autographs might have been lost due to centuries of persecution in which one of the objectives was to destroy every vestige of Christianity, including its scriptures. No, that apparently made no sense to you at all - you have already decided ad hoc what the correct scenario was.
For those of us who do not proceed from such a materialistic bias, however, the evidence for the authenticity of the NT is quite compelling - many times greater than for any other ancient document. Nobody questions whether the writings of Homer or Plato have reached us in substantially their original form, however the manuscript evidence for the NT is many times greater.
The Apostles did not have laptops, internet, newspapers, telephone, cellphones, skywriting or other technolog TO MONITOR WHAT OTHERS SAID, DID OR WROTE for corrective purposes!!
These stories circulated everywhere that people traveled. Strangers went from town to town doing business and told jokes, wild fish tales, news and the Latest Jesus story!
It's true that they didn't have the Internet back then. Many did, however, have copies of the Gospels early on, since they were quickly circulated far and wide. And surely that circulation would have begun in the areas where the apostles lived and wrote. There would have been many in the early church who were personally familiar with the events and could have corrected any embellishments, and there was certainly great motivation to do so among the Jews, the Romans, and other opposers of the new Christian religion. In other words, there were both motive and opportunity to debunk the accounts of Jesus' life and work if they were untrue, yet we don't find such refutations forthcoming in history. Much as you would like to reduce the Jesus story to a series of folk tales, the manuscript evidence indicates otherwise.
Terry

You demonstrate your bias even in the way you phrase your premise. Claims of the supernatural are "outrageous"? According to whom?
Gee, I wish I could totally non-biased like...um...you!
The Supernatural is by definition beyond NATURE. Nature can be examined, tested, measured, quanitfied, explored. All of which gives us
the fundamental operation of "what exists". The Laws of Nature are what Science deals with.
The Supernatural, on the other hand, cannot be examined, tested, measured, quantified, explored. It is subject only to imaginary claims.
You, being a Mystic, hide behind what cannot be proved. This makes whatever arbitrary, capricious or whimsical idea you harbor beyond
reach in intelligent conversation, beyond logic and beyond comprehension except to yourself.
Your comments consist of niggling animadversion with a broad summation like a child knocking the pieces off a chessboard.
Holy is the topic of Discussion.
HOLY is an ABSTRACTION and not a reality. Mystical abstractions are a child's toy for the brain.
The attraction for people of Faith is that assertions by their favorite Guru, Priest, Shaman, God or Holy writ cannot be assailed directly due to
the illusory and titillating domain of metaphysical nonsense.
In other words: A reasonably intelligent person who knows the difference between what is real and unreal could not possibly ask the question you asked with any seriousness!
So, I'll deduce that you are indulging some personal penchant for colloquy by ranting on about bias when you know full well what nonsense you're
barking on about.
You posted the following list yourself. You might want to review the list and apply it to the SUPERNATURAL!
Below are a few examples of bad reasoning causing bad
conclusions.
Though humorous, the principles are based in truth.
REACHING BIZARRE CONCLUSIONS WITHOUT ANY INFORMATION:
Example: My car won't start. I'm certain the spark
plugs have been stolen by rogue clowns.
FAULTY PATTERN RECOGNITION:
Example: His last six wives were murdered mysteriously.
I hope to be wife number seven.
FAILURE TO RECOGNIZE WHAT'S IMPORTANT:
Example: My house is on fire!
Quick, call the post office and tell them to hold my mail!
OVERAPPLICATION OF OCCAM'S RAZOR (WHICH SAYS THE SIMPLEST
EXPLANATION MUST BE CORRECT):
Example: The simplest explanation for the moon landings is
that they were hoaxes. (maybe?)
INABILITY TO UNDERSTAND THAT SOME THINGS HAVE MULTIPLE
CAUSES:
Example: The Beatles were popular for one reason only:
they were good singers.
PROOF BY LACK OF EVIDENCE:
Example: I've never seen you drunk, so you must be one of
those Amish people.
BLINDING FLASHES OF THE OBVIOUS:
Example: If everyone had more money, we could eliminate
poverty.
TAKING THINGS TO THEIR ILLOGICAL CONCLUSION:
Example: If you let your barber cut your hair, the next thing
you know he'll be lopping your limbs off.
JUDGING THE WHOLE BY ONE OF ITS CHARACTERISTICS:
Example: The sun causes sunburns.
Therefore, the planet would be better off without the sun.
Terry

The more outrageous a claim (miracles, angels, demons, resurrection, etc.) the greater the burden of proof.
Why? (Not being a smartass - sincere question)
Tammy
I would never call you a smartass, Tammy!
Yours is the sweetest of natures and without any guile or mordant tone whatsoever!
Here is why a CLAIM must be accompanied by an equivalent proof.
One mind is asked to BUY (as it were) something from another mind and own it. The more costly the purchase the more skepticism and due dilligence is required lest there be a swindle in the transaction! Buying a used car, for example or a home...requires the seller and buyer to have a meeting of the minds on value. Inspections are made to the plumbing, foundation, wiring, termite damage, structural soundness etc. This is all perfectly obvious. But, when it comes to IDEAS and CONCEPTS that lie beyond the everyday world which are said to involve LIFE AND DEATH the same prudence and skepticism is required. No new ideas in Science can be accepted without the peer group being able to TEST the soundness of the idea by experiment. Science consists of statements which are framed so that they can be FALSIFIED if wrong. In other words, if there is no way to prove something wrong---it cannot be Science. It must be able to be tested and reproduced as verifiable.
NeonMadman

Gee, I wish I could totally non-biased like...um...you!
I never said I was unbiased. I'm pointing out that your conclusions are driven by an agenda.
The Supernatural is by definition beyond NATURE. Nature can be examined, tested, measured, quanitfied, explored. All of which gives us the fundamental operation of "what exists".
That sounds a lot like a faith-based presupposition to me. Or can you offer scientific proof that nothing exists beyond that which "can be examined, tested, measured, quanitfied, explored" ( and, of course, your unspoken qualification is that such testing, measuring, etc. must be accomplished by natural, physical means)?
The Supernatural, on the other hand, cannot be examined, tested, measured, quantified, explored. It is subject only to imaginary claims. You, being a Mystic hide behind what cannot be proved. This makes whatever arbitrary, capricious or whimsical idea you harbor beyond reach in intelligent conversation, beyond logic and beyond comprehension except to yourself.
Are you listening to yourself? You have set an arbitratry, essentially faith-based qualification as to what can or cannot exist, then you call ideas that differ from your own as "imaginary," "capricious," "whimsical" and "beyond reach in intelligent conversation." It's hard to fathom such arrogance.
And what's ironic, to drag this discussion kicking and screaming beak to the original topic, is that we are not even discussing the question of whether the supernatural really exists. No, we have been arguing about whether the books of the Bible were perceived as being sacred by those alive when they were written, an entirely separate question from whether the books were actually of a supernatural origin. Your original contention was that they were not perceived as sacred, and that therefore they were not preserved by those who received them. For some reason they were copied and circulated widely, and, of course, they contain specific claims to have a supernatural origin, but we are to believe that those who did all this copying and circulating didn't really believe those claims, but thought the books had some good stuff in them so they made copies. But apparently the good stuff was not sufficient to warrant preserving the originals after making all those copies. You have completely ignored the periods of intense persecution that I have repeatedly cited as the likely reason that none of the autographs have come down to us.
You know, one doesn't have to be a believer or a mystic to agree with my conclusions on this topic. I think that the most hardened atheist/naturalist who thought about the matter for five minutes would quickly conclude that the persecution scenario is a far more likely reason for the disappearance of the autographs than the reason you have proposed in your original post under this topic. Since you have made a positive historical claim, however, and given the preeminence you have assigned to physical evidence in your subsequent comments, I assume you can prove scientifically that your scenario is the correct one? Because without better evidence that you are offering, it sounds a bit more like wild, illogical, agenda-driven speculation to me.
You posted the following list yourself.
Did I? Certainly not on this thread, but I've posted lots of stuff on this board over the years. Can you provide a link? I don't remember it...not that I disagree with it.
Science consists of statements which are framed so that they can be FALSIFIED if wrong. In other words, if there is no way to prove something wrong---it cannot be Science.
I agree. Nobody is contending that the supernatural, if it exists, falls under the purview of science. The unspoken, faith-based assumption inherent in this statement, however - the statement that cannot be falsified, if you will - is that nothing exists that can't be quantified by science.

Let us discuss HOLY

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