The Incredible odds of fulfilled bible prophecy

[joobz]

I never said I was a literalist. Even Billy Graham is not a literalist.But I believe from all the evidence I've seen that Christ is divine

So now your only source for claiming christ is the son of god is potentially flawed.

When a witness' testimony in a criminal trial is shown to have factual errors, what happens to that witness' credibility?

and the only hope for this dead and dying world is Christianity.

This is by far one of the most arrogantly self-absorbed bits of nonsense i've yet to hear.


Where was christianity for the 1800 years we had slavery?
Where was christianity for the 1700 years we had monarchies?

The greatest advancements we've made in human rights and morality wree done inspite of christianity (which was more than happy to maintain the power status quo).

We face trouble with a theocratic movement in the form of islam and you are claiming we need a itheocratic movement to counter it. That's battling the devil with the devil's own tools.

 

[Lothian]

Lothian, just so it's clear. It is obvious that you have proven DOC wrong in this instance.

It was Ladewig who questioned Christ making the quote. I merely chased up a reply. Even if god said it to Isaiah, we still have no evidence of the words leaving Jesus's lips.

 

[joobz]

It was Ladewig who questioned Christ making the quote. I merely chased up a reply. Even if god said it to Isaiah, we still have no evidence of the words leaving Jesus's lips.

Thank you for the clarification. I hope that eventually DOC will learn how one remains intellectually honest.

 

[UnrepentantSinner]

Don't despair. There's still the vanishingly-small possibility that DOC could be...mistaken?

He has admitted that in his 23,730 "informative" posts to having made two or three mistatements, usually attributed to copying errors or mistakes in interpretation.

 

[zenotter]

(quoting post 260 regarding Mr. Coulter's asian heritage without the benefit of caffeine to quote the reply because I'm ... zzz...z.... zzzzzzz....)

If she's Asian, I really am an otter.

"Prophecy is a guess that comes true. When it doesn't, it's a metaphor." - Vir, Babylon 5

*not thumping the Book of G'Quan*

 

[joobz]

I don't think she's Asian.

Yes, but prophecies are sometimes missleading. In this case, it would seem that Asian is really, "As Ian".
So, She fullfills the prophecy if her male name was Ian.

 

[DOC]

If the bible is the word of an omniscent god, it would not contain four different gospels. It would have one, consistent, historically-accurate account of the life of Jesus. Backed-up with references.

The official bible (which includes 27 books in the New Testament) wasn't brought together on a whim, it was hammered out over centuries and wasn't decided on until 367 AD. They knew of the minor inconsistencies but as the following article states:


"It (the Bible) is rather an attempt to bring together as many Christian communities that were bound to a particular gospel into one major church. And this was essentially accomplished through the four gospel canon."

The above paragraph is from the article: Emergence of the Four Gospel Canon
by Elaine H. Pagels

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/emergence.html

 

[zenotter]

No matter; I hardly believe that s/he was born in Bethlehem.

 

[zenotter]

The official bible (which includes 27 books in the New Testament) wasn't brought together on a whim, it was hammered out over centuries and wasn't decided on until 367 AD. They knew of the minor inconsistencies but as the following article states:


"It (the Bible) is rather an attempt to bring together as many Christian communities that were bound to a particular gospel into one major church. And this was essentially accomplished through the four gospel canon."

The above paragraph is from the article: Emergence of the Four Gospel Canon
by Elaine H. Pagels

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/emergence.html

I was raised Christian and was most recently a decent Catholic; are you including the Apocrypha in your bible, and if so, are there any references you can quote for messianic prophecy fulfillment in any of those books?

*wanders off to home library to read the story of Judith and Holofernes again*

 

[joobz]

The official bible (which includes 27 books in the New Testament) wasn't brought together on a whim, it was hammered out over centuries and wasn't decided on until 367 AD. They knew of the minor inconsistencies but as the following article states:


"It (the Bible) is rather an attempt to bring together as many Christian communities that were bound to a particular gospel into one major church. And this was essentially accomplished through the four gospel canon."

The above paragraph is from the article: Emergence of the Four Gospel Canon
by Elaine H. Pagels

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/emergence.html

So you admit that the word of god was determined by committee?

 

[DOC]

So you admit that the word of god was determined by committee?

No the word of God was determined by God. How some of that word of God eventually gets to us is a process. And nobody is stopping anyone from reading the Gnostic Gospels if you wish. Get out your library card.

Or if you choose you can pray to God directly and He might speak to you that way.

 

[zenotter]

So.... God could speak through actual historical people to prove that some prophecies have not been fulfilled at this time?

(I prayed; that's the answer I got from her. Seriously.)

 

[joobz]

No the word of God was determined by God. How some of that word of God eventually gets to us is a process.

So, the word of god was filtered through a committee?

Filters have a bad habit of skewing the data. Ever notice what the world looks like when you have red tinted glasses on? It becomes a bit difficult to tell which objects are really red and which aren't.

Hmm, I wonder how we can believe really anything in the bible if it was applied through so many filter over so many centuries by so many people with so many political and power driven agendas.

I think the only thing I can do is to rely on logic and reason to sort out the mess.

 

[zooterkin]

No the word of God was determined by God. How some of that word of God eventually gets to us is a process. And nobody is stopping anyone from reading the Gnostic Gospels if you wish. Get out your library card.

Why did God need to make it so hard for himself; why did he let things get to the stage that he needed a committee to sort things out? What about some poor soul in 300 AD with access to an incorrect bible; were they doomed to believe things that were not true? Or do you, as your post suggests, think that only 'us' living now are important?

 

[bokonon]

What about some poor soul in 300 AD with access to an incorrect bible; were they doomed to believe things that were not true? Or do you, as your post suggests, think that only 'us' living now are important?

Christians perform all kinds of mental gymnastics to reconcile their views of a just god and a man they claim is the only route to salvation. What about the people born in 300 BCE, who never heard of Christ, how are they saved? What about the baby who dies in the womb, how is he saved? What about the child who grows up in the jungles of Brazil and never even suspects that the Bible exists? Does it make sense to condemn any of those souls for being innocent victims of circumstance? Conversely, if those souls can, by some divine loophole yet to be revealed, be saved in spite of the fact that they never accepted Jesus as their personal savior, does it make sense to condemn an ethical Muslim who thinks Jesus was a fine guy, but no finer than Moses? Or an ethical Buddhist, or an ethical atheist?

Most of them just shove questions like these into the "through a glass darkly" drawer, so they don't have to question their beliefs.

 

[SezMe]

The official bible (which includes 27 books in the New Testament) wasn't brought together on a whim, it was hammered out over centuries and wasn't decided on until 367 AD. They knew of the minor inconsistencies but as the following article states:

So god performs miracles, responds to prayers, is omniscient and omnipotent yet takes a hands-off approach to letting a committee of mere mortals determine the contents of his book?

Really? You sure you want to stick with that line ....

(well, I was going to end that sentence with "of reasoning" but caught myself just in time. )

 

[Frozenwolf150]

Darn, joobz beat me to it.

I can kick the legs out from under several of those prophecies with this simple point. The suffering servant mentioned in Isaiah is Israel itself, not Jesus. The misconception that Isaiah is talking about some messianic figure, when in actuality he's referring to Israel, is the basis for some of the most popular prophecies. It's not unusual to personify a city, nation, or people as a whole. When Ezekiel refers to Jerusalem as a whore who had sex with well-endowed Egyptian men (Ezekiel 16, I'm not making this up) and then the Assyrians, Canaanites, and Chaldeans, would you assume he was making a prophecy about Jesus as well? Of course not.

 

[fuelair]

I doubt it, after 30 years they might remember the quarterback or maybe one or two other players but that would probably be it. I wouldn't even be surprised it all four accounts had different ending scores if nobody bothered to write them down.

Sorry Docky, you can't have it both ways - either it's inerrant and they all wrote exactly the same things with the same interpretations or it isn't and they each wrote it as remembered (with all expected inaccuracies) many years later - exactly as appears to have happened.

Fortunately, I don't need to give a crap which is the case because there is no evidence of any functional (real) kind that any of it is real or that it's supposed "coordinator" is or ever was. You do not have that excuse.

 

[Tricky]

The official bible (which includes 27 books in the New Testament) wasn't brought together on a whim, it was hammered out over centuries and wasn't decided on until 367 AD. They knew of the minor inconsistencies but as the following article states: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/emergence.html

Ah, but that article also states:

There actually are only four authentic gospels. And this is obviously true because there are four corners of the universe and there are four principal winds, and therefore there can be only four gospels that are authentic. These, besides, are written by Jesus' true followers."

Well that's laughable enough on the surface. I would like Ms. Pagels to identify even one corner of the universe. Since the universe is three-dimensional, then the universe (in her view) must be like a triangular pyramid or tetrahedron. That's the only regular three-dimensional shape with four corners. And there are only four principle winds? I'm sure that navigators would gladly have their workload decreased by this marvelous discovery.

But then she goes on to admit:

we don't know who wrote the gospels we call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, any more than we know who wrote the Gospel of Thomas. They're all attributed to disciples of Jesus, but we don't really know who wrote them.

So we don't know who they were but we trust that these unknown people were transcribing the literal word of God? So unless God himself did the editing during the fourth-century meetings, the validity of the various gospels (of which there were many) were indeed determined by committee. No amount of library research is going to change that fact. You have given this fourth-century committee the authority to decide what you belive is true. How does it feel having someone else in charge of your thoughts?

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

DOC quoted Elaine Pagels on the origin of the New Testament?

That's really funny.

The quote about the four corners sounds like Ireneaus not Elaine Pagels. She is, at best, now an agnostic IIRC.