I think you are mistaking Christian fundamentalism for christianity. Taking bible inerrancy as an example, I doubt that 98% of christians believe that.
You deviated from the principle of evaluating arguments on their merits when you stated:
You can look at what I am saying and decide whether I am a Christian or not. Meanwhile, I have my own opinion about it. You can say you are an agnostic, a deist, a libertarian, or whatever else. Based on what you say, I can decide if I think your statements are consistent with those labels. But, obviously, neither of us are bound by the other’s opinions, and are free to call ourselves whatever we choose.
It occurred to me after making my last post that all you’re doing is taking pot-shots while not making a stand on anything yourself. Why would that be?
What pot shots? I think the problem is that you like things in air-tight categories. “You’re a deist, I’m a Christian. You’re a libertarian, I’m a liberal.” You want everything to be pinned down precisely. Everybody has to stick to their clearly defined role. When you learned that Christianity doesn’t have all the answers, you moved quickly to adopt other well defined positions. No matter if the positions are well supported, if they oversimplify complex realities, or if they are untested in the real world. The important thing is they superimpose structure on ambiguities that you abhore.
So I don’t fit into your little world. I take the Bible seriously , but I don’t take it literally. I believe in Jesus as the Christ of God, but I don’t believe in a literal heaven or hell. I have experienced that zen mediation takes me to the same spiritual place as deep Christian prayer. I see life itself as a mystery and a paradox. So, what issue do you want me to take a stand on?
How about, “I believe in Jesus as the Christ of God, but I don’t believe in a literal heaven or hell.” I have no idea what ‘Christ of God’ means or what you mean when you call yourself a Christian, or how they are compatible with each other. I am genuinely interested.
Christ is the ancient Greek word for messiah which means the “anointed†of God, the expected king and deliverer of the Jews. The church accepted Jesus as the Christ in an expanded universal sense of the word. Through the medium of the New Testament and the creeds, Christ came to be understood as the king, lord, ruler, authority and deliverer of the cosmos including humanity. On a personal level, Christ of God, means that I recognize Jesus is mediator, authority and deliverer of my soul. Mediator-- because he concretely defines who the invisible God is. Deliverer-- because living in the pattern of his life, my life has meaning. By “soul†I mean my subjective reality. Living according to the Jesus pattern I am energized by the Spirit and “delivered†to God, the Ultimate Reality.
The figures of heaven and hell were appropriated from ancient mythology by New Testament writers. Heaven and hell are only available to us as literary figures or visual arts images. The visceral reactions of even atheists to them testify of their archetypal power. The reality of all spiritual things is ultimately God, so heaven and hell say something about him. They point to different ways God is experienced depending on the moral state of the experiencer.
By what means was the Messiah expected and prophesied, and how was the authority received by which he was annointed? Deliverer of the Cosmos? All this sounds supernaturalistic to me, or do you believe in divine interaction within our universe/
Thanks for your response, it was definately helpful to understanding where you are coming from.
I’m still not completely clear on your method of interpreting the New Testament and particularly what parts you consider reliable, if any. It sounds like you reject anything written by Paul or Luke as being inaccurate, or is it the entire New Testament that you see as being inaccurate? Are there certain Gospels that you feel are accurate but not others?
First, I reject any reference to supernatural events as unreliable. 2000 years alone is grounds for dismissal of the whole Bible other than what can be verified by archeology etc., but there are all kinds of other avenues for its corruption via a myriad of human motivations. Going into all the other indications that the NT has been hijacked and overhauled for less than honorable purposes and are contained within the Bible itself as well as from other extraneous sources, is beyond such a format as this.
Each Gospel has its strengths and weaknesses and evidence for the truth. What I’ve looked for is a consistent picture that fits with other sources, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, and inadvertent information from early church fathers and the Bible, especially Acts and Paul’s letters. In modern politics, the usual way to find the truth is to follow the money. In the NT, follow Jesus’ brother, James, and his partner, John the Baptizer. I believe the James’ ossurary is genuine and probably used for THE James.
I don’t know “by what means.” But it is a well documented historical fact that the Jews were expecting and prophesying the messiah before Jesus was born. Jesus was received as such by the church. Also historical fact. A lesser known historic fact is that he was received as such by me.
The “deliverer of the cosmos” trope I coined in response to your previous question. I was thinking of the eschatological hope that the resurrection of Jesus was the beginning of a transformation that will culminate in cosmological transformation. You know, the “new heaven and new earth.”
Yes, expecting and prophesying, but was it divine revelation?
He was the/(an?) expected Messiah for those Jews who were with him at the Passion. He didn’t become the divine savior until much later. The only evidence otherwise is the Bible.
Based on any unrefutable evidence?
The end of the world has been prophesied since civilization began. Jesus said his generation would not pass before he returned. I will grant that even James, and therefore the early Jerusalem church, believed that as well. But as you can see, it didn’t happen.
No event can be rejected a priori unless one assumes an omniscient viewpoint. Since this is clearly impossible, the facts must be examined. In addition, you are not going to find any support from historians for your assertion that because something is ancient that it is automatically inaccurate. The primary means of establishing historical evidence is through written testimony. Archeology is limited as to how much it can tell us. You can’t tell me much of anything about Alexander the Great through archeology alone. This is well established by the fact that we know the least about ancient civilizations that we have no written records for. That being said, what archaeological evidence are you using to support your position? You are not presenting any historical evidence of any kind that the NT has been hijacked or overhauled. Finally, I disagree that this format prevents one from presenting evidence. What is the point in presenting opinions without providing evidence? On what basis should anyone believe your hypothesis?
Practically speaking, this methodology amounts to nothing more than picking and choosing what fits your theory and rejecting what does not. You claim these sources are corrupted and unreliable, but then you use those same sources to support your theory. Therefore, if you don’t provide other historical evidence to validate this picking and choosing, then your argument is self defeating. You especially must provide historical evidence that any historical testimony is inaccurate or false before you dismiss it. You can’t reject historical testimony just because it doesn’t match a hypothetical theory. Theories are supported by evidence, but theories do not determine what evidence gets excluded.
You are still not presenting a coherent theory that deals with all the evidence. You are just choosing to dismiss evidence that doesn’t support your theory. Just one example, if Paul corrupted the message of Jesus, how do you explain that the Apostle John who was universally attested to have outlived Paul by at least 20 years, did nothing to correct these errors? I guarantee that John as an Apostle who walked and talked with Jesus and was a part of the inner circle of Apostles, carried alot more clout than Paul did in the early church. He could have easily squashed any heretical teachings of Paul while Paul was still alive, much less 20 years after he was dead. The early church fathers that were alive in the late 1st century are reported to have specifically known John quite well. Among the specifically mentioned topics discussed was John’s role in squashing early gnostic herecies. Did they forget to talk about Paul’s deviations, or is this just part of the clever conspiracy to hide what really happened?
Getting back to the original topic of the post and why the examples we discussed were hyperbole.
The Talmid is where we get most of our knowledge of how the Jewish Rabbi’s of that day thought and taught. The Mishnah was one of two parts of the Talmud that was redacted by Rabbi Judah the Prince in 170 A.D. in Israel. It is a concise formulation of Jewish law and ethics written in Hebrew containing Biblical, Oral and Rabbinic laws. Following is a commentary by Rabbi Avraham, son of Maimonides from a famous essay on the Mishnah, that categorizes the midrashim in the following way (bold mine):
[i]The drashot of the Sages can be divided into five categories:
A drasha meant to be understood according to its simple meaning
A drasha that has both an external and superficial meaning as well as an internal, hidden meaning
A drasha that has no hidden meaning, but whose simple meaning is complex and requires effort and information to understand fully
Drashot that are used to explain a verse without claiming to represent the simple meaning of the words, rather one of many possible ideas that are expressed in the verse. Similar to poetic interpretations, and use of the verse to illustrate or teach a moral idea 5. Drashos that use hyperbole and exaggeration to make a point[/i]
Your interpretation is out of context because you are not recognizing that hyperbole was a common teaching method used by Rabbi’s at the time of Jesus. If you read the Talmud you will see the obvious similarities between the teaching methods and style of Jesus and those in the Talmud. In fact there is more use of hyperbole in the Talmud than there is in the Gospels. The teaching methods that Jesus used such as parables, discourses, hyperbole, and answering a question with a question, were identical to what other Rabbi’s of that time used. The Gospels have plenty of hyperbole - “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel”, “camels going through the eye of a needle”, “saw dust and planks in one’s eye”, “don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”, “hating one’s family”, “cutting off your hand”, “gouging out your eye”, etc. etc.
Finally, there is absolutely no historical record that any early Christians (or for that matter any Christian ever, including the Apostles who would know), ever interpreted these verses literally. Where is there any record, at any time, of all these self-mutilated Christians? This practice would have been impossible to hide from the societies in which they lived. Tertullian in the 2nd century A.D. defended Christians against the rumor of cannibalism in their celebration of the Last Supper. There is not even a hint that he saw any need to defend them against the charge of self-mutilation.
That’s the problem. All the facts that have come to light from then till now, have only validated historic non-supernatural events. If there is ever just one supernatural event that would stand up to reasonable inquiry, then yes, by all means let’s investigate. But investigating supernatural events from 2-3000 years ago when all we have are the writings from unknown sources with unknown motivations is a futile pursuit, especially given what we’ve learned to the contrary. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I reject the waste of time for such an investigation until we have something more to work with.
I’m merely showing the contradictions and errors they contain to those who believe they are divine revelation. And as I’ve implied above, some of the Bible has been historically verified. Those events are anchors from which we may possibly deduce more facts. But until we have one historically verifiable supernatural event to work with, anywhere in history, and given the near infinite amount of natural events, we can reasonably reject the supernatural in favor of much more likely explanations–at least since the Big Bang.
But the point is that the scientific and scholarly community does provide just that from archeology, epigraphy, and external and internal references to Biblical events.
First, we don’t know who “John” was. The Gospel, written between 90 & 100 CE, would have been 60-70 years after Jesus death. Possible but unlikely. But there are other considerations. You ignore James, Jesus’ brother, who was the leader of the early Jerusalem church, and the enmity between them and Paul leaks out into Acts and Paul’s letters. Any search for the truth in the NT must go through him. Paul was a powerful figure, having worked for the Temple priests, he was a Roman citizen, and he had the following and money of the gentile church which he had started as well as some diaspora Jews.
I know I may appear to be cherry picking, but I’m not. There is a coherent picture, but its complicated and I can only touch on the highlights here–some of which do stand on their own, such as the Eucharist problem. The best references I can recommend are Paul, the Mythmaker by Hyam Jacoby, which is very readable and concise, or the industrial strength James the Brother of Jesus, by Robert Eisenmann.
That’s irrelevant. Besides the fact that there aren’t any early sources that I know of that interpret this as hyperbole either, the fact remains that in the Bible, the supposed word of God, it says to “hate” your family. Hype must necessarily have an element of humor or irony to it (as the speck and the beam) and it must easily be understood as such. Hate is the most base of human emotions, and it leaves no room for wordplay any more than ritual human sacrifice or references to dead babies.
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Self-mutilation??? Middle ages perhaps, but how did that enter the conversation? I wonder why Tertullian felt the need to defend the Last Supper from being seen as a cannibalistic ritual?
My point remains, unless one is omniscient, you cannot “a priori” reject any event, which is what you are doing. Each event must be examined on its own merits. In order to argue against a specific historical event, you have to provide evidence against that specific event, not evidence from all other historical events. What happened last week is irrelevant to what happened 1000 years ago. By saying that there are writings, is to admit that there is evidence to be examined. No historians considers it a waste of time to evaluate historical events using historical writings regardless of how old they are. Your assertion that these writings are from unknown sources is completely false, we have contemporary testimonial evidence for who the writers were and their purpose. You just choose to reject it without any historical evidence to support your position. Therefore your conclusion that it is a waste of time is unwarranted, and in direct contradiction to those that can be considered experts on the subject.
I am not aware of any contradictions that you have established. They are only contradictions based on your interpretation, which you don’t provide any historical evidence for. I gave you contemporary historical evidence why the verses you quoted were hyperbole. What evidence do you have that they are not?
Once again, you can only “a priori” dismiss an event if you are omniscient, otherwise one must examine the evidence. If you have reasonable natural explanations for all the evidence, then you can reject any supernatural explanations. This however requires you to deal with all the evidence, not pick and choose what fits your theory.
Then quote the specific evidence from these sources that you feel supports your specific conclusions.
We do know who John was. Papias (60-130AD) states specifically that he knew and at various times talked with the Apostle John. It was the universal testimony of the early church fathers that the apostle John wrote the last gospel. I’ll quote just one, Irenaeus (120-180 AD):
“Matthew also brought out a written Gospel among the Jews in their own tongue, when Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel at Rome and founding the Church. But after their demise, Mark himself the disiciple and recorder of Peter, has also handed on to us in writing what had been proclaimed by Peter. And Luke too, the follower of Paul, put down in a book the Gospel which was being preached by him. Later on too, John, the disciple of the Lord, who had even reclined on his bosom, he too brought out a Gospel while he was dwelling in Ephesus of Asia.”
Acts and Paul’s epistles do not support your interpretation. I’m not ignoring James at all, I am pretty sure I have read all the historical documents that refer to James. You need to site the specific historical evidence that supports your position that there was all this enmity. As far as Paul being this powerful person who created his own version of Christianity, I reiterate the point that I made, that it was the universal testimony of the early church fathers that the Apostle John outlived Paul by at least 20 years. If Paul had preached anything that John would have disagreed with, he had the last say, and had the influence to discredit anything Paul said if he disagreed in any way.
Maybe you appear to be cherry picking because you are. You can’t expect others to accept your interpretation without providing compelling evidence to do so, complicated or not. Sorry, as many others also pointed out, the Eucharist is not a problem.
I am trying to get my hands on one of the books you mentioned.
How is this irrelevant? The interpretation of Apostles and early Christians is directly relevant since they are much more likely to have had the correct interpretation, you can’t get any earlier source than the Apostles. If that isn’t good enough, I gave you specific contemporary evidence from the Talmud that hyperbole was used by Jewish teachers(see my last post 5. Drashos that use hyperbole and exaggeration to make a point). I think the contemporary Jews of the day were in the best position to decide whether or not they used hyperbole and exaggeration as teaching methods. What early sources do you have that say we should interpret any of the verses we discussed literally?
My point is that if any early Christians including the Apostles had ever interpreted the passages about cutting off your hands or gouging out your eyes as something to be interpreted literally as you suggest, then all Christians from day one would have been mutilated. No Christian would have denied that they still sinned. Therefore, if they took these verses literally, and not as hyperbole, if they had looked at a woman/man in lust then they should have immediately gouged their eyes out as Jesus commanded. Since there is no record of early Christians ever doing this, they must have never interpreted these verses literally.
As far as Tertullian is concerned, I mentioned in one of my previous posts in your “Problem of the Eucharist thread” that early Christians were accused by Roman pagans of participating in cannabalism in celebration of the Last Supper. Tertullian was addressing this rumor (the specifics of the rumor were that Christians actually ate an infant among other things).
I suspect this is ether a poor translation or a poor choice of words. To hate oneself or one’s family is contrary to Jesus’s approach. However, “indifference” fits perfectly and is probably what he meant.
Retreating behind translation or other problems of fallibility, leaves the whole Bible subject to fallibility. Which version of the Bible is correct, and what happened before and after that? This the the Word of God we’re talking about here.
