Posted on 03/02/2013 10:15:26 PM PST by TBP
Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, who is writing an upcoming book titled “Killing Jesus,” proclaimed on his program Wednesday night that “a lot of the Bible is allegorical,” and the New Testament Gospels contradict themselves.
O’Reilly made the remarks during an interview with “Touched by an Angel” star Roma Downey and her husband Mark Burnett, executive producers of “The Bible” TV miniseries which begins this Sunday night on the History Channel.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
So, when the Apostle Peter refers to St. Paul's epistles as divinely inspired Scripture, we should not take that literally? When Paul said "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for all good works", we should ignore him because he didn't mean it? When Jesus said, "It is written..." in answer to every challenge tossed at him by Satan, we shouldn't follow his lead? Because, if, as you say, it is merely man's clumsy work, then you'd have to call it a lie and toss it all out. There is no middle ground.
You are perfectly free to take what the Bible says only as it applies to you and as you are most likely to recognize and understand it and not as THE Word of God that guides our paths. I, on the other hand, KNOW what I believe and why I believe it because GOD said it. The Bible is far more than simply a "book of inspirations". I see it as an "owner's manual" for how we work best and to our fullest potential and how we can relate to our Creator. It tells us how to be saved for eternity. I'd warn you to ignore it at your own risk.
Chances are that you may be missing THE component that will open your eyes to the treasure we have in this amazing book - it's called the Holy Spirit. The natural man doesn't receive the things of God because they are spiritually discerned. It sounds like foolishness to him. Maybe that is why you don't recognize how remarkable the Bible is.
Who told YOU anything TBP?
You can believe in a mysterious ‘P’ if you wish. But what you seem to wish to do is spread confusion. and God is not the father of confusion. Ponder that.
That's just it; we DO know, and it is much more than "a reasonably good idea of what the original probably said". That way of stating the problem seems to me to be grossly overstating the degree and nature of the uncertainty:
"...no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals."
Bruce, F. F., The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 19.“If all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, [the patristic quotations] would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.”
Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 34."Once again the reader should be reminded of a point made earlier. Though textual criticism cannot yet produce certainty about the exact wording of the original, this uncertainty affects only about two percent of the text. And in that two percent support always exists for what the original said--never is one left with mere conjecture. In other words it is not that only 90 percent of the original text exists in the extant Greek manuscripts--rather, 110 percent exists. Textual criticism is not involved in reinventing the original; it is involved in discarding the spurious, in burning the dross to get to the gold."
[emphasis mine]
Wallace, Daniel, "The Majority Text and the Original Text: Are They Identical?," Bibliotheca Sacra, April-June, 1991, 157-8.
And here is a compendium of quotes from other scholars on the subject of the degree of uncertainty:
Geisler and Nix make a comparison of the textual variations between the New Testament documents and ancient works: "Next to the New Testament, there are more extant manuscripts of the Iliad (643) than any other book. Both it and the Bible were considered 'sacred', and both underwent textual changes and criticism of their Greek manuscripts. The New Testament has about 20,000 lines."They continue by saying that "the Iliad [has] about 15,600. Only 40 lines (or 400 words) of the New Testament are in doubt whereas 764 lines of the Iliad are questioned. This five percent textual corruption compares with one-half of one percent of similar emendations in the New Testament.
"The national epic of India, the Mahabharata, has suffered even more corruption. It is about eight times the size of the Iliad and the Odyssey together, roughly 250,000 lines. Of these, some 26,000 lines are textual corruptions (10 percent)."
Benjamin Warfield in Introduction to Textual Criticism of the New Testament quotes Ezra Abbot's opinion about nineteen-twentieths of the New Testament textual variations, saying that they: "...have so little support...although there are various readings; and nine-twentieths of the remainder are of so little importance that their adoption or rejection would cause no appreciable difference in the sense of the passages where they occur."
Geisler and Nix make the following comment about how the textual variations are counted: "There is an ambiguity in saying there are some 200,000 variants in the existing manuscripts of the New Testament, since these represent only 10,000 places in the New Testament. If one single word is misspelled in 3,000 different manuscripts, this is counted as 3,000 variants or readings."
Although he was dealing with fewer manuscripts than we have today, Philip Schaff in Comparison to the Greek Testament and the English Version concluded that only 400 of the 150,000 variant readings caused doubt about the textual meaning, and only 50 of these were of great significance. Not one of the variations, Schaff says, altered "an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching."
Fenton John Anthony Hort, whose life work has been with the MSS, says: "The proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt is very great, not less, on a rough computation than seven-eights of the whole. The remaining eighth, therefore, formed in great part by changes of order and other comparative trivialities, constitutes the whole area of criticism.
"If the principles followed in this edition are sound, this area may be very greatly reduced. Recognizing to the full the duty of abstinence from peremptory decision in cases where the evidence leaves the judgment in suspense between two or more readings, we find that, setting aside differences of orthography, the words in our opinion still subject to doubt only make up about one-sixteenth of the whole New Testament. In this second estimate the proportion of comparatively trivial variations is beyond measure larger than in the former; so that the amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation is but a small fraction of the whole residuary variation, and can hardly form more than a thousandth part of the entire text."
Geisler and Nix say, concerning the observations of Hort above, that "only about one-eighth of all the variants had any weight, as most of them are merely mechanical matters such as spelling or style. Of the whole, then, only about one-sixtieth rise above 'trivialities', or can in any sense be called 'substantial variations'. Mathematically this would compute to a text that is 98.33 percent pure."
Warfield boldly declares that the facts show that the great majority of the New Testament "has been transmitted to us with no, or next to no, variation; and even in the most corrupt form in which it has ever appeared, to use the oft-quoted words of Richard Bentley, 'the real text of the sacred writers is competently exact; ...nor is one article of faith or moral precept either perverted or lost...choose as awkwardly as you will, choose the worst by design, out of the whole lump of readings."
Schaff quotes both Tregelles and Scrivener: "We possess so many MSS, and we are aided by so many versions, that we are never left to the need of conjecture as the means of removing errata." (Tregelles, Greek New Testament, "Protegomena," P.X.)
"'So far,' says Scrivener, 'is the copiousness of our stores from causing doubt or perplexity to the genuine student of Holy Scripture, that it leads him to recognize the more fully its general integrity in the midst of partial variation. What would the thoughtful reader of Eschylus give for the like guidance through the obscurities which vex his patience and mar his enjoyment of that sublime poet?'"
F. F. Bruce in The Books and the Parchments writes that if no objective textual evidence is available to correct an obvious mistake, then "the textual critic must perforce employ the art of conjectural emendation - an art which demands the severest self-discipline. The emendation must commend itself as obviously right, and it must account for the way in which the corruption crept in. In other words, it must be both 'intrinsically probable' and 'transcriptionally probable'. It is doubtful whether there is any reading in the New Testament which requires it to be conjecturally emended. The wealth of attestation is such that the true reading is almost invariable bound to be preserved by at least one of the thousands of witnesses."
That textual variations do not endanger doctrine is emphatically stated by Sir Frederic Kenyon (one of the great authorities in the field of New Testament textual criticism): "One word of warning already referred to, must be emphasized in conclusion. No fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading...
"It cannot be too strongly asserted that in substance the text of the Bible is certain: Especially is this the case with the New Testament. The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world.
"Scholars are satisfied that they possess substantially the true text of the principal Greek and Roman writers whose works have come down to us, of Sophocles, of Thucydides, of Cicero, of Virgil; yet our knowledge of their writings depends on a mere handful of manuscripts, whereas the manuscripts of the New Testament are counted by hundreds, and even thousands."
Gleason Archer, in answering the question about objective evidence, shows that variants or errors in transmission of the text do not affect GOD's revelation:
"A careful study of the variants (different readings) of the various earliest manuscripts reveals that none of them affects a single doctrine of Scripture. The system of spiritual truth contained in the standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament is not in the slightest altered or compromised by any of the variant readings found in the Hebrew manuscripts of earlier date found in the Dead Sea caves or anywhere else. All that is needed to verify this is to check the register of well-attested variants in Rudolf Kittel's edition of the Hebrew Bible. It is very evident that the vast majority of them are so inconsequential as to leave the meaning of each clause doctrinally unaffected."
Benjamin Warfield said, "If we compare the resent state of the New Testament text with that of any other ancient writing, we must...declare it to be marvelously correct. Such has been the care with which the New Testament has been copied - a care which has doubtless grown out of true reverence for its holy words - such as been the providence of GOD in preserving for His Church in each and every age a competently exact text of the Scriptures, that not only is the New Testament unrivaled among ancient writings in the purity of its text as actually transmitted and kept in use, but also in the abundance of testimony which has come down to us for castigating its comparatively infrequent blemishes."
The editors of the Revised Standard Version say: "It will be obvious to the careful reader that still in 1946, as in 1881 and 1901, no doctrine of the Christian faith has been affected by the revision, for the simple reason that, out of the thousands of variant readings in the manuscripts, none has turned up thus far that requires a revision of Christian doctrine."
Burnett H. Streeter believes that because of the great quantity of textual material for the New Testament, "the degree of security that...the text has been handed down to us in a reliable form is prima facie very high."
Frederic G. Kenyon continues in The Story of the Bible: "It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries (of manuscripts) and all this tudy is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scriptures, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of GOD."
Millar Burrows of Yale says: "Another result of comparing New Testament Greek with the language of the papyri is an increase of confidence in the accurate transmission of the text of the New Testament itself."
Burrows also says that the texts "have been transmitted with remarkable fidelity, so that there need be no doubt whatever regarding the teaching conveyed by them."
http://www.angelfire.com/sc3/myredeemer/Evidencep8.html
Cordially,
First of all, Paul didn't actually write several of the Epistles attributed to him -- which is why he sometimes appears to say one thing in one place and something very different in another. One of those things may have come from Paul, the other from someone writing in his name, but who was not Paul.
This is common in the Bible, BTW. Many of the books, including the four Gospels are almost certainly pseudonymous.
It may be inspired. That does not mean it's to be taken literally in every jot and tittle. There is much wisdom but it is not literally "dictated by God" or anything of that ilk.
I believe it because GOD said it.
There is the problem. You believe it because God said it. How do you know that? Well, the Bible says so. And how do you know we can believe the Bible? Well, God said so. Your position is circular. You believe it's so because you believe it's so. But if you're asked to show it to someone reasonably, you can't do it. Your case is weak.
Furthermore, a reading of the books of the Bible shows contradiction after contradiction. This undermines your view that it's God's infallible word (because He said so, after all -- it's right there in the Bible!) so you simply ignore or deny that the contradictions that are in the text even exist.
I see it as an "owner's manual" for how we work best and to our fullest potential and how we can relate to our Creator.
Yes, and that is also what the Scriptures of all religions are, if you examine them. What makes the Bible any more valid, true, or inspired on this or any other issue it addresses than the Adi Granth, the Tao, the Bhagavad Gita, or any other "holy book"? Don't they all contain wisdom on how we work best and to our fullest potential and how we can relate to our Creator? Isn't that what religion is about, whatever its expression?
It tells us how to be saved for eternity.
From what and to what? Why would the image and likeness of God need saving?
Various ministers with whom I have studied, experts in the field, my own study, writers who are well versed in the subject, and many others, plus reflection, meditation, and prayer.
There are allegories in the Holy Bible, that is without question. However, some of the writings that Bill thinks are allegories, are not.
Actually, we don't. We simply have much later manuscripts, undoubtedly changed (deliberately or inadvertently) by subsequent scribes. For example, scribes would often try to harmonize the texts, so one that is out of harmony is likely to be closer to the original.
What we think is the most "original" text we can put together is cobbled together by textual analysis from thousands of different manuscripts. They often disagree in key places, often in bunches or "families" -- due to copies coming from other copies. But often, even the documents in a "family" disagree with each other. You have to look at consistency with that writer's other material, at structural inconsistencies, and at the simple logic of the words, among other factors. I do not claim to be trained in this subject, but I have learned much from people who are.
Expert after expert points out the inconsistencies.
I think your experts are putting their faith ahead of tehir analysis.
Here is a detailed analysis of some of the discrepancies, inconsistencies, and contradictions:
http://www.bidstrup.com/bible2.htm
http://www.crivoice.org/autograph.html
Anyone who works with Scripture in the original languages knows that there are errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax in the biblical text as we have it today. It is also an easily demonstrable fact that there are hundreds of variants among the different manuscripts of the biblical text (see Sacred Words or Words about the Sacred). We sometimes forget that the Bible was not written on a word processor in English, and it is difficult to keep in mind that there is no “master text” of the Bible. We only have it in hundreds, even thousands, of manuscripts that all contain differences of greater or lesser degree. Our modern translations are based on an analysis and comparison of all these manuscripts.
On a different level, a careful examination of parallel biblical accounts, where the same story or account occurs in more than one place, reveals that in many places the accounts are different. For example, in the Gospels there are many places where the accounts of Jesus’ activity and sayings are recorded in multiple versions that vary from each other (see The Synoptic Problem).
There are places where the events are ordered differently (the cleansing of the temple or the day and time of the crucifixion in the Synoptic Gospels and John; see The Time of the Crucifixion: Chronological Issues in the Gospels), the same sayings are set in different contexts (the sermon on the mount and the sermon on the plain in Matthew and Luke), or the same event is accompanied by different sayings (the confession of Peter in Matthew and Mark). Even when all of these do correspond, there are often different Greek words attributed to Jesus, sometimes closely synonymous, sometimes giving a different nuance to the saying (for example, Matt 5:3, 6 and Luke 6:20-21). There are other places in Scripture where this occurs as well, such as the parallels between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles or between 2 Kings and Isaiah.
On a still different level, if one approaches the biblical text without the presuppositions of inerrancy, there are also historical difficulties. There are biblical accounts that do not correspond to what we know of the events, or the same events are recounted in different places within Scripture in considerably different scenarios (see History and Theology in Joshua and Judges). There are also discrepancies in the use of numbers, genealogies, Scriptural citations, etc. (see The Date of the Exodus).
To many students of Scripture these factors present no serious hindrances to accepting the Bible as the authoritative word of God, beyond needing to understand and interpret the message as it is presented with these factors. However to the inerrantist position these are potentially fatal observations. In an absolutist position, which many inerrantists take, none of these can be allowed to stand. While some of these such as the historical discrepancies can be explained by various means, the difficulties with the biblical text itself is a much more troublesome problem to inerrant views. While they are affirming the absolute inerrant nature of the biblical text, it is obvious that there are physical inaccuracies within the text.
The solution to this dilemma of wanting to maintain an inerrant text while faced with a text that is obviously not inerrant, is to affirm that it is only the original writings that were inerrant. While the inaccurate copies we have now were corrupted in the process of transmission, copying, and translation over the years, the original versions as they came from the hand of the original author were without any such inaccuracies. This position of “inerrant autographs” is a common way of maintaining inerrancy in the face of textual evidence to the contrary. In fact, some churches, for example the Wesleyan Church, incorporate such a statement into their doctrinal position on Scripture.
Now, this may be a valid move solely as a faith affirmation. But I contend that it does not really say much, and certainly does not give us any place to stand in the actual study and use of Scripture in the church beyond making affirmations about it. And it raises questions of credibility from those who do not so readily accept the faith affirmations.
There are several problems with the idea. As I have suggested, I think the main reason for affirming inerrant autographs is the simple fact that the text that we have now is obviously inaccurate in some details. So to maintain the concept of inerrancy, it is simply moved back to a context where the validity of the assertion cannot be verified since we do not have any of the autographs.
However, I find it extremely problematic to assert something about a part of the Christian faith that is as important as Scripture in a way that cannot be confirmed in the light of totally different evidence that can be confirmed. In other words, I think that smacks far too much of a rationalizing effort to bolster a fundamentally flawed idea than it does of good theology or good biblical study. Again, as a faith affirmation about the authority of Scripture, I understand what it tries to say. I just don’t think it says it very well.
There are other logical problems, as well, that drift into theological ones. If God supervised the writing of Scripture to the degree that people produced absolutely inerrant writings beyond their own capability to do so, why could God not have, or why didn’t he, just as easily superintend the transmission of that text so that it would remain inerrant as it was copied through the centuries. What is the purpose of having inerrant originals if that inerrancy is not to be maintained in some way? What purpose is served in allowing a perfect text to deteriorate?
And if we allow this, how then do we know we can trust the text we have today since it is admittedly inaccurate in some details, and since we do not have the “originals” with which to compare it? If our faith is in an inerrant text, and if that text has been allowed to deteriorate in one area to the point that it is no longer inerrant, how do we know that other areas have not likewise been corrupted? If the trustworthiness of the text depends on it being inerrant, how do we affirm that trustworthiness and reliability when the text we are using is in fact not inerrant?
In other words, if the criteria of inerrancy is to be the judge of truth, it solves nothing to push the inerrancy into the distant past since we only have the text today as it is. If that criteria is valid, then we do not have the truth.
http://irr.org/todays-bible-real-bible
Besides the fact that the original Bible and modern Bibles are in different languages, one of the major problems is that the original manuscripts don’t exist anymore. So we can’t compare modern Bible versions directly to the originals. Furthermore, the manuscripts which we do have are not exactly what was originally written. To explain, the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament go back to 250 BCE. Yet, the Old Testament was being written over a period of time long before that, from 1400-400 BCE. That’s a long time, especially for the earliest books – nearly 1200 years between original and copy!
Why don’t we have the original copies which were penned by the Bible writers? A number of factors caused the disappearance or destruction of ancient manuscripts. They were normally written on papyri (ancient paper-like material) or animal skins. Over time, these materials would decay and no longer be readable. Simply being used for many years could also ruin the manuscripts. In many areas of the world, humidity destroyed them. The only reason we have some manuscripts from as far back as 250 BCE is that they were found in desert areas with very low humidity. In times of war manuscripts were sometimes destroyed as part of the pillaging. The Bible is not unique in this aspect – the earliest copies of other ancient writings are missing for similar reasons.
What is left are copies of the original Bible manuscripts, and these do not all match each other perfectly. This fact has led many people to doubt the accuracy of the Bible’s transmission. However, we shouldn’t be too hasty and conclude that an accurate biblical text is a lost cause. Let’s first look at exactly how Jewish and Christian scribes over the centuries did their job and what the scholars who study this area have learned about the surviving Bible manuscripts.
Copying the Bible
First, we need to learn a little about the copying process for the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, a language which originally did not use written vowels. Ancient Jews were able to read this vowel-less text because they knew the language intimately, especially the traditional reading. To preserve this traditional reading, a group called the Masoretes added vowels and punctuation between 500 C.E. and 1000 C.E. That means they added vowels from 1000 - 3000 years after the books were written. This version of the Hebrew Old Testament was known as the Masoretic Text.
The care with which these Jews edited the text has been described by F.F. Bruce, a well-respected biblical scholar:
[The Masoretes wrote] with the greatest imaginable reverence, and devised a complicated system of safeguards against scribal slips. They counted, for example, the number of times each letter of the alphabet occurs in each book; they pointed out the middle letter of the Pentateuch and the middle letter of the whole Hebrew Bible, and made even more detailed calculations than these.1
In 1948, some Old Testament manuscripts (along with some non-biblical writings) were found in caves near the Dead Sea which dated as early as 250 B.C.E., about a thousand years before the Masoretic text. These are known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Instead of being anywhere from 1000-3000 years from the original, these are as close as a few hundred. In the case of one of these scrolls – a copy of the book of Isaiah – the only difference between its text and the Masoretic text, was three words, and these only differed in spelling! Though over 1000 years separate these two texts, there are only three spelling changes! This shows the care with which the Masoretes and other scribes had worked.2
The New Testament was copied more quickly, and thus less carefully, than the Old. It is likely that this happened in order to immediately spread the good news about Jesus. F.F. Bruce wrote, “The New Testament was complete, or substantially complete, about AD 100, the majority of the writings being in existence twenty to forty years before this.”3To those of us who have become accustomed to hearing today’s news about the world, 50 years between event and record may seem like a lot. However, this seems like a moment in time compared to other ancient literature.
In philosophy and history classes, for instance, students read the works of Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient writers, assuming that the authors wrote exactly what they study. Unfortunately, much time passed between the original writing and the earliest surviving manuscripts. So we cannot know how much the text was altered in the in-between time.
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Bible-Studies-1654/2012/9/dont-original-bible-manuscripts.htm
It is my understanding that there are two families of manuscript copies. There is the family of copies coming from Antioch Syria known as the Textus Receptus and they are no older than the 11th century AD. There are a few manuscripts dating back to 250-350 AD from Axexandria Egypt and some critics believe that these were corrupted copies influenced by heritics.
A good discussions of how the various translations have affected the Bible:
http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/bible/translations.stm
http://www.onenesspentecostal.com/originalbooks.htm
We do not have the originals of any of the books in the Bible. Before the invention of the printing press, books (originally scrolls) were copied by hand. Many copies were made of the biblical books for use in the early churches. What we have today are actually copies of copies. As far as what happened to the actual originals, we don’t know but they probably deteriorated from use. The Greek manuscripts which we do possess today are kept in various museums and institutions, mostly located in Europe but there are a few in the United States. Scholars now must compare the various Greek manuscripts we have to try and determine what the original said. This process is known as textual criticism. The standard Greek texts of the New Testament are the Nestle-Aland 27th edition and the United Bibles Societies’ 4th edition. They both contain footnotes throughtout the text indicating where there are major differences between Greek manuscripts.
Here is one example of a verse that just doesn’t belong:
http://gracethrufaith.com/ask-a-bible-teacher/does-mark-16-belong-in-the-bible/
“Here’s the issue as I see it. There’s some good circumstantial evidence that Mark 16:9-20 was not originally part of the Gospel of Mark. The same can be said of John 7:53-8:11 (which some scholars say should really be at the end of Luke 21). But that’s not the same as saying these passages don’t belong in the Bible.
The main arguments against Mark 16:9-20 are related to vocabulary and writing style. While some of the theological content is different from the rest of Mark’s gospel, it isn’t incompatible with either orthodox beliefs or the other Gospels. Mark 16:9-20 first appeared early in the 2nd Century and seems for the most part to be a compilation of verses from Matt. 28, Luke 24 and John 20. The intent was to give Mark a proper ending since without these verses it appears unfinished.”
This is but one of many such cases.
Numbers are not faith. Which of their estimates and/or percentages do you disagree with?
Cordially,
Let’s get this straight...for the record, the truth is that Bill O’Reilly is a contradiction. We would all be better off if Bill O’Reilly would just SHUT UP!
There are no contridictions in the Word of God. There are different views of similar occurances reported by writers who may or may not have directly witnessed what they reported. And there are differences because of translation. It is important to remember that God is the same, yesterday, today and forever...as is his Word.
There are also different ‘interpretations’ of what is written. Paul told the Corinthian women to ‘Shut Up’...they were chit chatting during the church gatherings and disturbing the congregation gathered there. He never said women had no place in being part of the church in any way, shape or form. Many women had a part in the formation of the early church, including teaching.
I know, and I think you know that ‘us’ is God.
The record shows the contradictions, and they are numerous. That’s what we’ve been discussing in this thread.
“There are no contridictions” is a statement of religious faith, a belief, but it is contradicted by the plain facts of the matter.
Nope wasn’t sure about the “us” part. Sounded like it was a group effort.
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