It has always been held by the early church fathers (and even our pre-Christ Hebrew fathers) that the Bible was the error free writing of God given to man. The early church fathers took great care to distinguish between God's word by setting it aside in the scriptures we have today.
Today many want to distance themselves from this position claiming there are all sorts of astronomical, geographical, or zoological errors, so the scripture must be only for "spiritual awareness". This is utter nonsense. Would you want to make the claim the Virgin Birth is biologically impossible so that it must be "spiritual" interpretation? There have been people who have made such claims.
The Bible does NOT make that clear! Jonah does not begin "this is a true story, it is not a parable"...As to the Great Flood, the Scriptures can be interpreted to mean the entire KNOWN world. It is unlikely that men in Israel would have knowledge about people in North America. It is just as acceptable to say that God flooded only the world of Noah.
It has always been held by the early church fathers (and even our pre-Christ Hebrew fathers) that the Bible was the error free writing of God given to man. The early church fathers took great care to distinguish between God's word by setting it aside in the scriptures we have today.
But it is also clear that the Church Fathers did not always take the literalist view of Scripture. There is a whole school from Clement of Alexandria (with Origen as his prime student) that delved into allegory readings of Scriptures. St. Augustine himself wrote a whole book on the Literal interpretation of Genesis, saying it was acceptable to read the Creation account in a spiritual sense - not taken literally. St. Thomas Aquinas ALSO noted, while refering to other Fathers, that it could be seen that animals evolved and changed by noting nature. Thus, it is incorrect to say that the Church looks ONLY to the literal view of Scriptures. Example? There are numerous interpretations of the Song of Songs - and very few of them (none, I'd think) see it as an erotic love story...
Today many want to distance themselves from this position claiming there are all sorts of astronomical, geographical, or zoological errors, so the scripture must be only for "spiritual awareness". This is utter nonsense. Would you want to make the claim the Virgin Birth is biologically impossible so that it must be "spiritual" interpretation? There have been people who have made such claims.
These are two separate things. The Virgin Birth can NEVER be disproved by scientific means. We will NEVER have such empirical evidence. However, modern science CAN tell us that the earth took longer than 6 literal days to form, through EMPIRICAL means. By scientific study, we find evidence of rocks that are greater than 6000 years old. God is the God of nature as well as Scripture. HE does NOT lie. Thus, either our INTERPETATION of Scripture is incorrect, or science is incorrect. I think their is ample evidence to hold that science is correct - BUT - the Church does NOT make an infallible declaration one way or the other. One is able to hold, with clear conscience, either view (FK, another example of that Catholic flexibility!). As a Catholic, we are not held to the literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3, scientifically speaking. However, it IS inerrant in that what God wanted to say was infallibly said. Apparently, God wasn't telling us that the earth was created in 6 literal days, but something else. God was using a creation story to pass along information about Himself and man, about how HE created the universe out of love, and so forth.
There is nothing "novel" about Christianity nor was there anything novel about it at the time.
Whoa, nelly! Hold on there! If Christianity wasn't novel, how come so many Jews did NOT convert? Where does the Hebrew Bible explicitly spell out that the Messiah must hang from a tree? Or that the Messiah must rise from the dead? Or the idea that God became man? Or that there was three persons in one God? Or that during their communion feast, the followers would eat the body of their savior??? Or that the community no longer had to observe circumcision or dietary laws, or a change in the sabbath day???? A Jewish reading of the Scripture found Christianity to be QUITE novel.
In fact Paul takes great pains to show that our belief system is exactly as Abraham. I believe there is a thread on this showing how we are losing this view
OF COURSE he does! But notice how few Jews actually buy into it! Do you think the original Jews reading the letter of Paul to the Romans understood that letter with the same authority as the Torah??? To the Jews, Paul was crazy and a destroyer of the Law. Of course WE read Paul's writings differently. But Jews at the time didn't make the connection. There was a major cognitive dissonance going on with early Christianity - between what was in Hebrew Scriptures did NOT match up with their experience of the Risen Lord. (for example, Deuteronomy says that "he who hangs from a tree is condemend". A sola Scriptura view of the OT would say that Jesus was NOT the Messiah). Those who hadn't experienced the Risen Lord would consider the Gospel to be foolishness and a stumbling block.
Regards
Factual errors exist in the Bible, whether it has to do with two different ages of some Jewish king, or the number of children of some Jewish woman, or with the confusion having to deal with what species of living things does a bat or a hare belong to (unless they evolved into present day species), etc.
So, now it is necessary to redefine what is meant by "error." The Bible cannot err in its message of God, because it is a message of love. That much we know. If you can find anything but love in everything the Bible proclaims, you are not reading it correctly because it would be contrary to God being Love.
I will be the first to admit that I often scratch my head and say "where is love in all this?" But that is my failing and when I ask others to show me they can't either, although they claim they see nothing but love in all of it! Which is soooo not convincing indeed...
I will also be frank with you all: my faith comes from God and not from the Bible. The Bible reveals God's Creation and God's Divine Economy, but does not "put" God into your heart. I also know that God's perfect love that I know through Him is expressed in imperfect language and intellect of man.
When you mix Perfect with imperfect you corrupt the Perfect even if you don't desire it, and even if your hand is guided by the Holy Spirit simply because there are no words to express the Perfect, nor could our minds comprehend the Perfect, so our knowledge and expression of the Perfect is always imperfect.
Which is precisely the reason the Fathers held from the beginning that understanding Scripture is a special gift from God and not something to be attained by pure intellect, and henceforth not available to everyone.
Hence, the power of the simple formula we all understand in our hearts but cannot show empirically in its totality -- God is Love. Oh, we can show hormonal and electrical changes in our bodies when we feel loved, but they all fall short of what the experience of love is. Such "empirical evidence" is not even recognizable as love.
But, love, although manifested physically (poorly nonetheless) is not physical or subject to physical laws at all! It is eternal and unlimited. Those whom you love truly today you will love the same tomorrow and forever, not matter where they are, no matter how far. It transcends time and space and all physical barriers and limitations of nature.
Thus we speak of love being limitless, priceless, "great" and "warm", "burning," something we would give up our own life for, our a kidney or an eye if need be, and yet no one can put a dimension or shape to it (heart is merely an "icon" of love).
Yet, although no one has ever seen love, we all claim to know love, even how to recognize love. Love supersedes our reason and logic and we "fall in(to) love," cleaving to the one we are in love with but cannot explain why, and even admit to being blinded by it.
All these terms we use in our daily experience that is known to us as true and very real, yet they cannot be measured, described, or illustrated in their , apply, forst and foremost to God; yeah, especially to God! So, when we find Love in the Bible, we know that it is true, because we know it already. That is our infallible "proof" that the Bible is inerrant.
Now, considering your silly comment about the Mystery of the Virgin Birth, as is the case with the mystery of the Holy Trinity, etc. as jo kus says, science has no power to (dis)prove it! Nor is it the purpose of science to do so. Not is it in the power of the science to prove or disprove God. Quite to the contrary, science only reveals the unimaginable power and glory of God.
Just the fact that we learn more and more about Nature proves that with God everything is possible. We certainly include the Virgin Birth in that, and a Big Flood. But, I can see the Virgin Birth happening much more than God changing His mind as if surprised and disappointed with mankind and deciding to drown the whole rotten lot along with its animals (what have the animals done to deserve that?).
The Virgin Birth makes sense in our Salvation; drowning the whole world because we turned out wicked on God's watch is not as clear. Surely, God had other options at hand! If God's revelation to man has to do with our redemption, out of love, and return to Him, then the Virgin Birth is certainly a big part in our soteriology, and more importantly a necessary step in its realization. The Big Flood is not. God could have killed every living thing, including Noah, and re-created man just as easily.
Another wasted bullet in the air, HD, as jo kus aprtly showed your error in assuming that the world is the entire world.
The early church fathers took great care to distinguish between God's word by setting it aside in the scriptures we have today
Based on the inerrancy of its message, not accuracy in geography, or astronomy, or zoology, or even history.
Of course we don't have any way of knowing what is the original. It doesn't matter as both Agrarian and I've pointed out
Well, if there are factual errors of transcription, language, zoology, mathematics, astronomy, geography, etc. then we really can't say that, can we? What we can say is that the copies and different versions maintain God's inerrant message (of love).
There is nothing "novel" about Christianity nor was there anything novel about it at the time. There were many Jew who understood and came to God through faith accepting Jesus as the Messiah promised by God in the Old Testament scriptures
No HD, this is another one of your sweeping generalizations. There was nothing even remotely close to Christianity in any form of Judaism -- for no one even suggested that any kind of work can be "good" on a Sabbath.
Another unsupported claim here is that there were "many" who accepted Jesus as Messiah...First, in Judaic definition of the Messiah does not have anything in common with Jesus Christ, our Lord. The Messiah was to be ordinary man, anointed (picked) by God to become (literally) the next king of Israel. Jews emphatically reject the notion that man can be God (although they never entertain the idea that God can become Man). Jews emphatically reject the notion than anyone can atone or die or "buy" someone else's sins (that's even biblical, you ought to know).
My next question is just how "many" are "many" who accepted Jesus? If they were "multitudes" as Agrarian believes, someone else would have written about this besides the Apostles. If the High Priest personally dealt with Christ, someone would have made a note because it is not everyday occurrence that the High Priest (the highest official of the country's priesthood) meets and act against someone in person. Nor is it without reason to believe that Romans would not have recorded an important person, with a large following that is even seen as a threat, especially when such an important person was sentenced by the highest official of a Roman Province.
I am sure if the Pope excommunicated someone publicly, the newspapers and archives would record it and document it. I have no reason to believe that it would have been any different in those days for the scribes to record such events. It is not necessarily that I am saying this did not happen: I am saying that those following Jesus were not that "many", not that important, and when He got arrested most of them scattered lest they be crucified as well.
If Christianity was such a large sect within Judaism it would have been impossible to throw them out of the synagogues. The truth is that by and large Israelites rejected Christ and still do. They see nothing Jewish about Christ, but an apostate. So much so is it seen as a different and novel religion by Judaism that one can be a Jew even if one does not believe, but never as a Christian. Only Evangelical Christians believe that somehow Judaism and Christianity are "tied" together. Jews obviously think otherwise; to them Judaism and Christianity are mutually exclusive, as it used to be for Christians for 1900 years.
Finally, without going to gentiles and spreading the word of Christ's message, Christianity would have died out, as the Sadduccees and Essenes died out. The only reason the Pharisees didn't is because they turned into rabbinical Jews after Jamnia in 100 AD, after having rejected Christian books and cursed Jesus of Nazareth. They are the only survivors of one of several sects of Judaism of the pre-Christ era.