Slashdot Mirror
World's Oldest Bible Going Online
99luftballon writes "The British Museum is putting online the remaining fragments of the world's oldest Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus dates to the fourth century BCE and was discovered in the 19th century. Very few people have seen it due to its fragile state — that and the fact that parts of it are in collections scattered across the globe. It'll give scholars and those interested their first chance to take a look. However, I've got a feeling that some people won't be happy to see it online, since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief."On Thursday the Book of Psalms and the Gospel According to Mark will go live at the Codex Sinaiticus site. The plan is to have all the material up, with translations and commentaries, a year from now.
fp for gnaa
First comment on the oldest bible. Now that's something !
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I'd like to know how the truly religious cope the fact that the book they read today has been rewritten over and over and perverted so many times that it can hardly reflect what was 'supposed' to be there.
...grumble grumble...
Oh wait, faith.
They took an OK script and tacked on a happy ending...
It would be a neat trick to have a gospel of Matthew from the fourth century BCE. It should be CE (or AD).
2000 - 1600 (from the site) is NOT 2400 years!
It should be 400 CE (or AD, if you've not caught up with the current usage).
Now that *is* old. I never knew the New Testament was written that long before Christ.
That's pretty cool.
Handwritten in Greek more than 1,600 years ago
isn't that 4 AD, not 4 BCE!?
methinks someone made a mistake in the summary...
Not so surprising that there was no mention of Jesus' resurrection...
study it's an interesting thing to put on line. The one thing that sends chills down my spine is the reactions from all religious whackos out there.
Protestant fundamentalists will start debating if it's complete, valid, canonical and whatnot. The Muslims will surely try to use it to debase Christianity further. The Catholic Church will probably not allow its followers to read it. The Mormons will.... then again, never mind the Mormons. :-D
On the bright side, at least the Jews will just shrug and say it's not Torah.
Heretic, you will burn for spreading the truth.
SRSLY
"I've got a feeling that some people won't be happy to see it online, since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief"
Was it not written 400 BC? But then again, if the words in the bible are the words of god & he is allknowing, he should have known, should he not? Finally proof he is not allknowing! IT MUST BE A HOAX!
I think you mean 4th century *CE*.
Should be fun. I wonder if they're going to say "Thou shall not kill" or "Thou shall not murder". I can't wait to count the mistranslations! Or, who knows, maybe historians will lead the project. Maybe definitely.
According to the article, the text was "Handwritten in Greek more than 1,600 years ago". 1600+ years ago would be around 400 AD (or CE, for you revisionist folks, though the numbering is the same). This is NOT before the Common Era. The summary is off by eight centuries (otherwise it would make perfect sense that this text did not contain anything about the Resurrection, considering it was 400 years before Christ! :-p)
but there were never any books I wasn't allowed to read while going to a Catholic school. The earth wasn't flat, gays weren't out to get me, and doing a book report on Darwin didn't get me excommunicated. If anything religion was the framework for how one behaved in school and did not control what I learned there.
If anything going to a public school was more of a shocker, stepping back the equivalent of two grades and being bombarded with more ignorance than one can shake a stick at.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There, fixed that for you.
Everybod knows the Flying Spaghetti Monster hid them from us. He's such a prankster!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
You know what I like the best about this version of the Bible? The part about gay marriage. Look it up!
You just got troll'd!
Well you know, I wouldn't have made that redundant comment if it weren't for this stupid D2 shit telling me there are no comments when there are.
Well, I'll assume that the trolls won't actually READ the Bible, but they might read this Cliff's Notes version: Don't Know Much About The Bible
This text is NOT the same text as what was compiled during the Council of Nicaea in 325. Nor is it the same as the Vatican bible. It is a third text written/compiled between 330-350. T
Who wants to start a betting pool on how many rounds of copyright "harmonization" it'll take before this sucker gets yanked out of the public domain and back under cover of copyright and darkness(as Big Content and God intended)? Particularly hairy for theological documents: At least in all Berne Convention signatories, copyright is life of author + 50 years(or greater). Presumably Jesus' 50 years started ticking at his Crucifixion, was it reset at Resurrection? If so, did it start again at Ascention, or does that not qualify as death, leaving His Works perpetually copyrighted?.
Muslims are in even more trouble. Allah doesn't exist in time, per se, nor does he fall neatly into either the category of individual author or corporate author. Being eternal, though, it is unlikely that his works are out of copyright.
Jews should mostly be ok, I think one or two of the prophets may have ascended rather than dying; but their quotations are generally short and pithy enough to fall under fair use.
Scientologists are screwed; but at least "All your base are belong to Hubbard" constitutes unambiguous legal advice.
Joking aside, though, this is great. Exactly the sort of thing that digital distribution is great for. There are loads of delicate and moldering historical documents of considerable interest that are, today, virtually impossible for anybody but scholars with nontrivial access to get their hands on. With digitization, the whole world can get access for peanuts.
Where to start, where to start...
First of all, there's some dispute as to whether Sinaiticus is indeed the oldest -- a cursory Google will show that Codex Vaticanus is believed by some to be older.
Second, it's patently untrue that Sinaiticus "makes no mention of the resurrection". The version of the gospel of Mark in it omits the last passage where Jesus appears to his disciples, but other post-resurrection appearances occur in the other gospels -- and even the Sinaiticus Mark version ends with an angel's pronouncement that he has risen. You can read an English translation for yourself here.
First, as others have pointed out, the Codex is from the 4th century CE (i.e. "AD") rather than BCE (or "BC").
Second, saying "it makes no mention of the resurrection" is inaccurate. It doesn't contain the final 8 verses from Mark's Gospel, which have been considered to be a late addition for years and are usually square-bracketed in modern Bible editions.
However, if you actually *read* Mark's Gospel, it has plenty of references to the resurrection of Jesus earlier in the text. Plus the Codex Sinaiticus also includes the other three Gospels, all of which include post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.
But apart from misdating the document by 800 years, misstating the impact of putting it online and misrepresenting the likely attitude of Christians to its publication, the summary is fine...
This is a misleading statement by the poster and the article itself. The post-resurrection text in Mark (which is the only text the article seems to mention is in contention) has always been recognized by the modern Christian church as not appearing in the earliest manuscripts. Don't take my word for it; pick up the latest NIV Bible and look at Mark 16:9-20. It most likely mentions this very fact.
The article only mentions the text in Mark missing. From the article:
Unfortunately, you still need to deal with the resurrection stories in the other three gospels (Matthew, Luke and John) as well as the Old Testament references such as Psalms 16:10.
Although the chance that anyone on Slashdot will bother to read the text is low.
Just look at the prototype. Unreadable. It's like it's in some other language or something!
Have no fear there are many more factual errors in the actual Codex itself than in the summary!!! The Codex while historically important is a silly mythology from superstitious ancestors and has very little to do with Objective Reality where we find our selves existing under the Laws of Mother Nature!!!
However Mark 16:6, which is included, still declares the resurection:
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him."
Additionally, the article only refers to the book of Mark as making no reference to the resurection. No mention is made of the other three gospels.
See Mark 16 in the Wikipedia
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
- Moving pairs
Given something like a checkers board, moving pairs would be checker pieces
paired together and arranged on the board so they each checker piece is said to be paired with another.
The pairs don't have to be next to eachother, they can arrange on the board in any awy.
Any way arranged is fair for how this works, but it matters for how they work.
There's no such thing as an empty space among pairs for how you consider them together.
They are the idea of how they move, and the problem with finding how
to move them, and how they work being together.
- Moving a pair
Pick a pair to move.
Each of the pair is to move together at the same time.
A pair together can only move to another pair together.
A pair moves to another pair, and each of the pair becomes paired with
each of the other pair. So now both pairs are new pairs, with the
pair that moved to another pair not being a pair anymore, both of the
pair to move
becomes a new pair with the pair that has to move for where they move to.
A pair moves to another pair, but the other pair is what moves away at
the same time.
A pair moves to another pair, the pair it moves to has to move at the
same time to another pair. So when moving a pair to another pair, that
pair has to move too.
So the pair to move to another pair becomes a new pair, each of the
pair to move to another pair
becomes part of a new pair with the pair that they move to. The pair
they move to is the pair to move to another pair at the same time.
You can't know what any pair's first move is until you know it's last move.
There's nowhere to think in the way moving pairs can move how it has
any inbetween to stop moving. It's always that a pair moving is making
another pair move, and is having a pair move it.
For any pair there's always one way to move it.
To think of pairs in the middle of moving is to think of needing to
know the end and beginning at the same time. Because a pair is
moving when a pair moved it, and is moving another pair where it's going.
But it's going where a pair can move to another pair, and coming from having a pair move it.
So a pair to move is moving where it can go, where another pair can move from, where it gets to there being
a pair that can move to where the first pair left.
When a pair moves it's what is moving away from what had to move it,
and is moving what needs to move at the same time for where it's going.
Each time a pair is moved, all the pairs involved in moving are
alternated as pairs. So a pair when moved makes all pairs that have to move at the same
time paired another way.
You can't know how a pair moves, it's to figure out as the problem
they have. The last pair to move has to be figured before the first
pair to move has a place to move.
All the pairs have a way to move, but may involve more or less of the
other pairs to move at the same time.
So a pair can be moved, but it's to figure out how to make it move.
So....
|55|66|55|
|44|44|66|
Move pair 44 44. Choice is either 66 66 or 55 55.
44 44 can move to 55 55, only if 55 55 can move to 66 66, and 66 66 can move where 44 44 is to start.
so try... 44 44 moves to 55 55. and now each 44 and 55 are a new pair. at the same time 55 55 moved to 66 66, so where 66 and 66 is at there's one of the new pair from
44 44 and 55 55. and at the same time can 66 66 move to 44 44 ?
So to know the first move is to know the last move, because the first move is where it works around to the last move, and the last pair to make is what can go where the first pair left.
- Moving pairs are a machine
They can be arranged in any way so that the way to move a pair is to have to move others too. So between all pairs they have an
arrangement strategy that carries a way to work at being rearranged. A way where to work at being rearranged is to be able to
rearrange in any other way
Some of us cope by not believing in inerrancy in the first place.
And, for some of us, the idea that the copying and translation has introduced both unintentional errors and intentional variation is not particularly news.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
But apart from misdating the document by 800 years, misstating the impact of putting it online and misrepresenting the likely attitude of Christians to its publication, the summary is fine...
What do you expect from Slashdot? Honesty? That's a laugh.
..or is it Hebrew or e Aramaic?
Yeah, the closer we can get to the original, the closer we can get to the Original.
But the King James version is itself considered to have been the work of inspired men, so there would be some point in putting more stock by the King James version than by random early texts whose authors may or may not be known to have been inspired.
(And then, there are some of us who believe that, even if you had the originals and were fluent in the original language, you'd still have to read under inspiration from God to get a full and perfect understanding of the text.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
thats because it's a made up fairy tale and it didn't happen. it's amazing to me that everyone this day and age doesn't get this.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Some people I talk with insist that it is more correct to call it the Revelation (singular) than to call it the Revelations (plural). I think there is meaning there, but I'm not sure the distinction is all that important to most people.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Well,
1. It was perverted from the start.
E.g., right after Christ's death, we already know that there was a sect called the Ebionites, which actually contained relatives of Jesus and people who knew him personally. (They actually insisted that the leadership of the church should go to a relative of Jesus, not to Peter.) They also made no claim of resurrection, nor that Mary was a virgin (much less the later idiocy that she stayed a virgin even after giving birth), etc. Generally they thought of him as a _human_. Prophet and divinely inspired, yes, but not the divine incarnation that the later church turned him into.
What we inherited as Christianity is actually mostly due to Paul, who went fanboy and convinced the others that they must (A) proselitise at all cost, and (B) that it's ok to change stuff, e.g., about half the Old Testament, if it makes it easier to swallow by potential new followers. I wouldn't be too surprised if it involved some embellishing about Jesus too, especially given the following fact:
The Ebionites actually considered Paul an apostate. Not a misunderstanding, or mis-representation, or whatever, but outright apostate. That's how much it deviated.
2. That wouldn't even be the end of massaging it into a different shape.
The new religion wasn't even too clear about who Jesus was, or wth did it all mean. A lot of the early "heresies", like Arianism or Pellagianism are, strictly speaking, compatible with what was actually written. They just filled the blanks in differently.
It took several generations of Byzantine philosophers to define exactly wth _do_ they believe in, down to the smallest details. (The schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism came much later, so yes, you did inherit the byzantine construct even if you're Catholic or Protestant.) A lot of things that resulted don't even reflect the original context or meaning, but the effort of fitting Christianity into the Greek way of seeing the world, which at times was like fitting a square peg in a triangular hole. E.g., they had to make Mary and the birth even more perfect and wondrous, because they thought that something perfect (e.g., Jesus) can't possibly come out of something imperfect (e.g., a normal human mother.)
And even then it created even more schisms and heresies, because some things made no sense to cultures who thought differently. At least one schism was because stuff that made sense in Greek, made no sense when translated into Syriac, because the words didn't have the same nuances.
They also defined very strictly what is included in the Bible, what you can write or say about it, and in which terms.
3. Which brings me to the point, they had no problem dealing with the Ebionites or with the Syriac churches which were a lot closer to where it all happened. They just proclaimed them heretics.
I'm guessing it will be the same today. People will just proclaim this manuscript as some gnostic heresy, and continue as if nothing happened.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I for one welcome our divine overlord, Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified and has risen - whether the last twelve verses of Mark 16 were or were not written by Mark...
Approves !!
Any game that Rod and Todd like is good enough for him, He sayeth !!
The oldest and the newest bibles on the same internets!
"sudo rm -rf your-face"
Why do I imagine you saying that very quickly while rocking back and forth?
Mark's Gospel was considered by some theologians to been written in a style of "play". Mark writes like you could play it on a stage. People come in, talk, go out.
Mark's ending, with the cross, was in many ways like the ending of a drama. It opened doors not just for talk about the play, but also for thinking about the matter.
I cant recite what I have read further, but the theologian was going into detail, why the ending did suggest something else to happen, which would have been obvious for people of that time, so mark didn't need the resurrection to be mentioned. it was obvious for them that there was more to it, like it is obvious for us now, that "I am your father" is a reference to Star Wars, but later, when time passed, the resurrection was added to the book.
Most christians know, that Mark did not mention the resurrection chronologically in the original. But, there were 3 other gospels, and plenty of people writing about the resurrection, and even Mark pointed the resurrection out in a lot of passages. So, no, there is no debate at all on our side.
Still, thanx for the news. Accurate timing (BCE?) and some insights which books are in this old bible would have been better, though.
Evidently, with multiple exclamation marks!!! It's Super Objecitve!!!
Can anyone spot the logical flaw in your argument that "I didn't know about any banned books therefore there were no banned books"?
I'm sure if you'd tried working your way through the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum) then I'm sure you'd have been in a lot of trouble.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Ah, this discussion reminds me of those we have when the subject is Linux, Windows or OSX. Or in the old days when we debated vi and emacs...
I have no doubt that this topic will spiral into a squabble between both camps in the God divide but before that happens, the rest of us could give thanks (you choose to whom) that we are now in a position to be able to examine a growing wealth of original source material in a way that has never before been available to anyone. The opportunity that this portends for the future are quite possibly, of greater immensity than we can imagine.
Not only that but in the very near future, when the pointless grandstanding that will soon render this topic unreadable happens, or when the discussion inevitably turns to the eternal question of how many polar bears can be balance on the point of an argument, we shall have a new moderation:
Go See.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Archeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is currently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitous and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental."
This sig all sigs devours
I'm terribly sorry to have the negative comment on this article, because I'm sure a lot of you are going to mod me down for this. But I think that the point of view that this article has no place as /. news article is a valid issue to be discussed, so please don't discard my opinion without considering it, because I mean it in the spirit of open discussion.
/.
Why is this considered newsworthy? I understand the science and technology of recovering and archiving ancient texts for future research, and it is a noble end and vital if we learned any lesson from the library at Alexandria. But this article isn't about the science of it, or the tech of it. It is about a specific book being archived and shared for public viewing, which I do not consider news.
If this book was just as old, but NOT the bible, would it have been submitted? I wasn't forced to read it, and I'm not offended by it. But I'm more so concerned with something that to me core seems like a contradiction to the tenet of "News for Nerds, News that Matters".
Basically, no topics should be holy. By which I mean that no subject should get preferential treatment in any way. And I feel that the only way this article could have gotten onto the main page is through the bias many people inherently give toward giving validity and credence to the relevance of Christianity (and all religion in general).
Religious topics have a place for discussion, but considering the damage Christianity (and other religions) has caused to science historically, I do not think that place is on
If anything, I believe the appropriate discussion regarding religion would be regarding the direct contradictions between the empirical evidence used in scientific study and the present positions held in current theology.
Is it not more important for the progression of scientific reasoning to address the sincere danger posed by religion on influencing the general perception of the public regarding a host of complex issues such as evolution, genetic research, and medical technology? Because the majority of Americans still believe in a "giant invisible man in the sky" interpretation of religion, if I am to trust the polls I have seen over a period of years and if you'll excuse the callous categorization of that type. I have also seen a number of polls which have shown a correlation between levels of education and religiosity being inversely proportional, which I hope I can trust without being more arrogant than I have already been. Perhaps the correlation can affect behavior in the direction opposite from the intuitive "education implies skepticism which implies questioning of faith". Perhaps by directly confronting people about the absurdity of their beliefs relative to scientific explanations would affect education in that it would spurn people to be skeptics about many other things in the world around them.
Just my two cents, no offense intended.
Intelligent majority? Please. Most of you are a bunch of stupid fucks with too much time on your hands. LOL.
So, if it was dated to 4 BCE (thats BC for you christians who havn't adopted the new format for dates) ... how does it have the gospel of mark (which was written after christ?)
"However, I've got a feeling that some people won't be happy to see it online, since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief"
This is complete nonsense, Christians should be very happy to see the most important manuscript online. The "no mention of the resurrection" is a myth.
My little Linux and tech blog
"Why... this is preposterous! This simply cannot be! This book has no references to magic! Who in the hell did we see resurrect?"
Many, many years ago: a puppet master rofl's.
Get in the way of a good Christian-bashing. After all Bush is Christian (not that anyone ever checked :-p), that proves they're all evil, right ?
By contrast pointing out that the founder of islam was a thieving (took things from people violently) paedophile (f*cked children below 9 years old) rapist (f*cked said child without her permission, using force, also others) is a fact (according to muslim sources), yet apparently here facts are not important, and have to be denied.
Of course said thieving paedophile rapist also killed women for criticizing him, and left their children to die (google "asma bint marwan").
Perhaps Jesus should have murdered some more women and children, and stolen more. Surely it seems that would have raised his standing on slashdot (and elsewhere) enormously.
For people who are supposed to be open-minded, there are a lot of closed minded comments being made. I am not pro-religion - but I am a believer in God and of salvation through Christ. God gave us the bible as a means of seeking Him. You can try to explain away the creation of the world - but there will always be a missing piece without the existance of God. I am not saying just accept this on faith - just let God and the Bible be explored with an open mind.
BTW there are over 5,000 extant copies of the new testament and validating the resurrection is not difficult
http://www.gnfi.org/external/TimLaHayeProphecy/reliability_of_new_testament.htm
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Possibly a bit off-topic, but, FWIW, there's this prophet guy, Nephi, in the Book of Mormon, that records a vision of the primary events of the New Testament in what would be the early 5th century BC.
FWIW, I believe it.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
And the truth is: the bible is a collectionof stories. You just don't read the bible as if it were a history manual, or some kind of unfallible transcription of PureTruth(tm)...
Let's look at the old and the new testament separately, shall we?
The old testament is a *typical* collection of short stories -- just like the ones you probably use to buy in your local book store.
But why is it so ... "holy", then?
It's the origin and original purpose of the stories that make them... well, worth a reading :-) (Is this what "holy" means? Who knows... who cares.) You have to know that 3-3.5k of years ago, people in the middle east were mostly nomades. They wandered from place to place. Few of them were educated, almost none of them could write. But the more intelligent of them gathered their share of wisdom, along the years... about how to lead a life, about how to behave in a way that society (whatever their society was like) could function.
So, what does an old wise man do before he dies? Try to teach the younger ones. Not being able to write (and knowing that the youngsters won't be able to read), the only way to teach them wisdom of life is telling them.
Ok, so why not write down "wisdom" instead of the stories? Well, the old testament *is* full of "wisdom". Read the book of Salomon, for example... But it's also full of stories (the story of Job, for example), because of the way people back then and back there used to think... they didn't like to tell one "do this and to that to make things work", they'd rather tell one "things didn't work for me the other day, so then I did this and that, and they they worked!" and then leave it for you to do the same.
In a nutshell: people 3.5k years ago in the middle east shared life experience and life wisdom by telling stories and passing legends around the camp fire -- stories about arguments, about wars, about ... "enlightening" experiences, aboud what they believed to be an experience of God etc. Of course, stories got exagerated, they became legend-like, but hey... that can happen to a story if it's being carried on from father to son for several hundred years :-) The key point here is that they shared life experience (and experience of what they thought to be "God") through stories.
(As a sidenote: read the genesis once again with the information I just gave you in mind: you'll clearly notice the fact that there are at least two texts having been mixed up that actually make up the genesis as we read it ... you clearly notice two different wrinting styles, belonging to two different authors. And there are even some passages that seem to repeat and/or contradict, further supporting the fact that a third author/redactor carefully put together some kind of a "Genesis" story from bits & pieces of information that he could find on the topic... a "Genesis" story that could possibly explain the origin of the world back then.)
Well, at some point, some guy decided to write down a besf-of collection those stories. *That* became the old testament. More or less... :-)
New testament.
The oldest evanghelium of the new testament was written sometime 70 AD, and the youngest one around 300 AD. So most of the "evanghelists" were certainly not around to witness Christ. Whoever wrote the evangheliums, they gathered whatever information they could, and then put it togegher to somehow make sense.
This would be like somebody *now* trying to write down what happened during the Civil War in USA, couple of hundreds of years ago, using nothing but information that somehow... well, just made it through to here :-)
How would it look like? Well, there would probably be a lot of documents with official Government stamps, some letters between this general and that other general, some orders, some plans... all kinds of stuff which's genuinity could somehow be proved. We'd take all tha
How can anybody tell from such poor scans? There's a brownish colour cast, the text is all wobbly and the contrast is way too low. I couldn't read a bloody word of it.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
And points out another point some Christians disagree on.
Some of us believe God allows us to make mistakes. In certain special circumstances, He corrects us more carefully than in others, but, in the end, He doesn't apply force. (Impossible to force a person to be saved.) So, even in the copying and translation of the scriptures, there would be some errors.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
This news is great, we could actually see one of the oldest copies around. Part of me truly wonders how many more manuscripts (religious or not) would have been available today if people back then don't have the habit of burning every piece of paper they dislike.
Religious book burnings are only part of it. Try to imagine what went up in smoke when the great library of Alexandria burned (mostly as a result of warfare). Modern archeologists and historians find it hard to even contemplate that loss. Fortunately, once in a while we do get very, very, lucky:
The Oxyrhynchus papyri, not religious texts and much of the material was mundane public and private stuff like invoices, edicts and tax records but valuable to archeologists.
The Villa of the Papyri, IMHO by far one of the most spectacular discoveries yet. Much of it seems to consist of Epicurean texts but who knows what else is in there. The lost works of some of the great ancient historians and scientists? One can hope...
There are probably quite a few more such finds that deserve mention. Book burning and generally all efforts to suppress and destroy written material, be it religious or secular, are among of the worst manifestations of ignorance. We are fortunate that once in a while the efforts of these zealots and vandals are undone.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The fact that somebody actually got modded +5 for questioning the occurrence of World War I has certainly given ME faith in miracles.
... not to get a Christian Moderator to mark you flamebait... just what are the chances of that at Slashdot. Uh... Whazzat? 99.99999%
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
It certainly does mention the resurrection! See the Book of Isaiah.
if it weren't true. But unfortunately there are people out there who think exactly like that.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
They weren't the "best sources available." They chose the books that supported a particular set of theological views. They destroyed the rest that they could find, and persecuted the sects that held different views. Historical accuracy was the objective.
I meant "historical accuracy was not the objective." It's always nice to contradict yourself in the last sentence.
I would like to point out that this text could not have come from 400 BCE and contain the Gospel of Mark. Did the author intend to say 400 CE? I am curious about the errors made in this stub, as well as the reaction to it. This has helped me realize some of the shortcomings of the Slashdot perspective of the world.
So its big controversy is that something is not mentioned in the "remaining fragments"? There would then presumably much that is said in the non-remaining fragments, no?
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
The Bible definitely underwent a major edit at the hands of Constantine and the original version labeled as "apocrypha" and suppressed.
That's definitely less than 200 years ago ans I'm sure there's more knowledgeable people than me who can come up with better examples.
Most of the old testament books clearly have multiple authors (different writing styles, different words for "god" from one chapter to the next, etc).
At most you can claim the bible is about 1500 years old and even then there's big differences between the various translations.
So... there's a 1500 year-old Bible and then there's things like The Iliad and The Odyssey from the eighth or ninth century BC.
Which is older?
No sig today...
88gayniggerballon writes
"The Gay Nigger Association of America is putting online the remaining fragments of the world's oldest Gay Nigger Bible. The Codex Gay Niggerus dates to the fourth century BCE and was discovered in the 19th century. Very few people have seen it due to its gay nigger state that and the fact that parts of it are in collections scattered inside the goatse. It'll give niggers and those interested their first chance to take a look. However, I've got a feeling that some people won't be happy to see it online, since it makes no mention of the white Jesus, which is a central part of Christian belief."
On Thursday the Book of PenisBird and the Gospel According to PenisBird will go live at the Codex Niggerus site. The plan is to have all the material up, with translations and commentaries, a year from now, to coincide with the GNAA Penis Rocket To The Moon project launch. Interested parties may visit irc.gnaa.us and join channel #gnaa for more details. Please mention penis rocket to gain our attention quickly and to serve you.
Presumably you prefer "dhimmi" with it's ideology of submission under pain of death.
As a non-Muslim please correct any error here: Mohammed is the ultimate model of Islam, no? So to be the best Muslim you need to emulate him as closely as possible. Murder the infidel, or take taxes off them if you get bored doing that. Forcibly "marry" yourself to young girls that kind of thing?
The guy to read on this is the late Bruce Metzger.
The ancient Greek texts are also a lot less politically sensitive so they're less likely to have been meddled with.
No sig today...
It is humourous that they used BCE incorrectly. Especially since it is in reference to a story about Christianity. Ha! I bet the writer would not have made this mistake if he had used the AD/BC notation. The CE / BCE always comes across to me as elite - why change a standard? What's wrong with AD and BC?
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
First of all, I'm an agnostic leaning towards atheism. I don't think Jesus was anything special, but I do think that _a_ man called Jesus might have existed. If nothing else because it was such a common name, that it's akin to saying that a Russian called Ivan must have existed. At any rate, you know, keep your canned speeches about "wishful thinking" for when they actually apply. Or was it too hard to come up with some original thought?
Second, this is such a monumental stupidity that it still cracks me up.
Get this: we don't have all documents and records from back then. In fact, we have only a small fraction. We don't even know half the commanders of the legions, or half the consuls of, say, the Gaul Empire (which was actually a bunch of provinces which rebelled and split up their own piece of the Roman Empire), or half the governors (e.g., who the heck _was_ governor of Britannia after Agricola?) You know, important people. But it was lost anyway.
A lot of records were destroyed in the warfare. A lot simply rotted away in some ruins. A lot were destroyed by the christian monks who erased old scrolls and wrote new stuff over them. Some even took it as an act of purification to destroy the heathen writings and write some copy of the Bible on that parchment instead.
So, pray tell, what kind of madness or idiocy makes you think that we'd absolutely have the records about every single unimportant John Doe? Because that's what's required to claim that lack of records proves non-existence.
No, seriously. We don't know anything about most of the _citizens_ of the Empire. What makes you think you can take lack of records about a John Doe as confirmation that it didn't exist?
For the Romans, Jesus was a John Doe. Just another non-citizen nutter who spoke against the Emperor and was nailed for it. Business as usual. According to Roman law, they didn't even have to grant a proper trial to a non-citizen, he could be executed on any whim of the governor or a military commander. Pilat wasn't even required to note anywhere that he had him executed. But again, even if you want to believe he did, we lost more important stuff in those 2000 years.
So basically, to cut it short, what you're doing there is just a pretentious kind of the Argument From Ignorance fallacy. Not knowing something doesn't automatically make it false.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Will it blend?
Neil is that you? Yeah yeah, it's me... Neil...
Nietzsche would laugh SO hard. :)
Send your spendthrift head of state this
I think this is an excellent idea as long as they (right wing, religous nut) weirdos rewrite the greek to fit their own cosmos.
Sadly, the bible is more accurate than slashdot. You'd think copy/pasting news blurbs wouldn't leave much room for error, yet most slashdot stories are old news, dupes, have incorrect/misleading titles, summaries with factual errIgnoors, or quotes taken out of context.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
if the books they found (and based their religion on) was "the collected works of George Lucas"
1. The Codex Sinaiticus has been corrected by so many hands that it affords a most interesting and intricate problem to the palaeographer who wishes to disentangle the various stages by which it has reached its present condition...
2. Tischendorf identified four different scribes who were involved writing the original text. However, as many as ten scribes tampered with the codex throughout the centuries. Tischendorf said he "counted 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus." Alterations, more alterations, and more alterations were made, and in fact, most of them are believed to be made in the 6th and 7th centuries.
3. There are glaring examples where one scribe had copied verses up to the end of the first, but when he looked up to his example again to continue copying, his eye fell upon the second occurrence of the phrase, from which he continued, omitting all of those words between the two occurrences of the phrase.
4. If you are not acquainted with the Greek, you can study the alterations and changes that have come into the New Testament by Sinaiticus and Vaticanus through Westcott and Hort by getting "The Doctored New Testament"
Google is your friend, not Wikipedia, nor Slashdot. Seek and ye shall find - Anonymous Coward 5:1
thats because it's a made up fairy tale and it didn't happen. it's amazing to me that everyone this day and age doesn't get this
.
The resurrection is in all four of these early gospel texts - meaning you didn't read beyond the summary or examine it critically. You were ready to believe what you wanted to believe.
...to be a Christian. Old texts go a long way to proving the authenticity of the Bible - not the other way around. Often times, after a discovery such as this one, the media gets all excited. Never mind the fact that most of these discoveries 'reveal' things already known to religious and secular scholars. Have a look in a Bible, check the footnotes. They mark passages that don't appear in all notable manuscripts. Christians don't hide this, nor do they need to.
I have a BS in Physics from a state school (Emphasis on theory not some science-math-wimpy-education-track). I have listened to the higher criticism of the Bible as well as equally capable defenders of the faith. Those in defense of the Bible have a better case.
Now, if you take someone who has poor logical and rhetoric skills and put them up against a professor, it is easy to make the educated side seem to have the correct position. But, that works both ways.
Have a listen to what some well educated and well spoken men of God say in the defense of the Bible. Of course, there are charlatans, who masquerade as if they know what they are talking about and make Christianity look stupid. But, every field has those - cold fusion, anybody?
I would suggest Ravi Zacharias rzim.org if you are looking for a modern man with excellent logical skills and comprehensive knowledge on the subject. He has Q&A sessions (often at colleges after a debate) and takes questions such as yours seriously and gives educated answers that actually address your criticism. Take a look here for the past 100 broadcasts of his 'Let My People Think' program, you might find answers to some questions you have had. If he isn't to your liking, look for another - there are many.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
This makes more sense to me, as I thought the bible was supposed to be the Old Testament and the New Testament. I was curious how they could have find a bible older than the new testament.
There's an error in the quote from this story. The Codex Sinaiticus doesn't have any post-resurrection stories, but it does mention the resurrection. It ends at Mark 16:8, but just two verses prior in 16:6-7 we have:
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.' "
CE and BCE are stupid. Not only because they look alike, but because they're new. January is named after the god Janus. All words have historical references. Some we know, others we don't. The point is that we have common and accepted terms that we use. What's the point in making up new ones? We still have to learn the old. This is just creating more work and confusion, especially when the new terms look alike.
Translations are all well and good, but you'll find that interpretation of texts presents a bigger problem than documenting the text itself.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
When you have an organization that stretches back over a thousand years, maintains strict records and a sizeable library, and has a hierarchy for disseminating official interpretations, the idea of being close to an inspired (and thus "correct") interpretation becomes easier to believe.
Now I don't quite buy it myself, despite being Catholic, as I think the kind of people that get put into place in such positions of authority are no better at deciphering literary work than you and I, but I dare say they have a claim at it, more so than most religions.
Have you ever had an instruction manual for some piece of electronic gear (or a video game) that was so badly translated that it was hard to figure out how the damned thing worked? An instruction manual that was incomplete and seemingly at odds with itself? But you got the piece of gear working anyway, and although the manual helped it was frustrating?
The Bible is life's instruction manual. It is badly translated and at odds with itself, but it is useful. It even explains why you, an athiest, can't use it. John 8:47- " He that is of God heareth God's words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God."
The book of Proverbs is an exemple of much wisdom. "A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels".
"Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets: She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying, How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge? Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you."
I can attest to the fact that it is entirely correct when it says that if you consort with prostitutes, you'll spend a lot of cash. Some of my slashdot journals are about hookers (warning - most of them are NSFW). One whore stole the keys to my car, then came back in the middle of the night and stole the car. It gets mor einteresting but recounting the sad yet hilarious tale would take me offtopic, and it's already chronicled in my journals, so I won't.
Oddly, what a lot of Christians preach isn't in the bible at all! For example, it doesn't badmouth whores, but it does badmouth pimps and adulterers.
Sorry if this wasn't much help.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Sinaiticus has complete resurrection accounts in Matthew, Luke, and John and the entirety of Paul's resurrection theology (e.g. Romans). It doesn't have the post-resurrection appearences in Mark (the Gospel ends right when the disciples find the empty tomb), although it does have the pre-resurrection foretellings. It's also one of the four key texts behind the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, which is the basis behind nearly every modern Bible translation and what ministry candidates study in most North American seminaries. The problem with many of you atheists is that you assume Christians don't do any of their own textual criticism or historical research, therefore you don't do it, either.
Can you provide your proof that the Codex Sinaiticus doesn't include the resurrection? The Codex Sinaiticus is the oldest COMPLETE Bibles that we have. Noticie it mentions complete. You can look it up for yourself and check the sources. Not to mention we have over 5,300 ancient Greek manuscript copies of the New Testament Greek (these are copies of the actual words penned by the Apostles) We have an additional 10,000 Latin vulgate, and over 9,300 early manuscript versions in Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Gothic totaling over 24,000 surviving manuscripts of the New Testament all of them have the resurrection. Also from those thousands of copies 85% show no varience at all. Out of the remaining 15% - 90% have NO impact on the meaning of scripture. The remaining 10% can easily be figured out within the context of the text. Bruce Metzger the worlds leading Greek Scholar ( who Also was a professor at Princeton University for over 40 years) States that the New Testament is 99.5% accurate. So if you are going to claim that something was taking out of this text you are going to have to provide some evidence. Because there are thousands of texts that seem to disagree with you. You VS. thousands. ? ? ?
My understanding is that the books that were chosen were written by people who were either direct eye-witnesses to the events in the Gospel or close (e.g., Paul's letters). For example, the book of Acts does not detail the death of the apostle Paul, so it is believed to have been written before his death. Now Paul is reckoned to have died between 64-67AD, which suggests Acts was written prior to this.
Acts is the "sequel" to the Gospel of Luke which takes influences from the Gospel of Mark which is generally believed to be the first gospel to be written. This therefore dates the writing of Mark and Luke to 65AD, or within 3 decades of Jesus' ministry where a significant number of eye witnesses would still be around.
For those of us who deal in "Internet Time", 30 years is a long time. Apparently, for historians, it's a short period of time.
By comparison, most of the other rejected gospels (Judas, Peter, Philip) were written long after the original characters were dead, at least 100AD.
None of this is, of course, conclusive, but I personally find it quite interesting.
Somehow, kdawson just seeks out the worst submissions with the most errors and posts them. He has an excellent track record at this.
They destroyed the rest that they could find
I've heard that before, but never seen it actually backed up. Who are "they"? Do you mean the Nicene council? What books did they destroy? How do you know they destroyed them? IANAH or anything, just wondering where the proof is for this. I always just assumed that it happened, but then realized I had never seen any real evidence of it.
Antes de Cristo
Despues de Cristo
No sig today...
... then no wonder it doesn't mention the Resurrection, which occurred in CE (or AD, however you like it).
The Codex does indeed mention the resurrection.
As someone who has only read like 4 pages out of a bible... may I ask a favor?
Can you recommend a bible that isn't full of fluffing/pampering and gives what was actually in the book, rather than what makes you warm-n-fuzzy inside? I only have looked at one, and I assume this was meant to be read to children.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You don't really need to.
If you are looking for truth from the scriptures, ask God. (James 1: 5, among other places.)
When your neighbors come around to talk, well, talking can be an interesting pastime. (Ya think?) And sometimes it can help open the mind a bit. (Although it can also do the opposite when we are not careful. I'm rambling.)
Oh, but the answer I would suggest for the other question, probably all 9000 have some degree of real understanding. (In addition to some degree of fooling themselves.) As I understand things, God teaches people what He thinks they need to know, not what I, you, or somebody else thinks I need to know.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
No problem, just join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as Mormons. Part of the official dogma is that the Bible has been horribly translated over the years. The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, is the "most perfect" of any book on Earth. It's also possible that a Prophet may provide the Church with a correct translation of the Bible some day. Joseph Smith, the founder, actually started on that.
Also, someone mentioned all the confusion after Christ's death. This is also part of the Mormon version of Christian history. Before Christ can return, there must be a "falling away", and Mormon's refer to it as the "apostasy". They believe the Paul was right, but after all the apostles died, or were martyred, that the true Church ceased to exist. So, the great "falling away" is what happened as the Catholic and Orthodox Churches slowly came into existence.
See, now it all makes perfect sense!
Clovis
^ Clovis, look! It's that guy you are!
Its highly doubtful that I am a Christian anymore. I studied the text of scripture self taught w/ assistance of Greek Seminary Classes. I have look at these differences. Codex Aleph (1st letter of Hebrew Alphabet) is the oldest "complete" bible in Greek.
These variants as they are called not even the Codex Bezea (D1) the most variant has any difference in the story or teachings of the New Testament. If you want to have doubts fine. I actually have many NOT because of the text of the document but for the contents of it. Still have unresolved issues with it. Hanging out between Deism and Conservative/Moderate Presbyterianism.
But be fair. In truth King James Onlyists are small percentage of Christians. Most Christians accept the NIV, ESV and others as just as valid. Get an annotated NKJV if you want to see the types of textual differences. They give the major editions of the Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Hebrew text families on the footnotes. $5 - $10. Really easy to see the types of differences rather minor.
Hard to believe that people could bear reading books that only explosed two pages at the same time. Thank heavens printing technology evolved such that books could finally be read in 4 dimensions.
Really makes you think, doesn't it..
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486358/
Just watched it last night. Creepy, creepy stuff.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Earlier in my life, as an intellectual skeptic, I found Josh McDowell's short apology "More Than a Carpenter" to be a very convincing read, especially in the chapter where he addresses this very subject (historical authenticity and accuracy).
That was a very bad summary, here's why:
1) The summary said that the book was dated from the fourth century BCE. This New Testament was found in the fourth century *AD* (or ACE if you prefer, but since we're talking about Jesus, might as well be AD).
2) While this is the oldest surviving New Testament, that does NOT make it the oldest surviving version of Mark or any of the other Gospels. Historians have dated and reliable fragments (e.g. a couple pages here, a couple pages there, etc, a.k.a: all that's left after 2000 years of poor care.) from as early as the second century AD, including those with Mark's resurrection story.
3) And about the codex's Mark not having the resurrection, that's not really a big problem. The other three gospels in this codex DO have the resurrection story in them, so that stands to reason that Mark would have had the resurrection story if it weren't for a large number of pages being missing from the codex. From the article: "The Gospel of Mark ends abruptly..." which tells us that if it ends abruptly then it probably wasn't the end the writer meant. Also from the article: "Handwritten in Greek more than 1,600 years ago -- it isn't exactly clear where -- the surviving 400 or so pages..." which tells us that there's a substantial amount missing. So put two and two together: if the other gospels in the same handwritten codex have the resurrection, and Mark ends abruptly, and the codex is missing a alot of pages, then it's very reasonable to assume that the person who wrote this down did not mean for Mark to end that way.
Yeah, I'll agree. The KJT wording is a bit better at showing the deeper meaning than the simple prohibition against lying, especially in early 20th century English.
But if the boss is fishing for a compliment, "Yeah, they do." could be equivalent to saying, "I don't care how you feel about life today, honey." where a "The slacks nice and you do to." might be a way to avoid passing judgment on the size of the posterior. I'm not going to advise playing verbal chess, but it can sometimes be good to consider what the other person is going to hear.
And then there will be times when a "Yes they do. Take them back and tell your sister I don't like her taste in clothes." is appropriate.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
by excellent men of Rhetoric and not so excellent men. Just give Scientology another thousand some years and it could be on par with any "legit" religion of today. Look how it has progressed in only a few decades. For some enlightening reading, check out the following.
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/twainlfe.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3186/3186-h/3186-h.htm
And no, I am not an atheist. I use my reason and believe in no human god because there is no "True" evidence, and faith is not it. But, I also do not claim that there is no God because I neither have "True" evidence of that. I do not belong to any religion because the past and present has shown that it can be easily manipulated by certain corrupt humans for their own political agendas. Most likely the future will show the same.
"Without curiosity and knowledge, the mind is a vast void. Without the mind, curiosity and knowledge are nonexistent."
nt;
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
This summary is ridiculous. The Codex Sinaiticus contains plenty of references to the resurrection. The article mentioned that pieces of the resurrection story at the end of the book of Mark were missing. Mark is only one book in the Codex Sinaiticus - Matt., Luke and John are included fully with references to the resurrection. At least get your facts straight before bashing the Bible.
Summary says "world's oldest Bible"
Actually its the oldest extant New Testament
Summary says "makes no mention of the resurrection"
Actually the New Testament is rife with references to the resurrection. This particular book contains a shortened version of Mark that ends when the disciples discover the empty tomb. Any biblical scholar is familiar with this shorter version of Mark.
In other words the summary is not merely bad but suggests an agenda.
I guess given that, the Bible would be more likely an authentic work than pretty much any other known publication from a historical point of view of the evidence. You may not believe what it says, but it is historically verifiable.
no comment
The NIV is an easy read for most Americans. I'm not sure which pages you read, but the Bible is full of non-fluff which sometimes seems too "real" to be appropriate for children. Take the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. There isn't a whole lot of fluff in it, and it's a story that I would be uncomfortable explaining to a child *in full detail*.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah)
Pretty much all Orthodox Jewish Rabbi's and a very large percentage of Orthodox Jews in general are fluent in ancient Aramaic ( language of the Talmud ). Also, there are a number of places where Aramaic is still a day to day spoken language. Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic probably have as much overlap as English and French ( about 40% I think ). It's somewhat amusing that the only people in the middle east who could probably read an original 6th century Koran are Sephardic Orthodox Jewish Rabbis ( a number of very important texts on Jewish religious law are written in classical Arabic ). Not too surprising considering that Muhammad himself was illiterate.
They chose the books that supported a particular set of theological views.
What is informing your assertion here? How do you know that it was not the other way around?
The classic Christian doctrine is "inspiration" - "Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost". The documents were written, and the words chosen by men, with the individual personalities showing in full force - but the inspiration and endorsement was from God. The "divine dictation" idea that someone sat with a pen and wrote exactly what God dictated is cultic - although *some* divine dictation is contained within prophetic books. Even Mormons only believe in divine dictation as a miraculous means of restoring a lost manuscript. ("All copies are lost? No problem, I'll let you copy a vision of one.")
"rewritten over and over": The 5000+ extant manuscripts of the NT have only minor variations. The OT books were copies virtually error free thanks to clever checksum schemes used by the scribes. Since the variations in NT books are transcription errors (not "rewriting"), they form a tree, like genetic mutations. And you can trace down to the root and get a pretty good idea of the original.
Even if a small part of the Bible is an accurate copy of something from the second century it still isn't the oldest book. Not by at least a thousand years.
No sig today...
Since Yeshua mentions His own resurrection numerous times thru the Gospels and it's discussed thru the Letters, and is forecast in Isaiah, the omission of the actual resurrection stories themselves can only have been a purposeful culling. The resurrection has been under attack since day one because that is the crucial moment of victory. Day one as in the Pharisees instructing the guards to spread the story that they had been overcome and the body was stolen. Resistance to the resurrection continued and continues to this day. As in any war, propaganda is a tool that is often used against the enemy and discrediting the resurrection via propaganda or censorship would be then and is now paramount by those who loath Yeshua and what He stands for. Nevertheless, the Act is done and cannot be hidden under a rock.
Totally. Fucking. Awesome.
my pet machine
When I came to slashdot for the first time, I thought, "Wow, I'm really glad I found a place where people can provide intellectual arguments and have the facts to back them up." My respect for the authors and many of the posters have gone downhill since then, especially when it comes to religious discussion. The utter innaccuracy and bias in the presentation of TFA has really demonstrated the quality of slashdot to me.
Thanks kdawson for this great article... *unchecks kdawson from authors list*
Even in the short version, a angel explains why the tomb is empty.
...the date the article gives is AD.
and it also says the Gospel of Mark "abruptly ends" before the resurrection.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
The Old Testament is the instruction manual (and most Jews don't even follow all the silly bits of that any more.) The New Testament is just illustrative stories, or at least it was until it got edited into a set of commands. A lot of it has been mistranslated or misrepresented to say things it never did say (e.g. "god hates fags" or "masturbation is wrong".)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hello? If it is from the 4th century BC (BCE for you new types) it wouldn't mention the resurrection because it is from before Jesus was born. Which would make it a copy of the Torah not the Christian Bible. You idiots.
For every one of these stories, there is one about the devout atheist who studies diligently to disprove the Bible only to become a Christian.
For examples of atheist-turned-Christian see CS Lewis to quote "...Lewis claimed he became an atheist at the age of 15..."
Or you could listen to a radio drama of another true life converstion at unshackled right here in their archives (wma and ram sorry). Heck you can search their archives for others. And when you find them, look the people up in the phone book an call them and ask them yourself instead of taking a radio drama's word for it.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Well, it's true that it hit mainstream because of Constantine, and obviously got mangled by Constantine and his successory.
But it didn't appear suddenly, out of nowhere, at that point. We have plenty of records of Christians before that, if nothing else, of the "persecutions" against them. Nero (37 AD to 68 AD) blamed the great fire of 64 AD on the Christians for example, and, to be fair, the only ones who blamed Nero for the fire were the Christians. That's a good 250 years before Constantine's conversion.
(And I say persecutions rather loosely, because the Romans didn't actually have anything against Christianity as such. They only had a law that you're not allowed to deny the official Gods. You weren't even supposed to worship the official Gods, just don't be an arsehole to those who do. You know, play nice and don't go telling other people that their gods are lies and demons. It annoys people. Especially not to the Gods of the ruling class, because then they can do nasty things when annoyed. Nowadays we consider this to be just good manners, but early Christians took it as some duty and act of faith to troll those of a different religion. And let's just say that the Romans did feed the trolls... to the lions;)
So, you know, those _before_ Constantine had to believe in _something_, if they risked life and limb for it.
I'll further risk a guess that a great factor in it was the anti-Roman symbolism of it all. The crucifix, for example, was a symbol of Roman oppression. It was a cruel execution that was reserved by law for non-citizens only.
So basically I'd say that the whole rest is, basically, irrelevant in that context. Even whether the guy was called Jesus or not or were several Jesuses. What mattered was, basically, "OMG, they even nailed God's son." There were literally millions who were very dissatisfied with Roman rule, and the promise of a God who's against the Roman imperial power too 'cause of what they did to his kid, would find a lot of willing ears.
I'm also guessing that Constantine basically had very little choice there. Christianity was spreading steadily, both in the colonies and at home, and it was rabidly anti-Imperial. The only way to "declaw" it was to adopt it as the Imperial religion. Which he did.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Today I read a very good article on Mojave Spaceport. It was full of interesting glimpses of interesting work. But at the bottom, there was a comment by a guy who couldn't understand the point of the place. After all, flying saucers had been invented back in 1961 and suppressed by NASA to keep people from traveling to the Moon in a day.
Now I read an interesting piece of news about the very interesting Codex Sinaiticus, something of great interest to scholars, theologians, and ordinary people (of faith or not). I think to myself about how much interesting work will result, how much fruitful creativity, how many deep insights into what's either a very interesting group of folklore texts, or the actual Word of God. Either way, people are very interested in understanding what's going on.
Then I come to Slashdot's comments, and encounter almost nothing but the religious and historical equivalent of 'the flying saucer was suppressed by NASA'. Disappointing.
The real story, like the real spaceships at Mojave, is a lot more complicated but a lot more interesting. (Which is why real religious people slobber over themselves to study the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Codex Sinaiticus, and the real NASA is not in the business of suppressing theoretical flying saucers.)
So if you don't know what you're talking about, why not do a little research? (And no, I don't mean reading Chariots of the Gods or Holy Blood, Holy Grail.) Biblical studies and patristics studies (early Christian literature) are fairly easy to pursue, these days, and the latest thoughts of the scholarly community are accessible on the Web.
I have always loved the self-legitimizing process of collecting a few decades of writings, and then picking the ones which legitimize your organization. And then, as you pointed out, destroying anything which might threaten you, and persecuting any who believe in those works. I always thought that Leviticus was darn silly. I would love to see a collection of ALL the writings which were excluded from the bible. That must be a fun read.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
There are fragments from the 100s AD.
Thanks to Kurt Aland, Greek New Testaments already show scholars EXACTLY what each version of the scriptures says (all 5600 versions), including Codex Siniaticus, and they can reconstruct ANY manuscript from the notes at the bottom.
No mention of the resurrection? Surprises? Not hardly. Where do people come up with this stuff?
I guarantee you there will be ZERO surprises to anyone.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
One of the main reasons I have decided that the bible is a load of rubbish is not just that Genesis only takes 7 'days', but the way things are done are in the wrong order, so it doesn't really even make much sense as a metaphor..
Check out the literary framework interpretation of Genesis 1. It has been advocated in some form at least since St. Augustine (born AD 354) in his Literal Meaning of Genesis, and it stems from the very same interpretive considerations of the text itself that you bring up, not from a desire to make the text dance nicely with modern cosmology or biology. This view is figurative, but the figure of speech that it uses is not a metaphor.
In brief, the view "holds that the seven-day creation account found therein is not a literal or scientific description of the origins of the universe; rather, it is an ancient text which outlines a religious doctrine of creation. The seven day 'framework' is therefore not meant to be chronological but is a literary or symbolic structure designed to reinforce the purposefulness of God in creation and the Sabbath commandment" (Wikipedia).
With respect to the problem of the ordering of events, the framework view postulates that days 4-6 are a recapitulation of days 1-3, where each pair literarily describes a "kingdoms" and a "kings" to rule over them (sun over the day, birds over the air, fish over the sea, etc.). Any other view, as you note, introduces the difficulty of understanding where the light came from before the sun, etc.
A reader of the text can thus either bend over backwards in an dubious effort to force the text make sense as a scientific text (cf. your garden variety creationists); or one can assume that the author was an idiot and didn't know that light came from the sun and that this brief text is simply incoherent (as you have); or one can look a bit deeper and try to see what the author was really getting at (hint: it was not a scientific description of the origin of the cosmos).
...this
At least, I hope that wasn't serious..
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
What you described is the old argument about the differences between Religion and Faith. You claim the reason you don't believe the Bible is because it is used by men to control men. While I would agree with your conclusion that men control men using the Bible as a tool, my reading of the Bible has led me to the exact opposite conclusion, that it wasn't about men controlling men, it was about men controlling themselves through FAITH.
Yes the Bible has all sorts of rules and "commandments", but those commandments weren't issued by men to control men, they were issued by GOD.
However this never stopped men from using whatever tool they have to bash people over the head.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
They destroyed the rest that they could find, and persecuted the sects that held different views.
Actually at the time of deciding which books and letters went into the bible and which did not, Catholics(the ones deciding at this time) were hardly the ones persecuting anybody at that time. Saying you were a Catholic got you cooking in a heated chair or fed to lions. It was not made in the view of what they didn't like but what was worth dying for. It wasn't until later during the Catholic's church rise to power did you have the Spanish Inquisitions (nobody expected it) and whatnot.
Watch the "Gospel of Judas" by the National Geographic Channel to see how the Bible came to be and why other books, such as the Gospel of Judas", didn't make the team.
is worse than Slashdot on the law.
Just saying.
Wow, the arrogance. Parent should get a clue as well by reading the article he linked to. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum isn't even enforced anymore, it's relegated to the status of a historic document.
The documentation of Jesus's activities post-resurrection are omitted in Mark - NOT the resurrection itself!!!
Mark 16:8-20 are omitted. But... read Mark 16:5-7 and you tell me that the resurrection was omitted. Tthe resurrection has been under attack by the world since the first day when the Roman guards were instructed to lie, having misinformation like that statement pandered by Slashdot should come as no surprise.
And even then, earlier writers predating the Codex Sinaiticus referred to the expunged text authoritatively, such as Irenaeus - so the texts in question were removed rather than added later. The Alexandrian texts suffered from too-vigorous a cleaning, the same can be said of the Sinaiticus - and yet the cleaning or omissions have done nothing to discredit the resurrection.
There are enough other references to the resurrection too that has not been expunged from the scriptures - even the Sinaiticus - that you simply cannot say that the "Codex Sinaiticus makes no mention of the resurrection." Whether you agree with it or not is irrelevant.
1. You don't seem to understand the Romans very well.
For a start, they actually deliberately erased the records about some people, who they thought he _shouldn't_ be remembered. Traitors, for example, could get a "Damnatio Memoriae", meaning that the Romans literally tried to erase the person from all recorded history. Census data, chronicles, monuments, etc, they'd erase any mention they could find.
They weren't the only ones, btw. In Egypt, Hatshepsut was almost erased from history as a Pharaoh by her son (though he did leave everything alone that didn't mention her as a Pharaoh), and Akhenaten. The Greek states also occasionally practiced that kind of thing.
Basically you seem to assume that, like today, if someone got famous for the wrong reasons (at least from the point of the view of existing law and government), you'd want to know and record every single detail about him. E.g., the way everyone knows all the details about the Unabomber. In the ancient world essentially they'd try to prevent other people like Herostratus from being tempted to achieve fame by nefarious means. Precisely _because_ those bombings were made to achieve a certain exposure for him and his manifesto, someone like the Unabomber would have vanished from the records altogether in the ancient world.
2. Well, you have to understand that he achieved that notoriety a (relatively) long time after his death. It would be many decades before Rome even figured out the difference between Christians and Jews. The Jews were quite rebellious and had a major religious problem with the Romans too, so yet another group of them preaching fire and damnation against the romans, was, well, business as usual.
Basically by the time that Jesus got really famous, there was no way to go back in time and tell the governor, "psst, make sure you record everything about this guy."
3. I don't know what you mean by, "The Romans put an inordinate amount of effort into killing the guy". It doesn't seem like any signifficant kind of effort to me. Just about everything about it, that I remember, was bog-standard (in fact, regulation standard) for a Crucifixion. Even posting guards there, or breaking those two other guys' legs when they weren't dead yet, and everything, was a standard crucifixion. They already knew in advance exactly what to do when they can't leave someone on the cross for several days. The Romans were organized like that :P
Or what did you mean?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Man, if you can win a game of verbal chess with a woman my hat's off to you.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The British Library's Turning the Pages is not just religious text, but includes wide range of old books including; The Diamond Sutra, probably the worlds oldest printed 'BOOK', Sketches by Leonardo, FIRST ATLAS OF EUROPE and others.
The "Belief in GOD" is the way that you can distiguish between those who think, and those who don't. Those who "believe in god" go about their days in a capacity to do nothing more than dwell in circular logic, or the lack of any logical reasoning in general.
The problem is that you can't actually believe in a "god", because that would require that the definition actually make sense, it doesn't. There is no "god" not because "it" doesn't exist, but because the "it" part has no conceivable logic that can be described accurately. You can't believe in something you can't describe. If you try to describe it, the description must make sense logically. This is why it is impossible to be "agnostic".
You said: "... He has a plan..."
You used the word "he" as one aspect in the description of your "god". Where did you get that from? Any grand arm chair philosophy about what gods should be would lead you directly to the idea that they are by definition genderless. You state that your "god" would have a "plan", but by definition, no "god" would plan. Planning is something humans need to do. No real idea of a god would use the word "plan".
People constantly bandy about the word "god" this and "god" that without once dwelling deeply in their lives what "it" is. A "god" to Christians is just some kind of a "mega" or "meta" king. Their grand "king" still has all the standard emotions and frailties of standard humans.
The "god" as creator of the universe doesn't even make sense. How do we know the universe was "created". If the universe was created, then how do we know that it wasn't created by something less than a god. How do we know that it takes some grand thinking to realize the creation of a universe? Maybe creating a universe is as simple as making coffee? Would you be satisfied to know that the universe was created by an alien? How about a human? Maybe the universe just is. Maybe the universe changes over time, and maybe one of the states that it must be in is a state in which it has no material in it, and maybe that state happens every now and then.
Maybe a god doesn't exist now, but it will in the future. Maybe we need to create god. Maybe a god did exist in the beginning but to create the universe it had to destroy itself, and maybe one day it will exist again.
What would a god "need" a human for? Why would a god "need" to be worshipped? Needs, requirements, wants, lusts, these are all human emotions. Praying is utterly meaningless to gods because a god would alreay know what you were about to pray. All gods know the future right? Wrong. A god would not know the future, or past, or any other "kind of time". Time, space, and storage of information is meaningless to gods.
Gods just don't make any sense. The religious rhetoric bandied about to describe gods, angels, demons, and devils is nothing more than non-concretized haphazard thinking. This is the way children think. This may be a period of history in which the human species needs to evolve out of. Many people are still primitive and have thoughts close to animals. It could take a while to get us all evolved out of this mess.
The only logical definition of the word "god" is the universe itself. We know the universe exists. We know the universe created us. We know the universe has a plan. We know the universe is every where at every time.
There are SOOOO many ideas! Think, or be damned to generate no new information in your circular reasoning. Only a devil would prmote "belief", a self induced sensory deprivation.
Theological noncognitivist.
From your wiki link:
[T]he Congregation for Doctrine of Faith ceased publication of the Index in 1966 following the end of the Second Vatican Council, largely for practical considerations
So unless this guy went to school before '66...there was no banned books list. Further on evolution anyway, the late Pope John Paul II was a supporter of the theory and believed it compatible with Catholic doctrine.
Catholicism is the IBM of religions...bad when it's dominant, but when in an a minority, it has no problems adapting pragmatic stances and using common sense to survive. And they'll both survive me;)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I was actually thinking more of the widely held view of how the moon was created from the earth, and how it would have to be done before the water and all life.
I don't particularly believe the writers of religious texts are idiots, Paul must have been quite clever to come up with some of the stuff he did and affect so many people over the world, but I think that if God were the God that Christians think he is, then he would have just said we came from animals, because he would know that we would have found out eventually and it would cause many people to doubt and basically go to hell for using their brains. There are far too many things that need to be explained away. If you have to make lots and lots of complex addendums to a theory to keep it valid, it probably isn't actually a valid theory. Maybe you have to place limits on a theory to keep it simple (ie Newtonian physics only works on the level we see, it doesn't apply down on a subatomic level), and that's what you're doing by saying it's just a metaphor, but there are just too many issues for me to believe in it any more.
One of the most poignant things someone said to me in the last few months is that even if the Christian God does exist, they wouldn't want to worship him. And it's true. That a god would create a bunch of people knowing that some are going to hell, and still call himself 'good'/ is pretty sickening. The good thing to do would just be to blank those people out of existence. Roman Catholicism gets round that by creating the idea of purgatory, but the reformed church doesn't believe in that, and I consider the reformed church to be more 'pure' to what Christianity was originally meant to be. If something has been added later by humans then it's obviously not from God, though you could say that about the new testament over the original Torah too. Basically, you can explain away anything if you want to. But I no longer want to worship a god who would be such a jerk, and if I have to go to some kind of hell for that then so be it. I maybe won't get used to it like a hot bath (as Reverend Lovejoy or his wife mention in The Simpsons), but if I can't do anything about it but take then pain then meh, I can't do anything about it :p
which is totally what she said
But there are manuscripts of the individual gospels and many of the epistles that date much earlier, including some that can reliably be dated within the first century AD.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas#Rigveda
The logic behind reading a literal six-day creation is that, while "day" in Hebrew can mean a period of time when used alone, all other references to "day" that include "evening and morning" are references to literal days. Thus, the literalists argue, there is no reason to believe the usage of "day" with the term "evening and morning" in Genesis should be viewed any differently.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I dunno--this might be helpful:
http://www.thebricktestament.com/genesis/sodom_and_gomorrah/gn19_01.html
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Codex Sinaiticus has been used as a source to help compile Greek bibles and from there to translate the New Testament since at least 1975 or so (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus). This isn't any new information, my seminary has a bound copy of Sinaiticus in the library. It is really cool that it is available online - that's the real story here. Up to this point one had to purchase an expensive photographic reproduction from the British Museum, usually only libraries. Now anyone can look at it (if you can read it), pretty cool.
On another note, remember that the "oldest bible" (not agreed upon by all researchers) is a misleading term. Sinaiticus is one of the best and most complete representatives of the Alexandrian Text Type (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrian_text-type) which dates to as early as the mid second century and "All extant manuscripts of all text-types are at least 85% identical and most of the variations are not translatable into English, such as word order or spelling." (wikipedia).
I recommend starting with John and continuing through Acts and Romans. Just those 3 books (which will take about 2-3 hours to read), will give you a very good understanding of the core of Christian belief.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Please God, I pray to thee, don't let some idiot make this in to yet another iPod Bible App.
"Gravity: Doesn't exist. If items of mass had any impact of others, then mountains should have people orbiting them. "
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am converted. Truly, if they managed to put the Codex Sinaiticus online.
Even if the book does not have an ethernet port, and relies on 1600 year old SLIP it's tremendous foresight that the original illuminators had to even include a comm port of any kind. Fair play to them.
My only concern is that if it's firewall has not been updated in many centuries, won't it get hacked.
And of course, the natural curiosity - does it run Linux ?
Nullius in verba
Wow, thats almost older than the earth!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Q: From where did we get the Bible?
A: The Church. The community of faith saw to it that the Gospels were written down, and before that, the Jews saw to it that Scripture was recorded. These groups recognized these books as the word of God.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that the Catholic Church's interpretation of the Bible is the "correct" one. When it comes to matters of interpretation, the Magisterium (that is, Catholic Tradition) can often be illuminating. It shouldn't surprise anyone if the two are in accord. You would expect a witness and his written testimony to agree; or a professor and his thesis to agree; why would the Bible be any different?
This is no secret - its a matter of historical fact. From time to time, some group will try to split away from the Church based on their own, unique, interpretation of the Bible. Often times, such interpretations are really heretical, because they deny things which, while they may be ambiguous in the Bible, were not at all ambiguous to early Christians. You know, things like the divinity of Jesus, and such.
So when a Catholic has a question of a matter of the faith, he is in the right to ask the Church. Because they know. In two thousand years, most of the questions of faith the common person experiences have already be asked and answered and written down. You just have to look.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
What's wrong with AD and BC?
Because whoever started that system did not start counting at zero. Either they didn't consider years to be ordinal numbers, or didn't consider zero to be a number, or whatever. Either way, they started count from one, and now whenever we do date calculations that cross the AD/BC line, we have to add or subtract one in order to make the math work.
Remember folks, when using numbers as labels, always start at zero.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"Historical accuracy"
I do not think this means what you think it means.
Are you suggesting that they included only the books that did not support their views?
The history of early Christianity is well known. Everyone knows about Arianus and all other leaders/sects/whatever that were declared heretical and persecuted, through killing, confiscation of property, denial of position, etc. This is common knowledge and available in many books. I'm not going to provide a bibliography for something that is not seriously in dispute.
HAH...another so called word of god book...written by man, edited by man, interpreted by man...to suit the desires of the men in power...
Worthless as far as a belief items, nice that an old piece of FICTION can be read online though
Well, in which version? From your linked site, I see available several versions. Would you have any recommendation? I'm hoping there is a clearcut one that's more truth and less "edited to keep the serfs happy".
(versions listed on that site, in English)
* 21st Century King James Version
* American Standard Version
* Amplified Bible
* Contemporary English Version
* Darby Translation
* Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition
* English Standard Version
* Holman Christian Standard Bible
* King James Version
* New American Standard Bible
* New Century Version
* New International Reader's Version
* New International Version
* New International Version - UK
* New King James Version
* New Living Translation
* The Message
* Today's New International Version
* Worldwide English
* Wycliffe New Testament
* Young's Literal Translation
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I thought Landover baptist was a parody site?
I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people here think it's real. That's what they think a church looks like.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I've done some poking and it looks like Young's Literal is probably the best for me.
Thanks though!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
"Best ones? Hypocrasy."
Christians see a huge difference in innocent life... a baby certainly is innocent... and someone that chose to do great evil.
You find that hypocritical. And yet I find it hypocritical that people would choose to abort a baby, and yet spare a murderer.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
CE and BCE are stupid. Not only because they look alike, but because they're new. January is named after the god Janus. All words have historical references. Some we know, others we don't. The point is that we have common and accepted terms that we use. What's the point in making up new ones? We still have to learn the old. This is just creating more work and confusion, especially when the new terms look alike.
Right on. Moving to BCE/CE was just politically correct silliness to me. As the parent poster noted, do you have to believe in Greco-Roman gods to support the naming of our months? BC/AD is easier, and we should have stuck with it. The argument for changing the system was that it would offend non-Christians. Well, too bad. How many other things are we going to change in order to accommodate a politically correct naming convention? Planets? Cities? Landmarks? You don't even have to believe in the divinity of Christ to acknowledge the historical impact the man had, just like I don't have to be a Zeus/Jupiter worshipper to appreciate the names of the planets. We should have left well enough alone.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Eugene Peterson's Eat This Book has quite a bit to say on translation and why it is part of the Christian way. He also takes the King James Version to task. Worth a read.
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Lee Strobel's "Case for *" books are very good.
"For the Romans, Jesus was a John Doe. Just another non-citizen nutter who spoke against the Emperor and was nailed for it. Business as usual."
Have you read the Gospels? Jesus did not speak out against the Roman Empire. He preached keeping your faith to God and worldly affairs separate ("render unto to Caesar"). This is why Pontius Pilate was so perplexed that Jesus had been arrested. He could find no fault with the man, and certainly didn't find that he'd rebelled against Rome in any way. Jesus was arrested because the old Hebrew priesthood considered him a blasphemer and wanted him dead. They just didn't want the blood on their own hands, so they turned him over to the Romans. Recall that Pilate pleaded with the crowd to let Jesus go.
This little meme really annoys me, because it's starting to catch on in some circles. Shane Claiborne writes in his books that Jesus came to topple Rome. He did no such thing, and he made his purposes clear. He was here for the coming kingdom, not this one. The Jews rejected him as a Messiah in part because he wouldn't oppose Rome. They thought the Messiah would be a kind of military commander to free them from the Roman yoke.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Everyone has a preference. I prefer New King James, even tho it's based on the Textus Receptus and isn't completely up-to-date with current and more complete textual witnesses (tho it does include notes referring to the differences if you get a study bible version of this translation). NASB is also another good choice that I like to read. I've been looking at the Holman bible too. If you get one, get a bona fide study bible. The extra cross-references and notes on other texts are very helpful.
As to the best recommendation for the absolute best "version"? I like the UBS Greek as well as Robinson's compilation of the Byzantine Greek texts. Greek isn't hard to learn and there's nothing that will expand your understanding more than getting closer to the original writers. Mounce has a lot of good texts to help you learn Greek too. Nowadays, light reading is the English translations I have - study is the Greek itself.
Sounds like God could have used CVS.
Actually, CE was originally "Christian Era" but some people got oversensitive about that, so they changed it to "Common." But the Gospels about Jesus were *definitely* not written "Before Christ."
Of course, we're off by about 4-6 years, anyhow, thanks to a miscalculation by an ancient monk (Jesus was presumably born around 4-6 BC), but whatever.
Yes, there are some fringe scholars who try to write Jesus out of the picture and make Paul the founder of Christianity, but only for shock value. It's like trying to explain the universe, but leaving out the Big Bang (or Horrendous Space Kablooie, depending on your preference).
Actually, it's not the first time it's been made available online:
http://www.biblefacts.org/church/pdf/Codex%20Sinaiticus.pdf
I claim 666th post!
Actually, back around 1978 someone wrote and published a book about how Star Wars (1977) proved the correctness of Christianity, and how SW was a parable of the Christ, or some such blather. I don't have a copy and can't find the title offhand, but the notion is hardly unique to Slashdot.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I saw the 400 BCE also, and thought Bible meant Torah here. The article says 1,400 years ago, which is circa 400 AD.
I personally don't like the Common Era (CE) dates. If we're really going to make a standard, then let's have a year zero.
-1 The year before Mary was pregnant.
0 The year including most of the 40-week pregnancy.
+1 The year Jesus was born.
Finally, let's use Julian Days like every database vendor does internally!
The Gnostics are a good example. They were slaughtered by the Emperors after Constantine, and they had their own Gospels.
Though there are many documents that could be included among the gnostic gospels, the term most commonly refers to the following:
* Gospel of Mary (recovered in 1896)
* Gospel of Thomas (versions found in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt in 1898, and again in the Nag Hammadi Library)
* Gospel of Truth (Nag Hammadi Library)
* Gospel of Philip (Nag Hammadi Library)
* Gospel of Judas (recovered via the antiquities black market in 1983, and then reconstructed in 2006)
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
First of all, I want to say that I find this kind of misinformation and mockery really disappointing. I've been a slashdot reader for a while, and usually I'm impressed with how fairly and objectively this crowd deals with issues. Unfortunately, whenever a religion-related topic comes up, large quantities of respect and open-mindedness seem to vanish.
First regarding myself; I'm sure I'm considered radical by many, but I like to consider myself Biblical in my ideology and worldview. I strive to live by the principals I find in the Bible, while I'll be the first to admit that I often fail at this.
Regarding Scripture, I think the Bible has proven it's validity and accuracy both prophetically, as well as personally for me. I therefore believe that the original texts were inerrant and infallible; the authors were under direct and authoritative inspiration. Certainly because we do not have the originals, only copies of copies, there have been transcription errors, as well as the unfortunate intentional addition or omission by a over-zealous handler of the texts. Contrary to popular belief though, we can logically conclude with a reasonable degree of certainty, that these mishandling are minor. At least regarding the New Testament, after the writing copies were almost immediately spread across the known and civilized world. As an earlier poster mentioned, the earlier manuscripts that we have are then descended from those copies that were spread. The differences between the manuscripts that we have are almost all minor and most are easily identifiable as change. Therefore if any changes were made that we don't know of, they necessarily would have been made in the very small window of time between original authorship and duplication/spread, otherwise the manuscripts we have (some quite recently), could not be so similar.
So basically, to put it clearly, as does the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy:
"WE AFFIRM that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.
WE DENY that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant."
Finally, regarding the current state of the Christian faith, there have been many very valid accusations of bigotry and hypocrisy directed toward some of those who claim the banner of Christianity. When dealing with this sort of situation please remember that a outward claims and truth can often be very different. Read 1 John, starting with chapter 2:1-6. John very clearly explains what it really means to abide in Christ (to have true faith). Please do not disregard Christ and what I consider to be His infallible teachings on the basis of fallible humans and their mistakes, or even their knowledge-less zealotry.
Before judgment is passed on an ideology, consider it with an open mind. Compare a modern translation with this online one, pray about it and actually read and study it; I don' t think you will be disappointed.
http://www.twowaystolive.com/
My guess is that its both of your ability to understand exactly what 4th Century means. TFA mentions nothing about it being BCE. The second link in the submission says it was made 1600 years ago, which jives with what the AP article says. I'm guessing the submitter made the mistake, being as editors don't edit.
I, for one, would greatly like to see a bible written 400 BCE. Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen.
I guess it's pretty tricky to study historical records and discern which people were really Christians and which were just saying that they were. Heck, it's pretty tricky even when you *know* someone.
Meh, I prefer a.Y.P.S (Anno Yersina Pestis Spiritus)
Well, of course it won't mention the resurrection if it is from 400 BC. Doh! in addition, he writer mocks the reliability of the resurrection. Really? Well, it's funny how when this topic is debated, the Christians win. See for example the discussion between Gary Habermas and former atheist Anthony Flew. The MP3s are available online. And then there is William Lane Craig who Richard Dawkins refuses to debate (Dawkins ya chicken) who does numerous top-level academic debates - and wins them -- on the topic of the Historicity of the Resurrection. Go to www.reasonablefaith.org for MANY debates in MP3 and video formats from the best scholars in the world.
Karma? Sorry, i don't believe in superstition. http://talk.thinkingmatters.org.nz
> I think it is funny to see the religions getting together to get rid of Atheists. It is like George Bush and Saddam Hussein getting together to get rid of pacifists.
I don't think atheists are pacifists. Stalin & Mao pretty directly contradict this, given the way religious folks were targeted in the purges. As a matter of fact, China is still out to suppress and destroy religion (see also: Tibet).
Well - um - thats because there is more than one bible. If you are referring to The Bible that is the Catholic bible which certainly does mention the resurrection.
Nice try at some Christian-hate, though.
Word of man edited over an dover to suit the needs of those in power to keep the sheeple in line for the slaughters...
If you believe in GOD then, you know you should not kill others....for any reason...but your 'faith' teaches you to kill the unbelievers...so tell us all, where is your GOD now?
You won't find him in a book, at an alter, or under the robes of a priest. Your so called GOD today is a man written book and the all mighty DOLLAR that drives the political mandate of the churches.
Recently the Saudi schools revamped the kiddies text books to teach them that they should hate any one that doesn't believe as they do...and you want me to believe god told them this bullshit?
BURN the bibles, pull heads from asses, and stop the religious cult thought process before your churches destroy the world.
It's good that you brought Star Wars into this faith discussion. Personally I believe the truly inspired version in fact the Backstroke of the West version of the holy text.
Obviously some nutheads will claim that it has been translated into Chinese and then into English or some such, but that simply to further their agenda to prove that nothing like the event in Star Wars ever happened. They are apostates or trolls and there is no hope for them.
Just as an example that only this version is truly divinely inspired: in EpIII 03:08 nothing sums up more accurately Vader's emotional state than when he states "Do not want". Some may claim that the supposedly "original" version in EpIII 02:08 would have him cry out "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!" instead, but anyone with half a brain could immediately tell how ridiculous that would have been.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
The King James version is a Government Publication ...
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
nt
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
reading your comment it would seem the ultimate would be killing EVERYONE-
sacraficing yourself so that no one could commit suicide or any other mortal sins--
plus all the stuff you mention...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Just meditate under a Bodhi tree and inspiration (Satori) will arrive. Hey, it worked for Buddha!
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
This is truly a slash dot moment.
You all are actually arguing about a collective fantasy written so loooong ago, by soooo many different men, compiled from various other fantasy's that there are no records that can prove anything to back up any of your assertations.
I can't wait until "they" rewrite "the bible" (it doesn't deserve capitals) with george bush and dick cheney (and neither do they deserve capitals) as "great prophets".
It's only a matter of time, and I'm sure that in a thousand years many fools will believe that nonsense as "the truth" too (it's out there man...).
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
I have a BS in Physics from a state school (Emphasis on theory not some science-math-wimpy-education-track). I have listened to the higher criticism of the Bible as well as equally capable defenders of the faith. Those in defense of the Bible have a better case.
I have reached the opposite conclusion. I grew up in the church, but after some exposure to rhetoric and apologetics, I found that I could not justify my beliefs.
It's really cool to see people still looking for the original teachings to minimize distortions. Nevertheless, the teachings back then were designed for much more primitive people. The people today have a higher level of consciousness and thus are ready for higher levels of truth than that given 2,000 years ago.
Jesus' updated and corrected teachings are available today and he's here sharing with us the new levels of truth we're ready for. It's time for humanity to evolve. That was then, this is now.
"You can start by noting that Slashdot contributors are 90% atheists..."
Really?
Just how did you come up with that figure pilgrim?
I call bullshit on your weak ass claim.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
That reminds me:
Personally it's not God I dislike, it's his fan club I can't stand.
Are you suggesting that they included only the books that did not support their views?
The history of early Christianity is well known. Everyone knows about Arianus and all other leaders/sects/whatever that were declared heretical and persecuted, through killing, confiscation of property, denial of position, etc. This is common knowledge and available in many books. I'm not going to provide a bibliography for something that is not seriously in dispute.
No, I am not suggesting they including only the books which did not support their views. What I mean is that the canon was not formed by a top-down pronouncement. It formed at the as groups of letters and books began to circulate together and was later affirmed by synods. Moreover, you will find that in the case of disputed books, the litmus test was generally Apostolic authority, not theological correctness. So it seems that the theological views came from the canon and not the other way around, as you asserted. Note that your response was centered on persecution of heretics, not on the actual formation of the canon.
P.S. I think you mean Arius.
Evidently the poster couldn't be bothered to RTFA. The actual article doesn't say the codex has "no mention of the resurrection". It says that, "The Gospel of Mark ends abruptly after Jesus' disciples discover his empty tomb." What this refers to is Mark 16:9-20, which most modern translations note as a later addition or discard entirely. The gospel ends abruptly with the discovery of the empty tomb and skips later appearances of Jesus. The remaining three gospels pretty much have the usual resurrection stories in the usual places.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
"I can't speak for "most fundamentalists of any stripe," but I am a Mormon..."
And many folks will be happy to point out the incongruities in your special brand of propaganda posing as religion.
Like this example of my friend who's wife taught at BYU, in SLC.
He was on campus one day to meet her for lunch, and was accosted by an LDS'er and told to leave because he wasn't allowed on campus wearing a beard!
Beards are evil according to that guy.
So my friend attempted to reason with this individual, but he wasn't into listening, just preaching his version of the LDS beliefs on how beards are evil.
Finally, my friend just pointed to a statue of Joseph Smith sporting a big beard, and asked just why it was fine that he had a beard.
Shut that fool right up!
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
This really doesn't strike me as anything either new or needed. Anyone who might want to has been able to look at the entire manuscript (both Old Testament Septuagint and New Testament with Barnabas and Shepherd) in VERY high quality color images. I, myself, downloaded the entire thing to my home computer over two years ago.
http://alpha.reltech.org/BibleMSS.html
username: any
password: any
"Personally it's not God I dislike, it's his fan club I can't stand."
I'm with you, many of them come off as complete nut cases.
Logic never enters into their thought process, it's completely Pavlovian behavior when it comes to xtians "defending" "their" religion.
If their "special" religion is the "best" then why do they feel the need to defend it?
It's the best right?
Tossers.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
citation needed.
People complain about fundamentalist, but isn't this just making it worse?
If the oldest bible was written around 400 BCE, then I doubt that their would be any mention of the resurrection, as that happpened 400 years later. I'm sure the OP meant 400 CE.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
If you're going to bash, at least get your facts straight. Otherwise you just look foolish.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
According to wikipedia, the canon of the New Testament (compilation of books) was decided gradually and independently during a period of 200 years by the Churches and was written in the 1st century. The apocrypha (books outside the canon) were written after ~200, which means that they are almost certain the be historically inaccurate. Actually, historians (paragraph evaluation) agree with the Church canon. I would say that the facts prove you wrong.
Nicene council: 325 AD
Constantine's conversion to Christianity: 312 AD
Basically ALL the particulars of Christianity were sorted out by Constantine I and his henchmen three centuries after Jebus got nailed up. They got the name wrong, only the inspired cartoon 'The Simpsons' has corrected it, but I digress).
Many were condemned as Heretics.
Constantine also had his own eldest son and wife executed in 326. Nobodies sure what for.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
People who take holy scripture literally are teh gay
Incidentally, despite the misleading title, this isn't the oldest surviving Bible; there are older copies of the Bible that are complete (i.e. Google it! :) )
The Mosaic law was never to be applied to non-jews. (Well it was applied, but Paul told them to knock it off). To argue otherwise is to misunderstand the transition in the book of Acts.
Yes, everyone old enough to know better IS sentenced to hell. I've accepted that on my own I'm not good enough for heaven, do you think you are? Or are you just hoping that by not believing in God he'll just go away?
God, what an atheist I am.
I got a chuckle out of that one
You say the Bible is fun to read: Read John through some time.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I was actually thinking more of the widely held view of how the moon was created from the earth, and how it would have to be done before the water and all life.
Still no problem with the framework view. As one of its primary exponents said of it, "The conclusion is that as far as the time frame is concerned, with respect to both the duration and sequence of events, the scientist is left free of biblical constraints in hypothesizing about cosmic origins."
... I think that if God were the God that Christians think he is, then he would have just said we came from animals, because he would know that we would have found out eventually and it would cause many people to doubt and basically go to hell for using their brains.
Perhaps the point is that they didn't use their brains quite enough. Yes, religion requires faith, but so does every belief system, including yours. No one can prove their foundational principles are true; they simply must assume them. We must all have faith so that we may understand, as Augustine and Anselm said. The question is not faith or no faith, but rather which faith -- which faith is most consistent with my thoughts, my experience, and the way I live my life?
There are far too many things that need to be explained away. If you have to make lots and lots of complex addendums to a theory to keep it valid, it probably isn't actually a valid theory. Maybe you have to place limits on a theory to keep it simple (ie Newtonian physics only works on the level we see, it doesn't apply down on a subatomic level), and that's what you're doing by saying it's just a metaphor, but there are just too many issues for me to believe in it any more.
Perhaps you're making a broader argument about the Bible here, but at least with respect to the framework view of the Genesis 1-2:3 creation account, there is no such complex addendum keeping it valid. It is not Bible thumpers adjusting their interpretation to fit modern scientific theories (though that's not necessarily a bad thing in itself either). The order problem you mention was addressed by Augustine in the early 400s because of exegetical considerations from within the text itself, irrespective of what modern science would later say.
One of the most poignant things someone said to me in the last few months is that even if the Christian God does exist, they wouldn't want to worship him. And it's true. That a god would create a bunch of people knowing that some are going to hell, and still call himself 'good'/ is pretty sickening. The good thing to do would just be to blank those people out of existence.
You should read Tim Keller's book The Reason for God (or listen to his MP3 on on the topic of hell linked to from that website). He addresses this topic.
Basically, you can explain away anything if you want to.
Including the evidence for God?
the bible was never "uncorrupted" in the first place. This is the kind of idealistic and idiotic thinking that religion encourages, that somehow, there was a "good old days" when people were pure and wholesome and then there was a "fall from grace" so that people today can be all said to be born with this "original sin" and thus in "need" of "salvation". Also there is scant evidence that jesus of nazereth even existed at all.
All religions are a lie. I was raised as a catholic, went to catholic school etc but as far as I can tell, the belief in god/jesus/whatever has about as much value to the believer as a fervent belief in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy or the Easter Bunny, i.e. no value at all. Rather it encourages blind conformity in case "god" is watching you and allows a small group to dictate what a large group of people believe and do. You don't have to watch people to make them *think* they are being watched....
The people that religious beliefs benefit are a small group, at the very top that knows that the whole thing is a gigantic lie to keep people in line and continuously distracted from practical issues such as how we are all being anally raped at the gas pump.
Well-rehearsed argument, and wrong in almost every detail.
Since you think Christianity is all wrong, why all the (95% bogus) research?
I seriously don't know how this one found its way past the hose...
In any event what you make obvious from your summary is that you are an atheist with a chip on your shoulder. Did mommy take away your freedom, regularly stuff you in formal attire and force you to be abused by a legalistic preacher?
The Codex Sinaiticus is from around 350CE your date's off by a few years. Further, the book as I understand it has pages scattered all over the world with so many missing you can't help but get a swiss cheese version of the Bible.
Mark is also not the only mention of Jesus' resurrection. There's not a book of the new testament that doesn't either allude to or outright proclaim it. The old testament has all manner of prophecy speaking of it as well. I really don't understand the point you were trying to make.
Perhaps you should step off your prejudices for a bit and take a fresh look at the subject before you spray any more ignorant non-sense.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
You can split the difference between Greek and the Teletubbies version by going with the Old King James. Using a Strong's Concordance you can match word for word to the original Greek new testament and the Aramaic/Hebrew old.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Yes, I meant Arius--thanks. My point was that the selection of the canon is itself in line with a particular set of theological views. Just as is in any canon, it is presented as the objective "best" when in fact it is considered best because it supports the views of those that selected it.
How is Apostolic authority judged? By conformity to a set of beliefs. Anything that differs from the beliefs accepted by those selecting the canon is considered to be of poor authority, of dubious provenance, etc.
I'm not an expert, but I've read this in several places. Granted, these books are all of the skeptical variety, and they represent a parallel, very different version of history to the books that present the Bible's assembly as a more orderly process, free of interpretation, dogmatic screening, and persecution.
I'm not saying that this was evil, or trying to impugn the Bible. I'm only saying that which books went into the Bible was more a reflection of the theological views of those doing the selecting than it was a concern for historical accuracy as we would demand when, say, assembling an anthology on the battle of Stalingrad. Even THEN, the selections would still represent a certain set of views. We're human, and can't escape that.
"If you're going to bash, at least get your facts straight. Otherwise you just look foolish."
What "facts" are you referring to?
Did I get the mormon cult leaders name wrong?
So sorry, I can't keep up with all of them.
And yes, I'm the biggest fool on the planet simply because I believe there may be intelligent life on Slash Dot other than knee jerk reactionaries.
And I still see little evidence of any.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
and is omnipotent, therefore knowing the future, we have no free will. That would mean that it doesn't matter wheter we believe or not; we have no choice.
The conclusion is that as far as the time frame is concerned, with respect to both the duration and sequence of events, the scientist is left free of biblical constraints in hypothesizing about cosmic origins
Which is another way of saying "it doesn't matter if the bible has things wrong, let's just forget this part of the bible and concentrate on the other stuff". Lots of the bible is 'good' morally speaking, and so useful in some ways, but I'd been brought up to believe the bible was 'infallible' and now that I see it isn't, and have thought about the incongruity of a few different things, it just seems very man-made to me now.
I don't particularly have a belief system right now, but yes everything requires faith and assumptions. That doesn't necessarily mean that your assumptions are correct either. A few of my assumptions may turn out to be wrong (though I'm trying not to assume too much at the moment - I do have some reasons to believe in spiritual things, but I have never seen any real evidence for Christianity specifically being true).
I have heard the reasoning behind things like punishment for sin before. I was part of the Free Church of Scotland which is a very fundamental branch of the church, Calvinistic etc. The ideas behind Calvinism make me think that prayer is a pointless exercise other than to brainwash people into continuing to believe things, or to get them to go out and actually do the things that they're praying for anyway. Church follows a lot of the patterns of brainwashing (scare people and offer them a solution, make them feel special/separated from the rest of the world by certain rites, blah blah blah).
Yes, you can explain away anything you want to like I said. I don't try to explain away evidence for God, I just believe that the Christian God either does not exist, or is not even worth worshipping if he does.
which is totally what she said
They also use the bible and their personal interpretation of it to justify their own wanton greed and the destruction of the innocent. George Bush, for example, claims to be a Christian. Hasn't he heard "thou shalt not kill?"
That depends on whether your interpretation (translation) of the commandment is "Thou shalt not kill" or "Thou shalt not murder". Capital punishment is not murder.
"Manuscript -- Too many concurrent connections (> 100.000). The manuscript page is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." Good job -- we just slashdotted God.
Jim Shilliday
You're making us all look bad, /.
BCE means Before the Common Era, also known as BC.
The Codex dates to the 4th century CE, also known as AD.
How is Apostolic authority judged? By conformity to a set of beliefs.
Actually, Apostolic authority is judged by a connection to the people whom Jesus appointed as apostles.
Hundreds of posts to rationalize a religion based on faith. It fails from both ends. Those who don't believe in God (in the Christian sense) try to come up with rational arguments to prove He isn't real. On the other side of the coin, you can't prove God exists to someone who has no faith. You either believe it or you don't. Incidentally, though it has been said a eleventynine times above, looks like the contributor was so quick to try to give the Bible a black eye that he really stepped in it.
Assuming your retelling to be truthful then these people were probably not Christians, you understand that right?
i love the 'if people who call themselves christians do something that seems [fill in bad thing here] they are not [real] christians.' argument.
you're logic is a tad faulty. you're assuming christian == moral/ethical. it doesn't.
christian == someone who believes in jesus christ as the son of god incarnate. generally christians also believe in the resurrection, but not always.
some christians are ethical, some aren't. if a priest molests, he's an unethical christian. you don't get a free pass b/c you conflate belief in an avatar with being an ethical person.
The problem with many of you atheists
One doesn't need to be an atheist to have valid critisims of Christianity and the way that Christians behave.
No, I will not work for your startup
The conclusion is that as far as the time frame is concerned, with respect to both the duration and sequence of events, the scientist is left free of biblical constraints in hypothesizing about cosmic origins
Which is another way of saying "it doesn't matter if the bible has things wrong, let's just forget this part of the bible and concentrate on the other stuff".
No, it's another way of saying that the Bible is not a science book and shouldn't be read as such, and it's "chronological snobbery" (as CS Lewis put it) and old fashioned arrogance and ego-centricity to insist that it or God must answer every question we have.
Personally I think John is an eye witness account - if it is not, it was written by a literary genius who developed a level of realism well ahead of his time: the inclusion of unnecessary details, the exclusion of detail likely to have been forgotten between the event and its recollection. Add to that the assertion that it was written by John himself, missing from the other gospels.
At least one person -William Lane Craig- will be convinced by that line of arguing...
lol. That's the problem with being entrenched in your beliefs. Even when something is shown to you that apparently contradicts what you believe, you manage to invent some excuse to twist things round to your own view point. Bravo. Myself, I think this logically shows that the Christian God is either a bastard or simply isn't there (you will disagree saying God's intelligence and sense of justice is far above our own, but if you had never had any beliefs and were presented all the religions and the pros and cons, you would discount Christianity because of this kind of thing):
The majority of people who ever existed never heard of Jesus or were given a chance to worship the Israelite God. I expect probably at least 95% of the people who ever lived. Even today not many people know about Jesus. If you believe that God gives them a chance anyway, then why witness to them? If you are going to make their punishment worse by witnessing to them (everyone will be judged based on the knowledge given to them), then you will just be making it worse for some people.
Secondly, why bother sending people to hell at all? Especially for an eternity. I can understand punishment for say a million years if sin really is that big a deal to a 'perfect' God - who somehow is not responsible for sin in any way, but let it come into existence anyway. *sigh* There are just so many illogicalities in all of this that it's insane I ever believed it, but that's what happens when you are brought up in a Christian home and want to fit in.
Yes I have slight reason to believe in spiritual things, but I have no experiences in life to specifically make me think that the Christian God is real, and I believe from just the way the church is so divided, and from the way I've seen many Christians act, that the church is a very human endeavour.
which is totally what she said
I'm fascinated by your comment. Could you give an example of what you mean?
Thanks
Well, this depends on your definition of "authenticity". If you mean that the Bible was written a long time ago, then yes, old versions do show us that the Bible was not written 100yrs ago. However, old versions can tell us nothing about the truth of the statements in the text, other than that they weren't written recently. Just because they were part of the "original" text does not make them true. As such I would say that old texts prove very little.
I think if you asked an "average" Christian, i.e. one who isn't a Biblical scholar, they would be somewhat surprised to learn about the council of Nicea etc. and the amount of editing that has been performed over the years by men.
Such is your opinion. I have also listened to many debates, and it is clear to me that the critics of the Bible have the better case. Which is really irrelevant to the topic at hand as it's just my opinion.
Absolutely true. Though I feel I should point out that it seems that in my experience, when the highly educated go up against the poorly educated to discuss religion, the averages have the highly educated side opposing religion. Please note I said the averages, as I know a few highly educated Christians myself.
I have heard many priests speak eloquently and reasonably on the topic of religion, however the arguments and positions they take when discussing faith with an educated atheist are far removed from the positions they take when preaching to the "unwashed masses" as it were.
The difference, of course, is that cold fusion can be independently verified. If someone claims to have cracked it, then we can all have a go at replicating their experiment and check for ourselves if they are correct or not. The same is not true of church leaders. How can you tell if a preacher is lying or mistaken about the meaning or veracity of a Bible passage?
Look, I'm not interested in debating you on this or any other random point of doctrine you might bring up. See Keller's book and/or MP3 on hell, which represents as well thought-out (not to mention NYTimes best-selling) position as you're likely to find. If you don't find that persuasive, I doubt I can add anything that would change your mind.
Your comment that drew my attention was (emphasis mine): "One of the main reasons I have decided that the bible is a load of rubbish is not just that Genesis only takes 7 'days', but the way things are done are in the wrong order, so it doesn't really even make much sense as a metaphor."
My point in responding to you here is that, while I think there are some difficulties that may amount to good reasons for tossing out the Bible (formation of the canon, internal inconsistencies, etc.), this is not one of them. You make the same error as the young earth fundamentalist in failing to account for the genre of Genesis 1 and instead reading it through a modern scientific lens.
If this is what you base your doubts on, you need to be more skeptical of your attempt at skepticism.
That was one of the main things initially, but since then I have reconsidered a lot of other things, and the whole thing just makes a lot more sense from the point of view that the bible is man-made rather than God-breathed. I know all the bullshit reasoning about why God let sin into the world, why people have to go to hell for it etc, but it does not seem like Justice to me. You will believe that God's concept of justice is above our own, but now I believe that in fact it was just the Israelites idea of justice and their own self importance. How likely is it that God would choose one race and let all the others for thouuuusands of years just go to Hell? And even today the majority of people are going to Hell. It's pretty easy to ignore how unjust the whole idea is if you take it locally, where most people around you have at least some exposure to Jesus, but taken on a global scale over thousands of years, it is ludicrous. It's the sort of thing you just gloss over if you're trying to explain the bible away, but when you start doubting the validity of the whole thing, you don't have to gloss over it anymore and can just accept that it's a load of bollocks.
So to reiterate - I now base my doubts on all of it, the stuff that I'd previously explained away with a complex web of interweaving crap. If you selectively ignore things and just say "oh, we'll never understand that because it's way above us" rather than accepting that the Israelite god was just as much a man-made thing as Baal and all the other gods from that era, then you are just convincing yourself of a lie. I understand how easy it is to do that once you are entrenched in your beliefs, believe me, but I now see that I was just being an idiot. I don't care if Genesis was a poem, it is possible to make a poem beautiful and yet factual at the same time. If you always operate on the assumption that the bible is truth then you will find ways of making it such in your head. If you operate on the assumption that it is man-made, then you no longer have to make pathetic excuses for why Genesis is wrong, why there are so many supposedly Christian denominations that believe totally different things (if God was there then he would be guiding them more to be of one body and believe the same things), and any inconsistency is not to do with divine wisdom and mystery, it is simply due to everything being made up.
I admire people who at least try to reason and think about their beliefs and defend them, it shows strength of character, but I also am disappointed that people can be made to believe rubbish so easily. If you think about Buddhists or Muslims or whatever you'll think "how could they believe that rubbish, it's obviously not The Way", but yet they think the same of you, and now I think the same of all Christians. It's all a matter of perspective, and I am at least attempting to be more reasonable rather than just go with what I have been conditioned (by others and by myself) to believe.
which is totally what she said
That [the order of creation in Gen 1] was one of the main things initially, but since then I have reconsidered a lot of other things, and the whole thing just makes a lot more sense from the point of view that the bible is man-made rather than God-breathed.
Fair enough, but my point is your "main reason" (here an "initial main reason") is of one cloth with 24-hour literalism and hence is an equally wrong-headed approach to the text. Better watch the company you keep.
I am at least attempting to be more reasonable rather than just go with what I have been conditioned (by others and by myself) to believe.
Bad news, Bucko. You're still putting your faith in someone. All worldviews ultimately boil down to faith commitments, even hyper-skeptical, absurdist worldviews.
The more exclamation marks used the closer to objective reality!!!!!!!!! ... n!