Posts by kepler

22

Inspiration, inscripturation

by Doug Mason in

the apostle paul stated at 2 timothy 3:16: all scripture is inspired of god.

the phrase inspired of god translates the compound greek word theopneustos, meaning, literally, god-breathed or breathed by god.

this is the only occurrence of this greek term in the scriptures.

New light!, says JW-Archive. The inspired word can have mistranslations, says Dec 2015 WT

by StarTrekAngel in

sorry, i know i posted this earlier but i believe the title did not gather enough attention.

i think is a topic worth discussing.. http://www.jw-archive.org/post/127866869178/new-light-the-inspired-word-of-god-can.

You've provided some interesting background on text origins and variations already, but I hope that you might share a few more observations. I started looking at some Dead Sea scroll summaries, but didn't get very far. One of the things I wondered about was what a document like the Isaiah scroll might show us: i.e., how it might differ from the Masoretic texts that were compiled later on. Did the Isaiah scroll say much the same in Hebrew as what the Septuagint did? Or is it different?

18

Oh my God, I now have proof that Adam was made from dust.

by James Mixon in

bro.

e. soriano set matters straight for me.. you people alleged that the creation of adam is an "anti-scientific nonsense; and god did not.

create adam from a handful of dust, like the bible says, (ok maybe a bucket full).

kepler

OK.... So what was going on in chapter one around verse 26. The poetic description in the first chapter sounds more scientific than the prosaic one in the next. And by the way, how big is God's hand?

14

What did early Christians believe about the dead?

by fulltimestudent in

as witnesses we were truly convinced that we knew the truth about the dead.

they were truly dead, and we often quoted ecclesiastes 9:4-6, our favourite proof text on that topic, to prove the point.

that text reads (just in case you've already forgotten it - smile), (from the niv):.

kepler

Without saying specifically what was the consensus back at the BC-AD transition, I've noticed in reading Josephus that there were both adherents to an afterlife and not among the three communities he mentions: the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes. Judea was surrounded by civilizations that differed on this matter too. The Mesopotamian valley peoples such as Sumerians and early Assyrians thought of man as mortal. The Egyptians were obviously obsessed with the after life. Persians had a view about the after life - and about the battle of good and evil - Zoroastrianism. And the Greeks offered Platonism and a host of other philosophies that included after-lifes. Some offered resurrection; others, not.

All of these civilizations over ran or influenced Judea.

A hung jury was the status when Christianity arrived on the scene. It was influenced, but made some calls of its own.

34

Hebrew Was The First Language

by Bloody Hotdogs! in

according to the newest watchtower:.

jehovah communicated with adam in the garden of eden, using human language.

god likely did so in an ancient form of hebrew.

kepler

Yeah, so aside from claiming that Adam read Haaretz over his morning cup of coffee, ...

I'm not a linguist and I don't play one on TV, but now and then I do study languages. I am aware that Hebrew is a Semitic language and that makes it a relative of other languages in the area with civilizations that came on the scene millennia before anything was derived from Abraham's covenants or migrations. Egyptian was not Semitic. It's got more in common with present day Coptic. But many of the peoples of Mesopotamian were. If you study Babylonian, you see a lot of cognates. Ditto with Arabic, though what it was doing before Islam is not clear to me. Sumerian was not Semitic, however, and it precedes in cuneiform tablets much of the later Mesopotamian writings. We have grammars of Sumerian contributed from Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets. So that gives us two languages that really crowd the fundamentalist's clock. The trouble with Hebrew is that it looks like it was borrowed or derived from what Canaanite peoples were speaking. Writings in the Bible, it is difficult to determine how old the original stories are, but when they are submitted to writing, they become dated by many of the anachronisms they include when describing events that supposedly occurred earlier. Camel caravans in Genesis, for example, is an anachronism. They arrived with Assyrian conquests. The Hebrew calendar borrows from Babylon ( rather than the Egyptian which is solar) and the months sound much the same, almost with as much affinity as the Arabic calendar does to the Hebrew.

These are not conclusive arguments that Hebrew isn't the oldest language, but arguments I would counter to such claims.

Another, speaking of Australia, as we have been so much of late, is what did aboriginal people of Australia speak? There is not a single reference to Australia in the Bible and yet cultures in New Guinea and Australia date back tens of thousands of years. ... I guess these societies must have been talking in original Hebrew and had never realized until the WT authorities helpfully pointed it out.

34

Hebrew Was The First Language

by Bloody Hotdogs! in

according to the newest watchtower:.

jehovah communicated with adam in the garden of eden, using human language.

god likely did so in an ancient form of hebrew.

kepler

Usually the old saw is that you can't make s**t like this up, so it has to be true story.

But actually quite the opposite. Some group has to sit down and make this stuff up and decide to write an article about it.

And under whose direction is this concoction dreamed up and set in print?

Why the governing board member in charge of writing, that friend of letters that dropped out of school at 15 to spread the WORD.

I wonder how much lead time there was on this article? How much review was there?

If he had been asked by the Royal Commission whether Hebrew was the original language from the Garden of Eden, would he have suggested that that claim might have been "presumptuous" too?

22

What Qualifications does Geoffrey Jackson have as a Translator of the Bible ? In any Capacity ?

by smiddy in

geoffrey jackson left school at the age of 15 and began pioneering , he never attended a university ,never studied ancient greek ,hebrew or aramaic at any recognized teaching academy , he has no certificates or credentials / qualifications from any place of learning that is approved by a competent body of religious instruction .. and by his own words at the australian royal commission , under oath he stated that was his primary role as a translator of scripture into other languages .. a 15 year old drop out from school in australia is the chief/ prime translator of the bible for jehovah`s witnesses world wide in their many languages that they preach in .. it would be very interesting to see his report cards for those few years he did attend school .. is it just me , or does anybody else see that his qualifications don`t come up to scratch to be a translator of the old testament or the new testament scriptures , and be taken seriously as a translator of either , into any language.. if i am wrong anywhere in this post feel free to correct me .. smiddy.

kepler

Raised the same question elsewhere. He's been involved with some translation from English to Micronesian tongues, OK. But about Hebrew or Greek to English? His arguments on stand reminded me of Humpty Dumpty.

"The words mean whatever I say they mean."

Years ago, cartoonist Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo ( a talking Possum living in a Florida swamp) and a disciple of Tenniel, caricatured J. Edgar Hoover as a bulldog with the FBI chief's face. In a small box he kept trained spider that infiltrated into books serving as asterisks. ( Did I see something about asterisks in the RC transcripts?).

J. Edgar in the cartoon said pretty much the same as Jackson. "He who controls the asterisks controls the meaning of the word."

And you could look at WatchTower as one of the world's biggest manufacturers of asterisks.

One of Pogo's friends observed, "Hey, I thought spiders had 6-legs!"

"Yes," reflected J. Edgar, "that was two too many...."

10

SOLA SCRIPTURA VS THE MAGISTERIUM

by Nicholaus Kopernicus in

the reinvention of the magisterium.

in catholicism, the magisterium is the authority that lays down what is the authentic teaching of the church.

for the catholic church, that authority is vested uniquely in...... a) the pope and.

kepler

Nicolaus K., Half Banana,

Want to thank you for starting and contributing to such a great topic. And nice book by the way back when, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. I know a guy who used to swear by it. namely...

Since I'm on short break, wish there was more time to reflect on this topic. But what time and inspiration allows:

Some of this is fresh from reading an account of the Reformation; other points from events leading to this forum.

1. Outside of JW-land, Magisterium vs. Sola Scripta sounds like a simple dichotomy; but I suspect that only narrow sects or sectors of Christianity adhere to it these days in pure form. Even during the Reformation when armies rallied to the latter, the leaders of the movement such as Luther and Calvin took exception to many doctrines. Both Luther and Calvin clearly had reservations about Revelations. The former questioned its validity in an introduction to his German NT and Calvin, a graphomaniac when it came to Biblical book commentaries, provides us with not a single word on the same. Both seemed to think they were living in the last days - and couldn't agree with each other on fundamentals. Even more: with the given shared assumption, they seemed to distrust the principal bearer of such message.

2,The Magisterium doctrine - perhaps - might have come out of a church history of "been there and done that". Athanasius of Alexander in the late 3rd century was one of the first proponents of a unified scriptural canon, Old and New and the ratification awaited another century in general councils of bishops in Asia Minor, not the Goth over run west. Most of the western church's philosophy came through the filter of Latin speaking Augustine. And when it came to Bible, he was straining with some of the same inconsistencies that trouble anyone who takes an analytical approach about it today. For one, he couldn't figure out how Methuselah fit Flood chronology. (He was probably aware that Eusebius couldn't get ancient histories of the world to match from one language collection to another). And at one point he just gave up and said that if pagan observers of nature could counter the "physics"and origins derived from scripture - accept it.

3.Can you see where I am going with this? The catholic church of antiquity was not interested in sending martyrs to be broken on a wheel over whether or not Joshua had an extra day of daylight from a fixed sun. On the other hand, a political trial of Galileo a millennium or more could involve submitting such evidence for heresy to contain a public nuisance. Meanwhile, Jesuits occupied themselves with pursuits telescopes charting a Copernican system no matter what the trial outcome was.

But you can imagine how Galileo and Copernicans stood with the Sola Scripta group at the time. They had even less interest, no contribution to the study and had no need to bother with a trial.

4.The Magisterium principle does provide an exit for an untenable situation. Inerrancy is obviously wrong if you can identify explicit internal contradictions or contradiction of observable facts. Authorship and origin is another problem. But yet if every book of the Bible were subjected to strict scientific and historical scrutiny, we might have an effect like a raccoom washing a lump of sugar in a creek.

5. This is all the heritage that we have. And we have to make of it what we can. And part of that is what are we going to do on Earth or in life after the birth and passage of Jesus Christ. The modern era Catholic Church would have us concentrate more on Matthew 25 vs. Matthew 24. Its liberation theologists in Latin America would have us address the inequities of rich and poor, miscarriage of justice... That's where there Magisterium seems to be headed after some moral and philosophical train wrecks.

10

PM to Geoffrey Jackson ( with cc-s): Read the NWT, especially Judges Chapter 4 vs. 1-20 or so

by kepler in

dear sir: .

regarding your recent testimony in australia on the nature of judges and elders in scriptures being male:.

read judges 4, and if you can hang on, chapter 5. it is with regard to a judge who succeeded ehud and performed similar services.

kepler

Also:

I would assume that somehow Mr. Jackson became quite fluent in languages of peoples in the South Pacific.

But in the course of defending his view of interpretation of Old and New Testament original texts, did he give a single piece of linguistic evidence by discussing the meaning of a specific Greek or Hebrew word? Did he explain how they were used in a text?

10

PM to Geoffrey Jackson ( with cc-s): Read the NWT, especially Judges Chapter 4 vs. 1-20 or so

by kepler in

dear sir: .

regarding your recent testimony in australia on the nature of judges and elders in scriptures being male:.

read judges 4, and if you can hang on, chapter 5. it is with regard to a judge who succeeded ehud and performed similar services.

kepler

Sir82,

I think you're right.

But I did neglect to mention the very important point that Angus Stewart et al brought up:

Mr. Jackson claims his appointment to the governing board is in accordance with a tradition originating with the early church congregation appointing elders.

Q. Do correct me, Mr Jackson, if I misunderstand this,

29 but this does seem to me to suggest, in the use of the

30 words "brothers select for yourselves seven reputable men",

31 that a broader congregation of believers would make the

32 selection, rather than the seven themselves?

Mr. Jackson, of course, retorted to this:

33 A. Well, this is one of the difficulties we have when

34 a secular Commission is trying to analyse a religious

35 subject. I humbly would like to mention that point. Our

36 understanding of the scriptures is these ones were

37 appointed by means of the apostles. Your point is well

38 taken. Let's assume, hypothetically, that others selected

39 these seven men, but it was at the direction of the

40 apostles.

If anyone listening to that video thinks he Jackson got off the hook with that explanation ( contemplating him and his associates)... well, indoctrination just does wonders.

Maybe he could explain the parenthetical nature of the eight or twelve GB members as well?

As close to an actual explanation I ever found was Fred Franz appointing his nephew...