Evidence for why we know the New Testament writers told the truth.

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Any Israeli second grader would be able to tell Ross that the Hebrew language has enough words to denote any time interval, and even sometimes more than one word to express subtle differences in regard to the same time interval. Ross apparently is not familiar with such words. In particular, the word epoch has more than one synonym in Hebrew. The most common Hebrew word for epoch is tkufa. A less common synonyms for this word are sfira and idan (the later is of the Aramaic origin but was used in the biblical Hebrew as well). There also other expressions in Hebrew which can be used for epoch. Since author of the Book of Genesis had all those and many other words at his disposal, the notion of the shortage of Hebrew words for denoting various time intervals is simply ludicrous. (Note that according to Christian beliefs the real author of the Book of Genesis was God Himself. Does Ross's explanation mean that God knew fewer Hebrew words than an average Hebrew-speaking kid does?)
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Not to get sidetracked, but yes, the average Hebrew-speaking kid knows many more words of Hebrew than a hypothetical bronze-age god would. The reason for this is that conversational Hebrew is a modern re-invention of a functionally dead language.

There are only about 8000 different words in the torah. But the modern hebrew dictionary contains more than 80,000. The balance of these, more than 90% of the language, were actually just made up, starting in the 1880s.

http://www.theworld.org/2010/01/07/israelis-mark-national-hebrew-day/
 
Simon39759 said:
Well, then, go and watch some VenomfangX youtube videos (are they still up? I don't know...)
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VenomFangX (now simply Shawn) has left YouTube, after getting into legal issues over false-flag DMCA claims. The last couple of videos featuring him (shown below, courtesy of dprjones) show an astonishing turnaround in his character.





If Shawn can admit his mistakes and move on, anyone can. But in DOC's case, I'm not going to hold my breath.
 
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Well, I had left the drama at him pretending to be the victim of death threats by Muslims and telling that dprJones was a pedophile...

I didn't know that he was 'officially' diagnosed with a mental problem, even if it had been suggested multiple times before. The videos also imply he got mixed up with some cultish brand of Christianity, which is not too surprising...

Anyway, I don't know how sincere VenomfangX was, the guy has pulled the act of contrition before, when trying to avoid the consequences from his illegal actions, only to get right back to it after a few months...
I wish him the best of luck, though, to amend his conduct and fix his relationship with his family...
 
Hokulele said:
Matthew claims the prophet "Jeremy" predicted Judas' death, the thirty pieces of silver, and some relation to potters. The problem is, the closest prophet to "Jeremy" would be Jeremiah, and there is nothing remotely like this in that book. It turns out, Matthew screwed up and was thinking of Zechariah. Basically, Matthew was inventing links between the OT and the NT again...
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That's an opinion. There are other opinions.

http://home.teleport.com/~salad/4god/potter.htm
 
Here's something that's NOT opinion:
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.ful

abstract said:
People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1–4). Manipulating people's beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God's beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one's own beliefs and God's beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person's beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs.
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Ever Notice how people seem to think god's morality is always their own? Well, there's a reason for that and science has identified it.
 
DOC said:
That's an opinion. There are other opinions.

http://home.teleport.com/~salad/4god/potter.htm
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That's retarded in so many ways...

-First of all, nothing in the passage suggests it being about Jesus. It makes perfect sense within the Jeremiah narrative, it's about crushing the local pagan customs.
Indeed, many part of the long passage distinctively contradict anything you'd found in the Jesus narrative. It's violent, it ends up with the destruction of the kingdom of Judas... Really, only the reference to a field and some kind of pottery is very vaguely reminiscent of the Judas myth.

-This reference to pottery can be explained by some godly pun: (the word for jar was an homophone of the word for ruin).

-Most importantly, there is absolutely no reference to the first half the "prophecy":
Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: "AND THEY TOOK THE THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER, THE PRICE OF THE ONE WHOSE PRICE HAD BEEN SET by the sons of Israel;
and they gave them for the Potter's field, as the lord directed me."
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On the other hand, we have a somewhat similar sounding "prophet" writing:

I said to them, "If it is good in your sight, give me my (V)wages; but if not, never mind!" So they weighed out (W)thirty shekels of silver as my wages.
Then the LORD said to me, "Throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by them." So I took the thirty shekels of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of the LORD.
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The passage also makes much more sense as a prophecy, it is about Israel (the flock) turning its back to its shepherd and betraying its trust and ends up with the threat that the next shepherd to come will be a bad ass (hence the name "The Doomed Flock").
It's quite clear how Matthew could have seen that passage as prophetic of Jesus. On the other hand, if he really thought Jeremiah was a prophesy of Jesus, then his judgement can't really be trusted with anything beyond lacing his own shoes.
 
DOC said:
That's an opinion. There are other opinions.
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Heh, your apologist doesn't even get the story in Matthew correct. The potter's field was bought by the priests to bury strangers in, not to bury Judas. It was in Acts where Judas bought the field and then tripped, fell, and died (not a suicide). But thank you for continuing to highlight the contradictions between the various authors.
 
Hokulele said:
Heh, your apologist doesn't even get the story in Matthew correct. The potter's field was bought by the priests to bury strangers in, not to bury Judas. It was in Acts where Judas bought the field and then tripped, fell, and died (not a suicide). But thank you for continuing to highlight the contradictions between the various authors.
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You know, it's such a good thing that the awesome-boson is a weight less sparticle because otherwise, the tectonic plate would subduct under the weight of Hoku's awesome and Hawaii would disappear under water and Pat Robertson would make an even bigger fool of himself.
Good thing, really and that was an awesome reply.
 
Simon39759 said:
I wish him the best of luck, though, to amend his conduct and fix his relationship with his family...
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I'm not holding my breath though. PCS (e.g. Poster-child for Creationist Stupidity) has pulled this disappearing act before when the legal heat was on him. He might live up to DPRJones' "request" he stay off YouTube for a year, but I doubt he'll have changed much WHEN he comes back.

In the meantime, there's still GeerUp, NephilimFree, The Atheist Antidote, and others for Christian/Creationist inanity on YouTube.
 
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Posted by Hokulele" Post #11138

The best single example to use to demonstrate what the posters are talking about is the bit about riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. This is lifted directly from Zechariah (I don't have access to the exact passage at the moment, but can look it up later). In it, the prophet states that the messiah will be riding "an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass". Most of the Gospel riders correctly interpreted this to mean a single, young, male donkey, the repetition simply being a poetic device.

Matthew, however, reads the original prophecy literally and invents rodeo Jesus where he is supposedly riding both animals (although I doubt at the same time). Seeing this type of discrepency highlights how the Gospel writers deliberately included prophecy into their accounts, even though it might not have matched reality very well (being written decades after the original events).
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The sentence I bolded shows you have a bad habit of stating something as a fact that is simply a skeptic theory. You lose credibility when you make these statements as if they are facts when there are other explanations.

For example the one below I wrote about this issue months ago. I thought it was much ado about nothing then and I think it is much ado about nothing now.


http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=4618777#post4618777

ETA And how well something matches prophecy is a matter of opinion. If you don't think something matches prophecy well, well that is your opinion, it is not fact. Some Skeptics think Isaiah chapter 53 doesn't prophesize Jesus' life. Whereas Jewish lawyer Jay Sekulow was converted to Christianity because of the chapter. And has devoted his life and career to the gospel.
 
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DOC said:
The sentence I bolded shows you have a bad habit of stating something as a fact that is simply a skeptic theory. You lose credibility when you make these statements as if they are facts when there are other explanations.

For example the one below I wrote about this issue months ago. I thought it was much ado about nothing then and I think it is much ado about nothing now.


http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=4618777#post4618777

ETA And how well something matches prophecy is a matter of opinion. If you don't think something matches prophecy well, well that is your opinion, it is not fact. Some Skeptics think Isaiah chapter 53 doesn't prophesize Jesus' life. Whereas Jewish lawyer Jay Sekulow was converted to Christianity because of the chapter. And has devoted his life and career to the gospel.
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DOC, your "ETA" isn't even an argument. Nor does it even relate to Zechariah 9:9, which is what Hokulele is talking about.

Hokulele's point on matthew is
1.) Hebrew Poetry often repeated phrases without implying dual events occuring.
2.) The prophecy described in Zechariah 9:9 repeats the humble king entering on a colt and ass
3.) This repetition is an example of this poetic tradition and not meant to imply a dual entrance.
4.) Matthew, unfamiliar with this tradition, errors and has Jesus jumping back and forth from a colt and ass.

If you wish to attack the argument, attack the premises to the argument. But you hadn't done that. What you did, DOC, was to simply handwave away things you do not wish to think about.

As it stands, POINT HOKULELE!
 
DOC said:
The sentence I bolded shows you have a bad habit of stating something as a fact that is simply a skeptic theory. You lose credibility when you make these statements as if they are facts when there are other explanations.

For example the one below I wrote about this issue months ago. I thought it was much ado about nothing then and I think it is much ado about nothing now.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=4618777#post4618777
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And there you are wrong.
Among competing explanations of equal predictive values, one should privilege the most likely one as factual with the caveat that it, like all human knowledge, is provisional until new contradictory evidences appear.

For example, Koch, when he injected Mycobacterium tuberculosis in mice, caused them to die of tuberculosis and his conclusions was that the bacterium was the causative agent of the disease, still stands to this day.
However, one could imagine the disease being caused by a totally unrelated factor and the fact that, in Koch's experiment, only the treatment group was afflicted, only to be a coincidence.
Both explanation works equally well at explaining the facts, but one his likely and simple, the other one circumvoluted and unlikely.


In the case of Matthew's passage, we have:
-A formula of repetition that is common in Hebrew poesy.
-A passage that is unique to Matthew and can not be found in the older gospel of Mark that Matthew used quite a lot for material.
-A scene that does not make sense, why ride two animals at the same time? How, one is clearly younger and thus smaller?

At this point one can draw two hypothesis of equally good explanation value:
A) Matthew misunderstood Zechariah 9 (read it in context, it's about Israel's victory on its enemies at the time of zechariah not about the travellings of a wandering preacher) and made up events to match it, the same way he made up events to match the birth in Bethlehem.
B) Jesus really did do his little piece of rodeos. Mark and Luke did not report it because they suck at their job.

Clearly, the first one is much more likely (especially if you start include magic).


ETA And how well something matches prophecy is a matter of opinion. If you don't think something matches prophecy well, well that is your opinion, it is not fact. Some Skeptics think Isaiah chapter 53 doesn't prophesize Jesus' life. Whereas Jewish lawyer Jay Sekulow was converted to Christianity because of the chapter. And has devoted his life and career to the gospel.
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No, it's not, a matter of opinion.
You can make a list of statements contained in a prophecy and count how many are specific and how many applies to the event you are attempting to fit. You can also tally up how many statements are in direct contradiction with the events that are so-called "prophesied", even a single contradiction should, normally, sink the claim at the text being prophetic and, if the events is only "predicted" by a few, very general statements, then it does not fit very well (I have been some "messianic prophecies" applied with better accuracy to Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker than to Jesus himself, they are just that vague).


Regarding Isaiah7, in particular, Tim Callahan made a post on the subject.


But, to summarize, at some point around 732 BCE, Ahaz, king of Judah, was seeing his kingdom, and his city of Jerusalem, threatened by the alliance of two powerful enemies.
Isaiah then came to reassure him:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The [almah] will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.
He will eat curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right.
But before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.
The LORD will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah—he will bring the king of Assyria.
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So, we have a series of statement.
The first one may be of a virgin birth. There is controversy as to how to translate the word almah , indeed, many traductions do not use the term 'virgin' but instead "young woman" or similar terms.
The second one gives us the name of the son: Immanuel. Problem, nowhere in the gospels is Jesus referred to as Immanuel. The only references we can find to Jesus/Immanuels are direct allusions to this "prophecy".
Then, the boy will 'eat curd and honey', problem, this suggest a rather comfy childhood, not one that you'd expect from the family of a modest carpenter.
He will know 'when to reject right and wrong', problem, Jesus being divine, would know that instantly from the beginning, there is no story of him having to learn right and wrong, this statement could only apply to a human child not a man-God.
Before the child gets to the age of reason, the kings enemies of Ahaz will be defeated, please note that this is supposed to happen while Ahaz is still alive ("The LORD will bring on you and on your people"). Ahaz died in 716/715 BCE, that's more than seven centuries too early.

So, really, the only elements that is not plainly in direct contradiction with the Jesus myth is the virgin birth.
But as we can see, the translation of the word is very contested, indeed, even the King James version translate it differently depending of the passage.
Of course, that argument is moot if Jesus is not born of a virgin. The virgin birth is not referenced to in Mark and seems a later addition to the Jesus mythos, maybe one more example of Matthew making stuff up to fit the prophecies, or maybe the narrative was forged to answer some nasty rumors that, we know, were running around when the narrative was first written down.
Indeed, the virgin birth is part of a narrative that includes the flight to Egypt and that a) has no external support b) is unlikely (9 month pregnant woman going through the hardship of a long trip, census organization that makes no sense) c) is not supported by the archaeological and documentary evidences you'd expect (for the slaughter of the innocents, the census). The whole narrative is very highly suspicious.


On the other hand, the use of the word Ah'Almah, suggest that the young woman in question was present during the conversation (this young woman).
Scholars have suggested that the whole prediction would be about Ahaz and a son of his, and then, the whole prophecy, suddenly, makes quite a lot of sense.


So, yes, the value of the passage as a messianic prophecy may have been enough to convince Mr. Sekulow, but, it seems to me, that it only speaks about Mr. Sekulow's poor judgement on the matter...
 
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joobz said:
DOC, your "ETA" isn't even an argument. Nor does it even relate to Zechariah 9:9, which is what Hokulele is talking about.

Hokulele's point on matthew is
1.) Hebrew Poetry often repeated phrases without implying dual events occuring.
2.) The prophecy described in Zechariah 9:9 repeats the humble king entering on a colt and ass
3.) This repetition is an example of this poetic tradition and not meant to imply a dual entrance.
4.) Matthew, unfamiliar with this tradition, errors and has Jesus jumping back and forth from a colt and ass.
If you wish to attack the argument, attack the premises to the argument. But you hadn't done that. What you did, DOC, was to simply handwave away things you do not wish to think about.

As it stands, POINT HOKULELE!
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Oh, I thought Jesus just had really long legs and was straddling both. Sure, it would be awkward, particularly in that long frock. Also, it might horrify young children and persons of a sensitive nature. But Jesus was the son of God, after all, so I'm sure he could have managed it. I mean, we know he was the son of God because we have evidence that the New Testament writers told the tr.....

Oh, right. Never mind.
 
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