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RE: Counterpunch on Historical Veracity of the Bible

in #religion8 years ago

If you need a more recent author it's hard to beat Josh McDowell. He is the author of some 115 books and references Ramsay's research as part of a comprehensive tour of the evidence behind Christianity. I've even had the pleasure of hearing him speak.

I watched a few videos from Youtube and didn't like what I saw. He clearly has biases to interpret all evidence like it supports him.

This video is clearly wrong:

It is well known that scribes have been making a lot of mistakes during the years, both accidentally and intentionally (to fabricate the message to support their own viewpoints). And of course we have the problem that God didn't make any material to explain how certain passages should be translated to other languages.

This is clearly not only a problem of the past, but there are also many different sects of christianity today. That proves without any doubt that God failed with his communication.

As an objective professional researcher, Ramsay proved that Luke was a first class historian who knew about things that no subsequent pretender could have known. That kind of information never goes out of date.

But what that proves? If you think that is a sufficient evidence, then you have a big problem because you have to evaluate same kind of evidences for other religions, too. Many religions have even better evidence for their views about supernatural (more written records, more recent authors).

Just because a religious text has some historical stuff that is right doesn't mean that the whole religion is right.

So called "evidence" from "textual analysis" presented by "modern" authors designed to cast doubt on ancient documents is typically of the form "here's a place where I could interpret things differently" or "there is no corroborating proof" that what the author said is true or that "remarkable claims demand remarkable proof." They are never of the form "here is irrefutable evidence that the work is a false account."

If you study about the proofs that have been made with textual analysis, you'll see that many of them are really good. There are a lot of versions of the same texts. Some differences are clearly accidents, but some are made intentionally to support a certain theological viewpoint. There are of course room for discussion what individual differences really mean but the overall picture is clear: There are a lot of different versions of christian texts but God hasn't clearly communicated which ones of them are right.

Look, I don't care (I should, but I don't) whether people want to put their head in the sand and deny the historical accounts that Christianity is based on. I certainly don't want to waste my time arguing with people whose mind is made up and don't want to be confused with the facts.

If you like facts, why don't you read more from authors like Ehrman and ignore people like McDowell (who clearly has religious bias)? Ehrman might have some problems too, but clearly he is much more unbiased. If you read reviews of his books from Amazon, you'll see that many believers have left a positive comment. He is not attacking faith, he is just documenting his results of studying the original texts.

The only reason I bother to point this out at all is to help those who are seeking the truth have a chance of actually finding it in the modern hostile environment (which the Bible also foresaw).

What exactly you mean by "the truth"? As I have pointed out, there are several different sects of christianity. Those have so different views that they can't all be true at the same time. Which one of them you believe in? Why do you think that is the right one and all others are wrong?

Those who are seeking God will find Him and those who don't want to find Him will not seek.

I've always found this to be quite baffling. On the one hand, christianity is supposed to be a religion for everyone. But on the other hand, achieving the real faith is really difficult. The message is unclear and doesn't make any sense, and it has to be spread out by humans (God himself doesn't want to do that).

How many individuals do you think have found the truth today? There has been 2000 years to spread the message, but most people haven't accepted it. There are still lots of other religions, and christianity itself is also divided. Then there are also a lot of people who belong to church but don't have faith.

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It is well known that scribes have been making a lot of mistakes during the years, both accidentally and intentionally (to fabricate the message to support their own viewpoints). And of course we have the problem that God didn't make any material to explain how certain passages should be translated to other languages

You are definately not addressing Jewish scribes, called Masoretes, with this misinformation. If you were to research them you would find that your "well known" information above has absolutely no relevance to the Mesoretes whatsoever.

Here are some highlights :

  • Hebrew people isolated themselves socially from other nations around them. Their isolationism protected the Hebrew Scriptures from error.
  • They copied the Old Testament in a very meticulous way.
  • The text was not changed, but they did add “helps” to ensure its accuracy and aid people in understanding it.
  • To assist Westerners the Masoretes added vowels to the text.
  • They added a checks and balances system to ensure that the text was copied accurately by their scribes. The system was very, very, thorough.
  • If a scribe made an error while copying from the original, the copy was thrown away and they started over completely.
  • The Masoretes listed the word or the phrase that would have numerically been found in the exact middle of the book and noted this at the end of each book. If the copy did not have the right word or phrase in its middle it was thrown away.
  • They double checked for accuracy. After one scribe finished writing another would count his words and look for the phrase that appeared in the middle of the book.
  • They would spend months on one book alone and when done if a single error was found they would throw that copy away and start over.

And on and on and on. Feel free to research this if you like for there is far more to the Masoretes than I have listed above. I just wanted to point out the gross negligence in your statement above.

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