Question for Practicing Christians.

[High Lord Tolkien]

HLT: An odd one indeed...especially considering the bible is pretty upfront about Jesus' brothers.

--A

[Cybrweez]

Ah, but until the Council of Nicaea there wasn't even an agreement on which Gospels were canonical and which ones weren't... how could there be an agreement on Jesus's divinity or lack thereof?

I think there was. We can read early church fathers' writings and their quotes from the Scriptures they had, before the Council.

EDIT: Av and HLT, you confuse what the Bible teaches, and what some churches have taught through the years. For instance, the Catholic church may say Mary remained a virgin, but the Bible says Jesus had brothers. That's why its better to read the Bible if you want to know, rather than listen to church teachers to get your answers, just like better to research an issue yourself than listen to someone on a message board.

[High Lord Tolkien]

EDIT: Av and HLT, you confuse what the Bible teaches, and what some churches have taught through the years. For instance, the Catholic church may say Mary remained a virgin, but the Bible says Jesus had brothers. That's why its better to read the Bible if you want to know, rather than listen to church teachers to get your answers, just like better to research an issue yourself than listen to someone on a message board.

"what the Bible teaches"
You say that like it's a clear thing.
You haven't noticed that there are a few inconsistencies with it?
A few issues with how certain words are translated and interpreted?

[Cybrweez]

No, what issues?

www.tektonics.org/lp/nttextcrit.html#ehrman

[danlo]

Kinda like what's happening to the US Constitution nowadays, eh?

[SoulQuest1970]

Well, that was interesting. I need to give this more thought.

[Lord Mhoram]

I'll trust modern scholarship, which overwhelmingly proves that the Bible has been modified greatly over time, over a single article on a single website.

[dlbpharmd]

No, what issues?

www.tektonics.org/lp/nttextcrit.html#ehrman

I don't have time to read all of that, how about a summary?

[Cybrweez]

LM, where is that scholarship?

dlb, summary: variations amongst the 24,000+ manuscripts of the Bible do not affect the message. And, Dead Sea Scrolls show OT was not changed from earliest previous manuscripts (9th and 10th centuries) from these scrolls, which are from BC. So previous to the scrolls, the argument was used on OT, it was corrupted. Now, the argument must be modified, well, turns out for that 1,000 year period it was preserved, but BEFORE the scrolls, it was corrupted. Or, tho the OT was preserved in that 1,000 years, OF COURSE the NT was corrupted. To prove it, I will show you the original Bible, which I actually don't have on me, or has never been found, but we KNOW it was changed.

EDIT: dlb, here's a link that's a bit smaller section that talks about what some writers during first 4 centuries thought was the canon. They were a little more on the scene than modern scholarship.

www.tektonics.org/lp/ntcanon.html#lists

[Lord Mhoram]

Cyberweez,

Off the top of my head, I own a book called Misquoting Jesus, written by the very man critiqued in your link - Prof. Bart D. Ehrman, the Head of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. As you and your link must agree, the New Testament has been repeatedly corrupted. But I don't understand you can agree with this and say there are no inconsistencies. I am less familiar, btw, with Old Testament scholarship.

[SoulQuest1970]

I'm with you LM. All the schooling I've had including us studying the many reformations of the Bible in college British Literature, I have to agree with you.

[Tjol]

I'll trust modern scholarship, which overwhelmingly proves that the Bible has been modified greatly over time, over a single article on a single website.

The world "modified" implies deliberate manipulation, while in terms of evidence, it only requires proof that the Bible has been translated several times, the latter of which I don't think many people doubt.

Now if there is overwhelming scholarship proving that the Bible was deliberately modified.... that I'd be interested in.

[Lord Mhoram]

Read Misquoting Jesus. Eye-opening read. There were intentional modifications.

[Tjol]

Read Misquoting Jesus. Eye-opening read. There were intentional modifications.

It should pull into another thread so I don't derail this one. But I still want to know what constitutes a deliberate modification. If one translation determines that a previous translation was incorrect and alters it, it's easy enough to portray that there was deliberate misquoting.

If you're talking about more recent modifications, such as what that English King did a little while back, then yes there certianly was modification.

If you're talking about what was included and excluded from biblical texts, you're talking about the results of debates over legitimacy, both groups claiming that their's is the accurate version, and the other's version a sham. They may both in fact be entirely right and/or entirely wrong. But I don't think it rises to what can be called a deliberate "misquote".

Think about this in terms of philosophical arguments, and disagreements that have occured within philosophy, and try to figure out whether one side was trying to deceive, or whether both sides were being equally honest.

[Xar]

Perhaps this kind of discussion deserves a thread by itself... let's not get derailed here

[Lord Mhoram]

Let me just get the last word in!

Tjol,

It's a fair question: what is deliberate? It's more straightforward than you think. A lot of scribes would change passages in the Bible to suit their own theological views - of which there were many variations in early Christianity. For instance:

We know of a number of Christian groups from the second and third centuries that had an “adoptionistic” view of Christ. This view is called adoptionist because its adherents maintained that Jesus was not divine but a full flesh-and-blood human being whom God had ‘adopted’ to be his son, usually at his baptism.

In particular, it was their understanding of Jesus as the Jewish messiah that set these Christians apart from others. For since they were strict monotheists – believing that only One could be God – they insisted that Jesus was not himself divine, but was a human being no different in ‘nature’ from the rest of us. He was born from the sexual union of his parents, Joseph and Mary, born like everyone else (his mother was not a virgin), and reared, then, in a Jewish home.

A couple of changes made by these groups:

1 Tim 3;16 says “God was manifested in the flesh”
“Whereas; “Our earliest and best manuscripts say that ‘Christ was manifest in the flesh’…It was a change made to counter a claim that Jesus was fully human but not himself divine" (157-58)

“One of the most intriguing antiadoptionist variants among our manuscripts occurs just where one might expect it, in an account of Jesus’ baptism by John, the point at which many adoptionists insisted Jesus had been chosen by God to be his adopted son…’You are my Son, today I have begotten you’….....Today I have begotten you’ – is indeed the original, and that it came to be changed by scribes who feared its adoptionistic overtones" (158-59)

“Despite the fact that they are familiar, there are good reasons for thinking that these verses were not originally in Luke’s Gospel but were added to stress that it was Jesus’ broken body and shed blood that brought salvation ‘for you’ (166)

And so on.

[SoulQuest1970]

But I want the last word!

[Prebe]

One of my main problems is how to reconcile the 1st 2nd commandment with the trinity/jesus divinity. But I'm sure that several guys have spent their rainy nights figuring out a way out of that one.

Anywho, if the message is so universal and so great and so God-given, how come the central text is so incredibly ambiguous?

It should be straight forward and unambiguous.

I'm sure this goes for many other religions as well.

[drew]

So lets rephrase the question (and change it quite a bit)

If you could time travel back there (For the sole purpose of stopping Judas from betraying Jesus).


Would you?

[dlbpharmd]

So lets rephrase the question (and change it quite a bit)

If you could time travel back there (For the sole purpose of stopping Judas from betraying Jesus).


Would you?

No.