by towerwatchman 77 Replies latest watchtower bible
But the Greek language has no indefinite article corresponding to the English “a”, or “an”.
Like many other languages, the indefinite article eventually evolved out of the cardinal one.
To plagiarize Longfellow:
"Υπήρχε ένα μικρό κορίτσι, που είχε μια μικρή μπούκλα, ακριβώς στη μέση του μετώπου της."
John mann..."the map it's not the territory "....from whence originates 'the territory ' but the mind of man? unless there is evidence to the contrary.
Towerwatchman, I do not have Adamic sin or any other defects curable by holy beliefs. I have no need for fairy tales to give me existential hope. You make a grave error in believing that the scriptures are something which we should respond to.
I greatly resent the idea that I should be grateful to an unknowable god for allowing me to live! Listen to yourself and realize that you are thoughtlessly repeating tired old religious spin, something which can never be proved and therefore of no use except in religious jingoism.
Paul's words were useful in recruiting for the early Christ cult and therefore selected for duty in the Roman Bible to rouse followers to action. It is only the the poor peasants who were led to believe this foundationless nonsense. They ditched reason for an impossible hope in a saviour figure who was renamed Jesus around 175 CE. We have moved away from peasantry.
Name me one person who has actually overcome death as promised in the Bible. Two thousand years, countless billions of people born and still no results yet!
To Half banana
I do not have Adamic sin or any other defects curable by holy beliefs. I have no need for fairy tales to give me existential hope. You make a grave error in believing that the scriptures are something which we should respond to. I greatly resent the idea that I should be grateful to an unknowable god for allowing me to live! Listen to yourself and realize that you are thoughtlessly repeating tired old religious spin, something which can never be proved and therefore of no use except in religious jingoism.
There is an interesting thing about life, it is that it does not start with reason and ends with faith. A child’s mind is very limited and does not inform the child for the reason of her trust, but as she runs into her father’s arms she does so because of an unspoken trust that those arms will hold her. A child begins with faith that is then proven by reason. Over time that trust will be tested, and it is the character of the parent that will establish that trust to be wise. One starts life believing in Santa, The Tooth Fairy, Zeus, maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster but overtime reason proves them wrong. My faith has substance, it is rational, based on the confirmed knowledge that Jesus has proven who He claims to be, God incarnate. Some accept by faith, I by reason. My faith is not orphaned by reason.
What is considered credible ancient text?
Caesar written 1 century BC, earliest copy 900 AD, number of copies 10
Tacitus written 1 century AD, earliest copy 1100 AD, number of copies 20
Thucydides written 5 century BC, earliest copy 900AD, number of copies 8
Demosthenes written 4 century BC, earliest copy 1100 AD, number of copies 200
Homer written 9 century BC, 643 copies 95% accurate.
All considered credible by scholars.
New Testament 1 century AD [50-100], earliest copy 2 century AD [100-130] number of copies from antiquity 5000, accuracy 99%, partial manuscripts 19000, quotations by the early church fathers 86000.
What is the probability they got it all wrong?
And you believe it is not trustworthy?
It has been established that what we have, which was written in the first century is credible. The question now is, “Is it true?”
One example: It is an established fact that Jesus did exist, was killed and buried in Jerusalem. That the “Christian” movement did start in the city where He was buried based on the claim of His Resurrection. It is one thing to preach the resurrection of an individual thousands of miles, and hundreds of years from the event, it is another to preach the resurrection of an individual in the very city and the same time of His death, and not only succeeded, but grow into one of the largest faiths in this world. They could have easily been proven wrong by producing the body, or an corpse. Why was none ever produced?
Paul's words were useful in recruiting for the early Christ cult and therefore selected for duty in the Roman Bible to rouse followers to action. It is only the the poor peasants who were led to believe this foundationless nonsense. They ditched reason for an impossible hope in a saviour figure who was renamed Jesus around 175 CE. We have moved away from peasantry.
Do you have any proof of this?
Name me one person who has actually overcome death as promised in the Bible. Two thousand years, countless billions of people born and still no results yet!
Wrong, where does the Bible promise one overcomes death?
The focus of the chiasm of John 1:1-18 shows not only the objective of that passage but, given its location in the Prologue, shows that it provides the dominant theme for the Johannine Community.
I have provided three ways of presenting the chiasm, and each shows the same focus.
http://www.jwstudies.com/Chiastic_structure_of_John_1__1_to_18.pdf
The earliest Gospel – Mark’s – was composed about 40 years after the time of Jesus’ ministry. Matthew’s Gospel was written about 55 years after the time of Jesus. John’s Gospel was composed over a period from about 50 to 70 years after Jesus, while Luke’s Gospel spanned a period from about 50 to 90 years after Jesus.
None was or is a literal biography of Jesus. Each account represents the views of each community; each account was written by, to and for that community. Mark's Gospel provided a model and often the words, provided material for subsequent Gospel writers, but each modified the story to account for its own needs, its own liturgy.
No NT writing is a theological treatise. Any quibbling must be taken from the view of the Jewish mind at that time, not according to any current Westernised perceptions.
In addition to providing the views of its community, John’s Gospel provides an insight into the community’s experiences and their opposition to the views of other communities, often the leadership of the synagogue, whom they called “the Jews”. In reality, the community members were Jews but their experiences at the hands of the synagogue leadership embittered the relationship. I have previously provided one account of that experience.
Doug
I needn’t remind you that the gospel of John abounds with references to overcoming death i.e. eternal life through JC. Why do you want to prevaricate on this?
The first thing to realize when dealing with handwritten texts is that the human impulse to edit at each re-writing was almost irresistible. To imagine a divinely guided and protected sacred scripture is a religious fantasy.
You can see the process at work in the Gospels to which Doug Mason refers. As he said, Mark’s writings are the earliest and over time and with geographical distance between them, they were elaborated on. Note how the story of three wise men with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh were added to the later gospels. This colourful and clearly exotic tale was part of the Mithraic cult which came from Persia and more significantly applied to the virgin birth of the saviour Mithra (or Mithras as the Romans called him) about three or four centuries before the Gospels were written.
The saviour story had been knocking around for millennia before the first century CE. Variations on the same theme of a miracle god-man saviour with twelve disciples curing the sick and raising the dead and dying at Easter was a religious trope from ancient Egypt and dispersed throughout the near east including India.
It was expedient for the Christ cults of Judea and other Roman territories to capitalize on the myth and put a name on the hero which matched people’s expectations. Iasus was a name taken by initiates in the Dionysian cult who also believed their saviour was born of a virgin and died sacrificially on a cross at Easter (spring equinox). Iesus was also (I believe) a name of a messianic rabbi from Hellenised Judaism about a hundred years BCE.
I must contradict your assumption that Jesus actually lived and died. Outside of the highly biased gospels there is no incontrovertible secular corroboration that the saviour god-man Jesus ever breathed.
Such ignorant stories as a theatrical persona coming to life; a man from a story taking on a human body. . . exasperated the Roman authorities and as the Bible (this time accurately) records, “there are many Christs and many Lords”. Nevertheless, the poor peasants believed the rumour and became followers of the cult leaders, especially those with good food supplied foc.
Any man in the civilized Roman world who really could resurrect the dead would be an international celebrity overnight and would surely have been noted by the commentators of the day. Instead there is a deafening silence in the copious records of first century Rome.
Set these things in this context that virtually all forms of Christianity doctrinally speaking, have passed through the bottleneck of Roman Imperial sanctioning. That means that Emperor Constantine used the traditional Roman ‘piety’ or reverence for the gods to assimilate all prevailing significant beliefs and fused them into one imperial ‘catholic’, all embracing church as a means of political control. There is little mention of this 'catholicisation' of Christianity because it would have been counter- productive to show what trick was being played on the populace. The bishops were being paid handsomely to compromise. All pagan source material texts were destroyed as well by Imperial decree. All religions other than the Catholic faith were eventually banned and as Rome declined, Church authority rose under the papacy controlling doctrine with an iron fist.
No wonder the belief in the Bible as God’s holy word and the story of Jesus; the hero saviour of mankind took root in people’s imagination. Sixteen hundred years of indoctrination is a powerful persuader.
To Doug Mason
Well done, in all the years I have discussed John 1 a chiasm never came up. It is a bit ambiguous but I do see it there. I also agree that each Gospel had a target audience in mind. Matthew to the Jew, Luke to the Gentiles, Mark to the Christians in Rome, and John to the Jew and Greek. I also agree they contain topics that were pertinent to the community it was addressed to. Now after understanding the backdrop to which the gospels were written, we can take the lessons learned or taught and apply them to us. They might not be written as theological treatise but they do touch enough on the subject matter that we can learn and apply from them.
To Half banana
I needn’t remind you that the gospel of John abounds with references to overcoming death i.e. eternal life through JC. Why do you want to prevaricate on this?
This is your original statement.
Name me one person who has actually overcome death as promised in the Bible. Two thousand years, countless billions of people born and still no results yet!
There is a difference between ‘naming a person who has actually overcome death as promised in the Bible.’ Vs ‘overcoming death i.e. eternal life’.
Everyone with the exception of Enoch and Elijah, have died physically. With the exception of the rapture we are all going to die, the question is what happens next. We are all spiritual and eternal. Are we going to spend eternity in the presence of God or banished from God.
The first thing to realize when dealing with handwritten texts is that the human impulse to edit at each re-writing was almost irresistible. To imagine a divinely guided and protected sacred scripture is a religious fantasy.
Read again. New Testament 1 century AD [50-100], earliest copy 2 century AD [100-130] number of copies from antiquity 5000, accuracy 99%, partial manuscripts 19000, quotations by the early church fathers 86000.
Notice the amount of material there is to compare. Nothing in antiquity even comes close to the number of copies or partial copies. The idea that the text was manipulated over time is proven wrong by the fact that the material from antiquity is 99% in agreement with each other and with modern translations. The 1% is mainly the pronunciation of names of individuals or locations.
You can see the process at work in the Gospels to which Doug Mason refers. As he said, Mark’s writings are the earliest and over time and with geographical distance between them, they were elaborated on. Note how the story of three wise men with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh were added to the later gospels. Here is where imagination becomes fact.
Read
the account in Matthew, and you will notice that Matthew never mentions “three
wise men” but “magi” from the east.
Now for the facts about the magi. Something I wrote a couple of years ago.
The information that we do have comes from history, from the book of Daniel, and the Gospel of Matthew, of which Matthew is limited. Putting the pieces together using Matthew, Daniel, and other historians we learn the following:
They were members of an eastern priestly group which were decedents of a tribe that belonged to the Medes. They were part of the Medo - Persian Empire that conquered the Babylonian Empire who in turn was conquered by the Greeks, who was in turn conquered by the Romans.
The word 'wise' and 'magic' comes from 'Magi' which is an untranslatable word, it being the name of the tribe they originated from. They were a pagan priestly line among the Medes, involved in astronomy, astrology, medicine, math, the sciences and sorcery.
During the Babylonian exile of the Jews the Magi came under the influence of the Jews living in Babylon. According to the book of Daniel, [5:11, 29] Daniel was put in charge of the Magi, having a great influence on them, especially regarding Jewish messianic prophecy. Over the next 600 years some Magi believed in pagan gods and some remain loyal to Daniel’s God and looking forward to the coming of Daniel’s Messiah.
From the Babylonian to Roman Empires the Magi were prominent and powerful in government. In Daniel we read that Nebuchadnezzar appointed the Magi as advisors to the people and later during the Medo Persian, Greek and Roman Empires they operated as advisors to the Eastern kings, thus called 'wise men'. In the political landscape of the time the Romans controlled the west and the Parthians controlled the east. In the Parthian Empire there existed a ruling house called the Megistanes composed of Magi which had absolute choice in the selection of the king. The new king had to be approved by the Magi, and master the scientific and religious discipline of the Magi. The wisdom of the Magi was known as the Law of the Medes and the Persians. In the Parthian empire they controlled the judicial and the royal office of government. They were the king makers.
During Herod’s reign the Parthian rulers wanted war with Rome. Standing in opposition was their king Phraates IV who did not have the heart to fight, he was deposed and the Magi were looking for a new king and Herod knew this. They were the king makers looking for new king.
Herod’s title was king of the Jews given to him by Caesar Augustus. The objective of Herod's life was to get his little buffer state under control. Herod’s kingdom laid between two super powers the Romans in the west and the Parthians in the east. At this time Herod was close to death, Augustus was old, and Tiberius retired. The time was right for the East to start a war with the west, and Herod knew this, compounded by the fact that earlier conflict between the Romans and the Parthians were fought along the coast of the Mediterranean in the area of Israel and Syria.
These king makers rode into Jerusalem not on camels but on steeds accompanied by a contingent of approximately 1000 cavalry asking for the King of the Jews. When Herod heard that Parthian Magi king makers came into Jerusalem looking for a king, Herod was troubled. The king makers that deposed Phraates IV were in Jerusalem looking for the one born King of the Jews.
After Daniel many Magis took different roads worshiping false gods, but there was a remnant that still believed in the One True God. Somehow God kept truth seeking Magi, king makers in the Persian Empire waiting for the Messiah to appear.
The saviour story had been knocking around for millennia before the first century CE. Variations on the same theme of a miracle god-man saviour with twelve disciples curing the sick and raising the dead and dying at Easter was a religious trope from ancient Egypt and dispersed throughout the near east including India. This colourful and clearly exotic tale was part of the Mithraic cult which came from Persia and more significantly applied to the virgin birth of the saviour Mithra (or Mithras as the Romans called him) about three or four centuries before the Gospels were written.
Let’s ask the expert.
The following is from an interview with Edwin M. Yamauchi, PH.D. who has a doctorate in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University, and having taught at Miami University of Ohio for more than thirty five years. Yamauchi has studied twenty two languages, including Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Comanche, Coptic, Egyptian, Mandaic, Syriac, and Ugaritic. He received eight fellowships from Brandeis, Rutgers, and elsewhere, delivered eighty eight papers on Mithraism, Gnosticism, and other topics at scholarly societies, published over two hundred articles and reviews in professional journal, lectured at more than one hundred colleges and universities. His seventeen books include the 578 page authoritative tome ‘Persia and the Bible’ which includes his findings on Mithraism, as well as Greece and Babylon, Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins, The Stones and the Scriptures, Pre-Christian Gnosticism, the Archaeology of the New Testament, and The World of the First Christians.
Mithras vs. Jesus
Was Mithras born of a virgin?
“No, that definitely not true, he was born out of a rock. Yes, the rock birth is commonly depicted in Mithraic beliefs. Mithras emerges fully grown and naked except for a Phrygian cap, and he is holding a dagger and torch. In some variations, flames shoot out from the rock, or he is holding a globe in his hand.”
Birth in a cave:
“Well, it is true that Mithraic sanctuaries were designed to look like caves. Nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus described as having been born in a cave. This idea is first mentioned in the letter of Barnabas at the beginning of the second century. This tradition does not come from a dependency on Mithraism, but rather from an ages old tradition in Palestine itself of holy shrines in caves. There is no doubt that the Christian tradition does not stem from the Mithraic account.”
Jesus and Mithras born on Dec. 25.
“Again not a parallel, because we don’t know the date Jesus was born. The earliest date celebrated by Christians was Jan. 6. In fact it is still celebrated by many churches in the East. Of course, Dec. 25 is very close to the winter solstice. This was the date chosen by the emperor Aurelian for the dedication of his temple to Sol Invictus, the god call the ‘Unconquerable Sun.’ Mithras was closely associated with Sol Invictus; sometimes they are depicted shaking hands. This is apparently how Mithras became associated with Dec.25.
When did Dec. 25 become Christmas for Christians?
“That seems to be in 336, a year before the death of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity. We know that before his conversion, he worshiped Sol Invictus. We know for sure that Constantine made Sunday, or the Lord’s Day an official holiday, even though Christians had already been observing it as the day on which Jesus was resurrected. So it is conceivable Constantine also may have appropriated Dec. 25 for the birthday of Christ. We know that Christian emperors and popes suggested that instead of simply banning pagan ceremonies that they appropriate them for Christianity.”
Was Mithras a great traveler or maser with twelve disciples?
“No, he was a god not a teacher.”
Did Mithras promise his followers immortality?
“Well, that can be inferred, by certainly that was the hope of most followers of any religion. So that is not surprising.”
Did Mithras sacrifice himself for world peace?
“That is reading Christian theology into what is not there. He did not sacrifice himself he killed a bull.”
Was Mithras buried in a tomb and rose after three days?
“We don’t know anything about the death of Mithras. We have a lot of monuments, but we have almost no textual evidence, because this was a secret religion. But I know of no references to a supposed death and resurrection.”
Was Mithras considered the Good Shepherd, The Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Logos, the Redeemer, the Savior?
“No, again that is reading Christian theology into this.”
Was there a sacramental meal in Mithraism that paralleled the Lord’s Supper?
“Common meals are found in almost all religious comminutes, what is noteworthy is that the Christian apologist Justin Martyr and Tertullian point out the similarities to the Lord’s Super, but they wrote in the second century, long after the Lord’s Supper was instituted in Christianity. They claimed the Mithraic meal was a satanic imitation. Clearly, the Christian meal was based on the Passover, not on a mystery religion. According to Clauss’s book, ‘The Roman Cult of Mithras’, ‘The ritual meal was probably simply a component of regular common meals. Such meals have always been an essential part of religious assembly; eating and drinking together creates community and renders visible the fact that those who take part are members of one and the same group.’ The Christian sacrament is rooted in the Jewish tradition of the Passover feast and the specifically historical recollection of Jesus’ last acts, while Mithraic feast has its origins in Mazdean [Persian] ceremonies.
Other scholars’ comments.
Manfred Clauss, professor of ancient history at Free University in Berlin, said in ‘The Roman cult of Mithras’, “That it does not make sense to interpret the Mithraic mysteries as a fore-runner of Christianity.
Press L. Patterson in his “Mithraism and Christianity” [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921], 94. “There is no direct connection between the two religions either in origin or development.”
Gary Lease, professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and long time executive secretary of the North American Association for the Study of Religion, who earned his doctorate at the University of Munich and later occupied its renowned Romano Guardini chair for Theory of Culture and Religion states, “After almost 100 years of unremitting labor, the conclusion appears inescapable that neither Mithraism nor Christianity proved to be an obvious and direct influence upon each other in the development and demise or survival of either religion. Their beliefs and practices are well accounted for by their most obvious origins and there is no need to explain one in term of the other.
I must contradict your assumption that Jesus actually lived and died. Outside of the highly biased gospels there is no incontrovertible secular corroboration that the saviour god-man Jesus ever breathed.
Josephus 1 century Jewish historian and servant of Titus and his father Vespasian, wrote the following while discussing the period in which the Jews of Judaea were governed by the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate:
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.
- Jewish Antiquities, 18.3.3 §63
Cornelius Tactitus {54 AD -117AD] Annals 15.44 [Some words adjusted to modern English for clarity].
But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiation of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Chrestians by the populace. Christ, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most destructive superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in the capital, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of setting fire to the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed.
Pliny the Younger was a lawyer, author, and magistrate of Ancient Rome 61-113 AD
In a letter he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan around 112 AD.
“They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god,”
As to the rest of your post claiming that scripture was changed over time to fit beliefs, this is nothing new. It has been a long time claim that Christians wrote Jesus back into the OT over the centuries. Note at the time the oldest copy of the OT was approx. 9 century AD. This was proven wrong with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls [written 2 century BC to century AD] found in 1946, 47. Among the material found was a complete copy of Isaiah, when compared to the modern copy it was 99% accurate. Jesus was not written back into the OT but the verses were true to the original now as they were when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written.
May I suggest you read. "The Case For The Real Jesus." by Lee Strobel
Good luck
TWM
towerwatchman,
Thanks. The scriptures are full of chiasms, including Genesis 1. Sometimes a chiasm spans a whole document.
With Hebraic poetry, they were not interested with rhyming words at the end of each line, they were interested in paralleling ideas, either in agreement or as contrasts. (Look at the Psalms, for examples).
Thus when we consider a pairing, we need to see the commonality of an idea, whether in agreement or as a contrast.
The focus point of the chaism of John 1:1-18 lays the theme of the remainder of the Gospel, as for example with John 17:3.
Doug
How do you view John 17:3 when compared with Jn 1:1?
