Lothian
should be banned
I guess we will have to put it along side earthquakes, disappearing sun, Zombies, Virgin mother, resurrection, miracles, son of a God. All with no evidence outside the babble..
Evidence for why we know the New Testament writers told the truth.
- Thread starter DOC
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If DOC truly believes that (a) The U.S. can order a census in Afghanistan and (b) this is remotely analogous to the made up census for Jesus' birth, then his track record of misunderstanding and misrepresenting is still perfect.
Strawman (aka misrepresenting) -- one way to prevent this is to respond to my post, which you didn't do.
Rincewind
Philosopher
Oh, great, DOC.
Luke wrote an account of a census for which there's no evidence in the real world, but we have to give him the benefit of any doubt because of an unproven comment by a Christian writer?
Boy - you appear to have surpassed even yourself, DOC - and I thought that wasn't possible....
RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
DOC, I wonder if you would respond to my post asking if, using your definition of 'evidence', you didn't think there was an overwhelming amount of evidence in this thread that the NT writers did not tell the truth.
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X
Slide Rulez 4 Life
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I would like to quote an excerpt from Bart Erhman's book, Misquoting Jesus. I know DOC has mentioned this book before (in passing, as he hasn't read it, but rather the lackluster counterpoint, Misquoting Truth by Timothy Jones). Not to worry, DOC, I'm not going to bring in Ehrman's arguments, as I know you have already rejected them on general principals.
Rather, I'd like to quote a short passage from the introduction, in which Ehrman relates an event that changed his entire outlook on the Bible.
DOC, I urge you to read this, and to consider honestly the question I ask at the end. Don't slough it off just because it doesn't accept as self-evident the validity of the New Testament. Actually consider the proposition, instead of hurrying to Google and bringing back the first hit that seems, at your quick glance of the headline, to support your ideals.
To set the stage: at this point in his life, Erhman already has a 3-year diploma from the Moody Bible Institute (an uber-fundamentalist college) and a B.A. from Wheaton College (another fundamentalist college, attended by Billy Graham). He was now attending Princeton Theolodigcal Seminary, working towards his M.Div (he would later also earn a Ph.D at Princeton).
A turning point came in my second semester, in a course I was taking with a much revered and pious professor named Cullen Story. The course was on the exegesis of the Gospel of Mark, at the time (and still) my favorite Gospel. For this course we needed to be able to read the Gospel of Mark completely in Greek (I memorized the entire Greek vocabulary of the Gospel the week before the semester began); we were to keep an exegetical notebook on our reflections on the interpretation of key passages; we discussed problems in the interpretation of the text; and we had to write a final term paper on an interpretive crux of our own choosing. I chose a passage in Mark 2, where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees because his disciples had been walking through a grain field, eating the grain on the Sabbath. Jesus wanted to show the Pharisees that "Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath", and so reminds them of what the great King David had done when he and his men were hungry, how they went into the temple and "when Abiathar was the high priest" and ate the show bread, which was only for the priests to eat. One of the well-known problem of the passage is that when one looks at the Old Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Sam. 21:1-6), it turns out that David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fat, when Abiathar's father Ahimelech was. In other words, this is one of those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the Bible is not inerrant at all but contains mistakes.
In my paper for Professor Story, I developed a long and complicated argument to the effect that even th9ough Mark indicates this happened "when Abiathar was the high priest," it doesn't really mean that Abiathar was the high priest, but that the event took place in the part of the scriptural text that has Abiathar as one of the main characters. My argument was based on the meaning of the Greek words involved and was a bit convoluted. I was pretty sure Professor Story would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be anything like a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper he made a simple one-line comment that for some reason went straight through me. He wrote "Maybe Mark just made a mistake."
Ehrman, Bart D. Misquoting Jesus. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007. 1st Paperback Edition, pp 8-9.
I'm actually ending the quotation a few lines before the end of the paragraph. But this comment is what jarred Ehrman into thinking honestly and openly about the possibility that the Bible wasn't infallible. That it might actually contain mistakes.
So let me ask you the question, DOC:
What is the author of Luke was mistaken about the census?
Rather, I'd like to quote a short passage from the introduction, in which Ehrman relates an event that changed his entire outlook on the Bible.
DOC, I urge you to read this, and to consider honestly the question I ask at the end. Don't slough it off just because it doesn't accept as self-evident the validity of the New Testament. Actually consider the proposition, instead of hurrying to Google and bringing back the first hit that seems, at your quick glance of the headline, to support your ideals.
To set the stage: at this point in his life, Erhman already has a 3-year diploma from the Moody Bible Institute (an uber-fundamentalist college) and a B.A. from Wheaton College (another fundamentalist college, attended by Billy Graham). He was now attending Princeton Theolodigcal Seminary, working towards his M.Div (he would later also earn a Ph.D at Princeton).
A turning point came in my second semester, in a course I was taking with a much revered and pious professor named Cullen Story. The course was on the exegesis of the Gospel of Mark, at the time (and still) my favorite Gospel. For this course we needed to be able to read the Gospel of Mark completely in Greek (I memorized the entire Greek vocabulary of the Gospel the week before the semester began); we were to keep an exegetical notebook on our reflections on the interpretation of key passages; we discussed problems in the interpretation of the text; and we had to write a final term paper on an interpretive crux of our own choosing. I chose a passage in Mark 2, where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees because his disciples had been walking through a grain field, eating the grain on the Sabbath. Jesus wanted to show the Pharisees that "Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath", and so reminds them of what the great King David had done when he and his men were hungry, how they went into the temple and "when Abiathar was the high priest" and ate the show bread, which was only for the priests to eat. One of the well-known problem of the passage is that when one looks at the Old Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Sam. 21:1-6), it turns out that David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fat, when Abiathar's father Ahimelech was. In other words, this is one of those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the Bible is not inerrant at all but contains mistakes.
In my paper for Professor Story, I developed a long and complicated argument to the effect that even th9ough Mark indicates this happened "when Abiathar was the high priest," it doesn't really mean that Abiathar was the high priest, but that the event took place in the part of the scriptural text that has Abiathar as one of the main characters. My argument was based on the meaning of the Greek words involved and was a bit convoluted. I was pretty sure Professor Story would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be anything like a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper he made a simple one-line comment that for some reason went straight through me. He wrote "Maybe Mark just made a mistake."
Ehrman, Bart D. Misquoting Jesus. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007. 1st Paperback Edition, pp 8-9.
I'm actually ending the quotation a few lines before the end of the paragraph. But this comment is what jarred Ehrman into thinking honestly and openly about the possibility that the Bible wasn't infallible. That it might actually contain mistakes.
So let me ask you the question, DOC:
What is the author of Luke was mistaken about the census?
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Joobz, 2000 year old history is not as cut and dry as you often make it out to be. Here is what Norman Geisler says about this issue:
"There are reasonable solutions to this difficulty. First, Quintilius Varus was governor of Syria from about 7 B.C. to about 4 B.C. Varus was not a trustworthy leader, a fact that was disastrously demonstrated in A.D. 9 when he lost three legions of soldiers in the Teutoburger forest in Germany. To the contrary, Quirinius was a notable military leader who was responsible for squelching the rebellion of the Homonadensians in Asia Minor. When it came time to begin the census, in about 8 or 7 B.C., Augustus entrusted Quirinius with the delicate problem in the volatile area of Palestine, effectively superseding the authority and governorship of Varus by appointing Quirinius to a place of special authority in this matter. It has also been proposed that Quirinius was governor of Syria on two separate occasions, once while prosecuting the military action against the Homonadensians between 12 and 2 B.C., and later beginning about A.D. 6. A Latin inscription discovered in 1764 has been interpreted to refer to Quirinius as having served as governor of Syria on two occasions. It is possible that Luke 2:2 reads, "This census took place before Quirinius was governing Syria." In this case, the Greek word translated "first" (prwtos) is translated as a comparative, "before." Because of the awkward construction of the sentence, this is not an unlikely reading. Regardless of which solution is accepted, it is not necessary to conclude that Luke had made an error in recording the historical events surrounding the birth of Jesus. Luke has proven himself to be a reliable historian even in the details. Sir William Ramsay has shown that in making reference to 32 countries, 54 cities, and 9 islands he {Luke} made no mistakes!"
[WHEN CRITICS ASK, Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe, Victor Books, Wheaton, Illinois, 1992, p.p. 384-385]:
http://www.biblestudymanuals.net/Jesus_birthdate.htm
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Of course not, the vast majority of the evidence leads to the conclusion that they were telling the truth.
RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
That can't be right. All of your arguments have been fallacies, such as special pleading, appeal to false authority, and circular reasoning.
So with the vast majority of actual evidence leading your to the conclusion that the NT writers did not tell the truth, does this mean that Christianity is built on lies?
joobz
Tergiversator
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- 17,998
DOC, that's odd. You claimed this wasn't an important issue, yet here you are still attempting to demonstrate that Luke didn't make up the census.
Unfortunately, you have no credible source to back up your arguement, otherwise you would use conservapedia and Norman Geisler.
Odd, nothing in this argument is new or different from what you already had said. Why would you think coming from him it would change anything? He isn't a credible historical source.
For instance,
Well, DOC, ddt made a rather educated analysis of this claim and you have yet to refute it.
DOC, where is ddt's reasoning incorrect?As to the above explanation for the Greek text, I have a few questions. It's 20 years since I read ancient Greek, and that was Homer - and in school I never read anything more recent than the Attics, no Koine, so please bear with me. (but boy, does this Luke gospel read like a 4th grader - every third sentence begins with "and then it happened that..."). Anyway, here's the Greek text:
1. Note the word αὕτη at the begin of verse 2. That means "the same", or in weakened form, "that". Wouldn't that mean it points back to the census mentioned in verse 1?
2. Your apologist du jour Heichelheim claims that πρωτος can have the meaning of "before". However, then it is a preposition and thus not inflected. Here, πρώτη is inflected to agree with the gender of ἀπογραφὴ (census).
3. Heichelheim also mentions "when followed by a genitive". However, the genitives in this sentence have no bearing on that: the clause ἡγεμονεύοντος τῆς Συρίας Κυρηνίου is a genitive absolute, a grammatical construction in Greek where a subordinate clause is rendered by putting its subject (here: Κυρηνίου, i.e., Quirinius) in the genitive and its predicate is rendered as a participle (here: ἡγεμονεύοντος, the genitive, masculine, singular, of the present participle of the verb ἡγεμονεύω, meaning to rule). So, that has no bearing at all on the meaning of the other words in the sentence.
So, I read nothing else here than "That first census happened while Quirinius ruled over Syria". It couldn't be that Heichelheim is lying for Jesus, is it?
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
And yet you haven't learned your lesson, and insist on digging an even deeper hole for yourself.
Taxing indeed.
You still haven't figured out how to remove the irrelevant footnote references, I see. It makes your amateurish cutting and pasting look even more amateurish, which is in itself an achievement to be noted, I guess. Do you ever bother to read the footnotes, DOC? Maybe you should, since a lot of them actually explain why cutting and pasting slabs of text from Wikipedia without understanding the source material is a really bad idea.
Anyway . . .
What you've provided above, despite not mentioning either Palestine or Quirinius, tells us at least two important things:
- That the Romans kept records of the censuses they took (bit of a no-brainer, one would think). So we have documentary evidence of them having been carried out - and yet there's no mention of the one that your hero, Sir Luke, claims accounted for Joseph and Mary traipsing across Galilee and Judea.
- That the imposition of censuses on non-citizens "provoked disturbances and resistance". Even Josephus, another of your idols, speculated that this resistance was a reason for the formation of the Zealots, since the Jewish people in particular disliked the idea of being counted. Maybe that's why we have no idea how many Simons there were.
my bolding
The bolded text doesn't hold any meaning for you at all, does it, DOC?
Why do you need to provide a link to Wikipedia when you're quoting Sir Luke?
Anyway, didn't he say "the whole oikoumene οἰκουμένη? As irrelevant as this point is, he might just as well have said "all of our provinces" (are belong to us).
But then, you knew that already, didn't you?
Are you for real, DOC?
This is the very first line of your reference:
my bolding
In other words, Judea wasn't a province of Rome at all until after the appointment of Quirinius. In fact, it was his appointment and the new status of (parts of) Judea that created the desire for Rome to conduct a census.
Your 'making sense' about Herod's appointment, the alleged political ambitions of the Legions and the idea of Judea owing Rome compensation (for what, I wonder?) is not just devoid of any sense, it's utter drivel.
I . . . I . . . you . . . but . . .
There are no words.
o rly???
Here is yet another quote from your Wikipedia source:
my bolding
Allow me to remind you, DOC, you started this thread to present evidence for why we know the New Testament writers told the truth, so I'd say Sir Luke's phantom census is a rather large issue for you.
Since you like Wikipedia so much, perhaps you'll enjoy reading the entry that deals with Special Pleading.
"Some other people" being pretty much everyone but you and your pet apologists.
Lucky for you that argumentum ad numerum isn't valid or you'd be well and truly stuffed.
Wait . . . according to you, argumentum ad numerum actually is valid, isn't it?
Amen, DOC.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
That had me scratching my head as well. DOC's reference is probably one I would use to show that Sir Luke's account is almost certainly wrong.
But then, we apparently realise that the devil is in the footnotes, and DOC doesn't read those.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
But Sir Ramsay was right about Sir Luke being right about everything else so this proves that he was right about the census even without any evidence.
Besides, if Thomas Jefferson had asked for a census in Afghanistan then Josephus would have confirmed Luke's description of the exact location for Crete and his statement on the existence of the Phoenicians.
Also, the empty tomb.
/DOC
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John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
Some is in post 13104 around page 328 of this thread.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=5959646#post5959646
Yes, I know, now it's time for a skeptic to make the blanket statement, "well all those have been demolished" -- and for me to say "no they haven't".
Sholto, just read the posts and ignore the unexplained opinions, especially those numerous no new information opinions that do not respond to a specific post of mine.
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bikerdruid
Philosopher
i haven't been here in ages......
is anything new?
is doc still using the bible as evidence of the veracity of the bible?
is anything new?
is doc still using the bible as evidence of the veracity of the bible?
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
DOC, the only possible way that this accusation could make any sense would be if you didn't post this:
Is someone forging your posts, DOC?
I'm going to go with "It doesn't seem likely or we would almost certainly have noticed the vast improvement in style and substance before now."
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
You know it!
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