A quote of interest regarding Genesis

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The bit in bold. THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR THE PAST CHRIST KNOWS HOW MANY POSTS.

The Bible AS A HISTORICAL RECORD should be studied EXACTLY AS ANY OTHER DOCUMENT. It should not be given extra credence simply because it is the Bible, nor because it is the basis of a faith.

You people are so dead set on the belief that everyone wants to tear the bible down and disprove every last word of it that you can't even see when someone is being fair-minded about the whole bloody thing. On the defensive much?

Compare the Bible to any other documents for the time periods in which its constituent books were composed respectively, and then tell me how accurate the other documents are compared to it, how much has been verified archeologically of claims in other documents versus in the documents of the Bible, etc. You keep spouting this, but you just don't know anything.

And you can't tell the difference between a doorstop-sized religious book and a sodding library, so I think I'll just ignore your opinion on what constitutes a historical document or how to cross-reference and research them properly.

Forget my bloody word-swapping. You just can't get it anyhow though, and you don't seem to want to. You seem predisposed to assume that anything of a religious nature is wrong by default, and since you live in a vacuum of knowledge in this matter, and so you can't tell one thing from another. Your opinion, thus, is at least as equally worthless as mine.

And clearly your reading comprehension is piss-poor because I've said exactly the opposite to "anything of a religious nature is wrong by default." What I HAVE said is "DO NOT ASSUME THAT A RELIGIOUS TEXT IS RIGHT JUST BECAUSE IT IS A RELIGIOUS TEXT".

This.

Apparently, you want us to believe that the bible is unreliable due to 'editing'. Specifically, you said this: "which brings the historical accuracy of the whole into doubt. Its like a more subtle version of Soviet Era newspapers".

You have yet to show any process that could be termed editorial that would have this effect. Choosing which documents get collected and considered holy certainly doesn't count.




Wow. You're yelling, using 'Christ' as a swear word (don't tell me you don't know that's rather offensive to the people you're talking to), ranting and raving -- and you think you're being fair-minded and we're being defensive?

The religious book is a collection of documents.
A library is a collection of documents.

What exactly is the difference?

How much has been verified archeologically (not to say that some things are under scholarly debate) about the Bible? even if there are many things that are verifiable, supernatural events described in the Bible are not, the flood thing, has been pretty much discredited, and as far as I know, there is not archeological evidence of the existence of Jesus, rather historical texts, and written after the time it is believed to be the crucifixion.

Note that physical evidence exist for fact-based fictions, but fictions remain fictions.

So there isn't so much to prove the Bible as an actual historical document, succesfuly, other than the pressumption of it through faith.

Last edited by greenblue on 20 Sep 2010, 5:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I started out being fair-minded and grew tired of repeating the same thing over and over again to people who insist that every query of their sacred book is de facto an attack. Especially when those people repeat back what I have already said with slightly different wording as a counter-argument.

You could hop back a page or two and read the relevant posts maybe. That or I'm going to have to point out AGAIN that a library is not treated as a single document, or even as a cohesive and contiguous set of texts. It is a collection of documents that, unless they happen to refer to a related subject, bear no relation to any of the other books in said library. The bible, for example, does not contain three books that deal expressly with the agricultural revolution, and then a dozen books on chess, or twelve books on DIY. The books of the bible have been collated together because they share a single relevance..the worship and veneration of God, and the "history" of that veneration. That is the point of that book. (In this context "book" meaning the section of text between two covers, not in the biblical sense)

The whole point of the "library" reference was to explain laboriously to people who should know better what an editing process is, and how it applies to the bible.

At one time, archeologists thought that Troy wasn't real, that the whole thing was just a myth. Then they found it.

Something pretty similar happened with King David.

I don't blame the archaeologists for getting it wrong -- it's not very realistic to ask for absolute certainty about things that old.


There are theological interpretations of the bible that take this into account.

In any case, it's impossible to disprove a miracle. It is, after all, a purported suspension of the laws of physics. Everything we can know about such things comes from clever guesses and reconstructions based on those laws of physics.

Basically, when it comes to miracles, you can either make the philosophical assumption that they can happen, or the philosophical assumption that they can't. Whichever one you pick can't be disproved.


What specific evidence of one specific Jewish peasant from ~30AD would you expect to find?

Everything that we know about Thales, the first Greek philosopher, fits on to about a page and a half, and it's all writings by later philosophers.


Whatever else it may be, and whatever you may think of its religious claims, the bible is a historical document.

I think that the Bible is a good historical document. I mean, when I read the Bible, I find that it describes very well in different degrees of detail the specific accounts of places, people, and events. And I also think that archaeology discoveries support the historical accuracy of the Bible. Sir William Ramsay, considered one of the worlds greatest archaeologists, says this about Luke in the New Testament: "Luke is a historian of the first rank" and "should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."

I'm of the opinion that both the Old Testament as well as the New Testament in Bible are complete. Josephus, a first century Jewish historian, writes that no Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) were added after the time of the Persian King Artaxerxes.

And nearly the entire New Testament exists in manuscripts dated before 300 AD; and the earliest manuscript, papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John 18:31-33, 37-38 dates back to about 125 AD, only 29 years from the original writing. I believe we have good reason to believe that all New Testament documents were originally written before the first century had come to an end. And also history has no ancient writings saying that this is not so. If the Books of the New Testament were not complete or accurate, an historian would have pointed it out at the time.

But if a person is going to dismiss the Bible as being unoriginal and incomplete, then that person will also have to dismiss the reliability of other ancient writings; for example, the history of Thucydides (460-400 B.C.), since the earliest manuscript is A.D. 900, nearly 1,300 years after he wrote it - unlike the papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John 18:31-33, 37-38, which is dated just 29 after he wrote it. Incidentally, Caesar wrote his Gallic Wars between 58 and 50 B.C., but its manuscripts (about ten copies) date back to about a 1,000 years after his death.

But, on the other hand, if a person accepts the reliability of ancient manuscripts - no matter of the time interval between the original copy and the extant copy, then that person will logically have to accept the reliability of the Bible and its authors, since the reliability of the Bible and its authors are greater by far than the all the other books and writers from the past.

Why would you accept ancient scripture as accurate historical record?

Julius Caesar's diary of the Gallic Wars is better history. It was written by a participant.

ruveyn

Because the ancient scriptures have a better chance of relaying actual history than mere conjecture and just-so stories which are produced contemporaneously when recorded history is arbitrarily rejected.

Genesis was a very famous band in the 70s and 80s, notable for having Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel sing in the band (listen to any classic rock station)
infact they were actually named after the book of the bible by their first manager and their first album (From Genesis to Revelation) had many songs about biblical theme's
they soon dropped this angle and were one of the forerunners of the prog rock era, but still touched in religious themes, in songs such as Supper's Ready and much later in the song Jesus He Knows Me (a song about televangelists)

What exactly are you classifying as "Just So" stories and conjecture here?