THE BIBLE: God’s Word or Man’s?

and Isaiah wasn't even a sailor.

 

People forget this important fact: The Bible stories were written to support a particular belief system. The belief system did not come from the writings. It was the belief system that created the writings. Most of what we consider to be the Bible wasn't written until the Middle Ages.

 

You are totally intractable. Knock off the silly strike business. Don't you realize how obstinate you appear in this kind of reaction to answers you asked for?

You asked for the basis of Graham's claims. I gave them to you. As for how he knew anything: I am not a mind reader.

You demonstrate just how much of a one-tract mind you have by repeating the fact that present conditions on the moon do not support life, despite my clear explanation that the idea was not based on present conditions.

So here you are making a big deal out the fact that Graham's claims aren't based on science so that you can make the credibility issue your trump card again. That doesn't change the fact that Graham has made mincemeat out of the Bible by showing that in terms of the face value of its contents it's a piece of crap. You call his claims off-the-wall. Let's see you directly face his claims about the Bible.

I won't play the game on your terms anymore. Where should we start? With or without Graham, you will never be able to overcome the metaphysical basis in the Bible at Gen 2:4-5 and Hebrews 7:3, or the blow to monotheism in Gen 11:15 and Joshua 24:15.

Let's see you overcome the fiction of Abraham being before the flood (Joshua 24:2-3) and then after the flood as a distant decendant of Noah.

While you're at it, tell us why Solomon, the richest king on earth (1Kings 10:23) was so great that all the kings of the earth sought his presence (2Chron 9:23) yet none left any record of this.

If that isn't enough embarassment, there are no records of Joseph, Moses, the captivity, and their association with any Pharoah.

 

The oldest partial manuscript of John dates to c. 125.

 

While you're at it, tell us why Solomon, the richest king on earth (1Kings 10:23) was so great that all the kings of the earth sought his presence (2Chron 9:23) yet none left any record of this.

If that isn't enough embarassment, there are no records of Joseph, Moses, the captivity, and their association with any Pharoah

I think the accounts were written to demonstrate how they wished it to be... having been exposed to the richness of Babylon.

- - - Updated - - -

Early Christian Writings..

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

Note the dates.

 

They made up all of the rest because it was just a partial manuscript.

 

You are wrong about the Old Testament Bible, and must be trying to suggest that NT was written during the Middle Ages?



Timeline of Bible Translation History
1,400 BC: The first written Word of God: The Ten Commandments delivered to Moses.
500 BC: Completion of All Original Hebrew Manuscripts which make up The 39 Books of the Old Testament.
200 BC: Completion of the Septuagint Greek Manuscripts which contain The 39 Old Testament Books AND 14 Apocrypha Books.
1st Century AD: Completion of All Original Greek Manuscripts which make up The 27 Books of the New Testament.
315 AD: Athenasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, identifies the 27 books of the New Testament which are today recognized as the canon of scripture.
382 AD: Jerome's Latin Vulgate Manuscripts Produced which contain All 80 Books (39 Old Test. + 14 Apocrypha + 27 New Test).
500 AD: Scriptures have been Translated into Over 500 Languages.
600 AD: LATIN was the Only Language Allowed for Scripture.
995 AD: Anglo-Saxon (Early Roots of English Language) Translations of The New Testament Produced.
1384 AD: Wycliffe is the First Person to Produce a (Hand Written) manuscript Copy of the Complete Bible; All 80 Books.
1455 AD: Gutenberg Invents the Printing Press; Books May Now be mass-Produced Instead of Individually Hand-Written. The First Book Ever Printed is Gutenberg's Bible in Latin.
1516 AD: Erasmus Produces a Greek/Latin Parallel New Testament.
1522 AD: Martin Luther's German New Testament.
1526 AD: William Tyndale's New Testament; The First New Testament printed in the English Language.
1535 AD: Myles Coverdale's Bible; The First Complete Bible printed in the English Language (80 Books: O.T. & N.T. & Apocrypha).
1537 AD: Tyndale-Matthews Bible; The Second Complete Bible printed in English. Done by John "Thomas Matthew" Rogers (80 Books).
1539 AD: The "Great Bible" Printed; The First English Language Bible Authorized for Public Use (80 Books).
1560 AD: The Geneva Bible Printed; The First English Language Bible to add Numbered Verses to Each Chapter ((80 Books).
1568 AD: The Bishops Bible Printed; The Bible of which the King James was a Revision (80 Books).
1609 AD: The Douay Old Testament is added to the Rheims New Testament (of 1582) Making the First Complete English Catholic Bible; Translated from the Latin Vulgate (80 Books).
1611 AD: The King James Bible Printed; Originally with All 80 Books. The Apocrypha was Officially Removed in 1885 Leaving Only 66 Books.
1782 AD: Robert Aitken's Bible; The First English Language Bible (KJV) Printed in America.
1791 AD: Isaac Collins and Isaiah Thomas Respectively Produce the First Family Bible and First Illustrated Bible Printed in America. Both were King James Versions, with All 80 Books.
1808 AD: Jane Aitken's Bible (Daughter of Robert Aitken); The First Bible to be Printed by a Woman.
1833 AD: Noah Webster's Bible; After Producing his Famous Dictionary, Webster Printed his Own Revision of the King James Bible.
1841 AD: English Hexapla New Testament; an Early Textual Comparison showing the Greek and 6 Famous English Translations in Parallel Columns.
1846 AD: The Illuminated Bible; The Most Lavishly Illustrated Bible printed in America. A King James Version, with All 80 Books.
1885 AD: The "English Revised Version" Bible; The First Major English Revision of the KJV.
1901 AD: The "American Standard Version"; The First Major American Revision of the KJV.
1971 AD: The "New American Standard Bible" (NASB) is Published as a "Modern and Accurate Word for Word English Translation" of the Bible.
1973 AD: The "New International Version" (NIV) is Published as a "Modern and Accurate Phrase for Phrase English Translation" of the Bible.
1982 AD: The "New King James Version" (NKJV) is Published as a "Modern English Version Maintaining the Original Style of the King James."
2002 AD: The English Standard Version (ESV) is Published as a translation to bridge the gap between the accuracy of the NASB and the readability of the NIV.

 

Distraff:

The fact that you believe Nostradamus actually prophesied makes me question your credibility.

The reality is that Nostradamus did not prophesy anything. Rather, he presented speculations, based on past history, that certain events would repeat themselves in the future. Notice how one writer revealed Nostradamus' ideology.

"In "Nostradamus, Bibliomancer: The Man, the Myth, the Truth," biographer Peter Lemesurier concludes that Nostradamus "believed that history repeats itself" and used the technique of projecting past events onto the future in order to make realistic-sounding claims. What's more, scholars have argued the modern translations of Nostradamus' writing are sloppy and unreliable."
http://www.businessinsider.com/predictions-of-nostradamus-2011-12​

As that same website further stated:

"But, like horoscopes, the predictions themselves tend to be vaguely worded, and therefore open to the reader's interpretations and biases."​

As for your claims about "dozens of predictions in the Koran" (and you are not the first person who has presented this argument), you have chosen to ignore the fact that the Judeo-Christian Bible has some 2,000 accurately fulfilled prophecies (compared to the supposed "dozens" in the Koran). You have also chosen to ignore the fact that the Islamic Koran was written more than 600 years after the completion of the Judeo-Christian Bible and that it plagiarized many of the Bible characters and events found within the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures.

Unlike "prophecies" found in other religious books, prophecies found in the Judeo-Christian Bible are not vague predictions. Rather many of them give minute details of future events that later happened exactly as prophesied. As stated in my OP, secular history has confirmed many of these Bible prophecies.

Alter2Ego

 

Do you realize what you've written? If it's a partial manuscript from 125 A.D. that means that the rest of it was made up long after that time. And so you have a partial manuscript that was all by its lonesome in some forgotten place and centuries later it popped up in some guy's grubby hands.

Did you know that you can buy a brand new Rolls Royce on Mars?

 

Alter2Ego, long time no see. Welcome back. Hope you stay a while.

 

Man's.

Not even Woman's but Man's.


God?

God is the Christian deity, Christianity invaded Rome and replaced emperors with popes.

Organised religion is always law and order.

 

The ancients never believed the Earth was flat - well, not those living near the sea or the smart ones, in any case. This whole "flat Earth" mind we gave them is in fact a way to belittle them, and to show how much superior we are (supposedly). They also knew about the gravity, if not its theory, then surely its practice. People always have pictured astral bodies as floating by themselves, anywhere.

The Antique world was a very inspired part of humanity's history. There are things done in this period that we just can't replicate, even now.

Oh, and the bible may not be as old as you think; Scholar consensus tells us that it was written during the exile to Babylon, near 800 BC, if memory serves me well.

 

The Torah plagiarized the much older stories of Sumer, Egypt and the Ugarit.

 

The Bible is the human accounts of testimonies of God's deeds, His messages (of Law and covenants) for humans. Humans rely heavily on human accounts of testimonies to reach a truth of any kind, this however is beyond humans' own awareness. That is to say, humans make use of human witnessing all the times but without their own consent of what witnessing actually is. The Bible (and Christianity) is an emphasis of witnessing simply because only God knows what it is. God's prophets are explicitly referred to as His witnesses.

Let's take a look at our daily news as an example to see what witnessing is. Our media which is our reporters and journalists act as a "middle man" between a truth and humans. All mankind don't dig up evidence but put faith in this "middle man" to reach whatever happening in each and every corner of our world. We can sit safely at home to get to know everything about this world through human accounts of testimonies, usually with our reporters and journalists acting as the middle man. There are several key factors in the process of human witnessing. 1) You need to broadcast/preach the message of fact/truth. 2) You need people to put faith in to believe. 3) Humans will rely on the credibility and reliability of the middle man to put their faith to get to the facts.

Our scientists are yet another group of "middle man" for us to reach a specific kind of truth, that is, our science. Humans don't do experiments or collect evidence of a scientific truth. We rely on the testimonies of our scientists as a middle man to get to a truth. We can however do the experiments ourselves simply because science is narrow but specific kind of truth which can repeat itself infinitive number of times for humans to repeatedly do observations and experiments to confirm a repeatable truth.

However not every kind of truth is repeatable for humans to do infinitive observations to confirm a fact. Humans are creatures of the present. They don't know the past, nor do they know the future. History is about facts/truths happened only once, which humans don't have to ability to go back to confirm what happened. The only way for humans to possibly know what happened in the past (especially the long past) is by putting faith in human accounts of testimonies. This time our middle man is the historians. Like our reporters and journalists, historians legitimately gather information ultimately from eyewitnesses for the rest of humans to possibly know what happened (to the very limited amount of events and figures deemed famous). History itself however is completely insignificant in comparing to the overall human activities. History is around 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of overall human activities, usually deemed famous by the public or mostly by an authority for them to pass on. As a result, it is fallacious to say that it didn't happen because it's unsupported by our history books or manuscripts.

Another most important area which humans don't have the ability to access is the future. The only way humans can possibly reach what lying ahead is through human accounts of testimonies and the existence of a God, and under the special circumstance that God has a good reason to hide behind.

Possibility of human accessing a future event:
1) a God exists who knows the future
2) this God has a good reason to hide behind, or else He as a super being should show up to guide the inferior humans
3) this God has to make use of human accounts of testimonies in the case that He has to hide behind
4) this God has to choose a group of eyewitnesses (our middle man to a truth) for them to write down testimonies for the rest of humans to possibly get to such a truth
5) this God has to urge His people (media of God) to preach/broadcast the good news to reach as far away and as many humans as possibly (an explicit command from Jesus)
6) the rest of humans need faith to reach this piece of truth (Christianity explicitly demands faith to believe)

Christianity is thus the only religion which explicitly put emphasis on witnesses, testimonies, preaching, and believing with faith. Humans don't know the significance. Only the true God knows.


Bible starts with Moses was commanded to write down laws. However it is very difficult for humans to keep documentations before the invention of paper. On the other hand, human lost almost all original documents at the point when paper was invented. Everything was transplanted to paper form but with original manuscripts completely lost. God has to train up the Jews to convey messages in oral form. That's how the Oral Law was strictly secured and enforced by the Pharisees back in Jesus days.

The canonization of OT Scriptures started with king Hezekiah. 17 out of 22 book Pharisaic Canon are said to be with a Hezekiah seal mark. The written documents deviated and melted away during the Babylon exile. God thus instructed Ezra to recompile the books and edited out the deviations from books kept by the various groups of Jews due to the lack of a central authority of publication.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a library of books of the Essenes who happened to live in caves. This shows that 1) humans don't have the ability to keep original documents, and 2) religion is the best mean to keep the original documents written before the invention of paper, such that OT is the only set of books humans can compare and reconcile with its original manuscripts. We also have large amount of NT manuscripts for the sake of Christianity as a religion. Maybe that's why God has to employ a religion to convey His messages.

The Bible is thus a book of God. Period!

 

Not only is organised religion man made law and order, but religious texts were like mass media.
That's why stories collaborate across faiths; major disasters where told by religion.

 

Have you heard about Nag Hammadi, or Ras Shamra or Dilmun?

 

Have you heard of Roman empire wide persecution?

First they are religious in nature. Second, they are not about a complete set of consistent theology. The Bible is about a complete set of consistent theology (cored about human salvation) carried forward precisely (in terms of theological precision) through a lasting religion. This theology can be reconcilable with its today's paper form vs. ancient scrolls. It is reconcilable the other way by comparing the different independent sources (which are the NT manuscript sources).

What you mentioned never shared the above characteristics. Something is broadcast consistently throughout humanity!

Moreover, Roman empire wide persecution was to burn down the churches and books. This seemed to spare Egypt may it's too remote to the empire. That's why all kinds of manuscripts can be found in Egypt, especially documents circulated in the 4th century.

 

The Romans weren't very good at persecuting christians. In fact the "Christians" managed to persecute more "Christians" than the romans did...they were a catty bunch back then; all them sects snarling at each other over their crosses....

 

It's irrelevant. Our church being unable to keep the original canonical documents mostly contributed by the Roman persecution.

 

True.. early Christians had many conflicting beliefs.

 

I guess they should have brokered the same deal with the imperial cult that the Jews did then.
The Romans were one of the most inclusive empires ever to exist in terms of belief systems.

 

I wonder how the Jews of Babylon understood anything about Bronze Age culture?
That is what the Torah covers. They
a - took a wild and lucky guess
b - worked from earlier documents
c - didn't write it during Babylonian times at all.

If you want to understand how willfully ignorant academia can be over this issue then
just read about the domestication of the camel. They say there were none in Abraham's
day so the story of the Patriarchs was a later invention. But camels were being ridden
before the pyramids were built. Tell that to Wikipedia.