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There are many seeds pretending to be plants.
If it's that illogical, why do you believe it?
There are many seeds pretending to be plants.
Is it an accident or is it inspired. Make up your silly mind.
the Bible says God is omnipotent and omniscient.As for the rest, the Bible is quite a miracle in its consistency, continuity, and brilliance. It came out just right in part by accident, but so be it.
If the Bible was an accident, then he's not and the Bible fails right there.
An accident by men, not by God, moron.
But you believe Jesus rose from the dead, correct?
He rises from the dead in every generation....
if it's divinely inspired, then it's no accident, moron.
You are trying to have it both ways. It makes you a moron, moron.
so you're making fun of someone believing in Revelation singular, but you are serious about a street magician returning from the dead.
You're a phony and a hypocrite, tbh.
Yawn. It is you who say I am.
Yawn.
It can be both. Just like literal things can also be parables. (Though not all parables can be literal.)
Dolt.
We are going round in the same circles. You and lumpydumbnuts are beyond help. Enjoy your little sand box.
Alpha Mike Foxtrot.
That makes about as much sense as believing in a God sending himself to kill himself in order to bring himself back from the dead.
Get back to more name calling, Christian.
Repeating your original arguments to my rebuttals doesn't contribute much. It just means you are not very creative nor quick thinking. That we have been at this for days speaks quite a bit about you for all of your comments about me being stupid and ignorant.
Lets go over issues you never address.
1) You grant that the copies prior to Constantine are not consistent. You grant that they are not all identical to your preferred copies commissioned by Constantine. You try and gloss that over by saying 'best we can tell' or your faith based mumbo jumbo but it still is what it is.
2) You still are completely unable to in any way respond to my points about the history for the first three centuries of the church. Rome was not sacked and the dark ages begin to roll until 100 years after Constantine commissioned the works you are so fond of. Nevertheless, it's not like the early christians were anything like the aristocrats that dominated theology post Constantine.
This led to two main issues. First was the fact that the religion of slaves and the subjugated is quite often not looked on fondly by the powers that be. Second, there was no central authority to prevent the various schisms that would occur. The early church was primarily comprised of bisphorics in major Mediterranean city states like the ones Paul wrote to. The denunciation of arianism is the one that is primarily pointed to but it was hardly the first and even less so the most violent. This was a brutal age in descent where disagreements ended up with factions literally impaled or dragged behind chariots through the streets.
What you characterize as 'inspired purely by accident' was the above. Who knows what the went on, what was changed, lost, or anything else. Playing like what Paul wrote to those early churches was held true much less the that was written before then is just laughable. Jesus couldn't write nor did he finish his Kabbalah.
But hey I am glad that you like your canon produced by 4th century politicians and how consistent it has been ever since.
Are you so stupid you believe magic sky man impregnated Mary?
Are you so stupid you believe Jesus banished demons into pigs?
Are you so stupid you believe Jesus' heart and brain ceased functioning for over 48 hours and reanimated?
Your method of picking and choosing is not special. You just underscore how stupid the thing really is.
Way to tap dance around the theology of free will.
If I make my dog take a on the rug is it an accident? Your tap dancing around your belief in the resurrection is noted as well. Intellectual and spiritual cowardice all rolled into one.
"I have a restraining order against skull"
Just gonna leave this here
It turns out that there is no archaeological evidence of any kind relating to a separate settlement of religious people in Egypt during that time. There is also no evidence of any kind relating to a mass migration across the Sinai Peninsula.
If things did indeed happen as it says in the Bible (and the Torah), there would have to be some archaeological evidence. But there is none.
Further, there is no evidence of any kind that Egypt even used slaves, and certainly no evidence that they enslaved an entire nation. The workers that built the pyramids are known to be well payed Egyptians. The pyramids weren’t even built in the right time period, being 800 to 2,000 years older than the supposed “Exodus”.
The same techniques used to track the migration patterns of ancient humans by examining DNA also show that there was absolutely no procreation between ancient Egyptians and ancient Israelites during the time that the story was supposed to have taken place. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if an entire nation was enslaved for hundreds of years, surely there would have been some inter-breeding.
In short, this story never happened.
And this isn’t even “news” – of course, the scientific community is across the subject, but even conservative Jewish sources admit that there is no evidence (but they still have faith! And some stuff about metaphors and such…)
Lee, since we are friends....
There was no Exodus. Moses did not part the Red Sea. I have maintained that consistently. It is a parable. The scriptures make that clear to anyone with spiritual eyes to see it (even an atheist can probably see it out of simple logic). Some of us have even lived that parable...
I was just like every other stupid Christian believing all of that stuff was literal. I read dozens of times the passages that say it isn't, but never noticed. But little by little I was shown the clues. Now I laugh at the folly of it. As a parable though, it is right on.
Do you laugh at yourself for believing that Jesus rose from the dead?
If not I'll do the laughing for you.
Lol skull
I know it's just a story, the whole book is just stories.It just seems odd for all these religious texts to be full of so much stuff that didn't happen or that are historically inaccurate. It's also weird that the authors of all these texts would purposely make it into some crazy hidden message you have to discover on your own. You got your own views, but I don't buy into that. When this was written thousands of years ago, it was meant literally and the people who followed believed that it was 100% fact.
Just to ask a question since you know a lot about da bible, from the versions I've read it seems like there is no really mention of the fall of Lucifer, it just kinda puts him as banished to to torture souls and corrupt people without explaining how it came to that. It's been awhile since I read it maybe I'm forgetting something but I don't remember reading that part
So since there is no evidence of the parting of the red sea, the prophecy of the four horsemen of the apocolypse, or any of the other obvious bull does that mean God and Jesus and everything else that is claimed is also a 'parable' that we can mae to be whatever the that we feel like it. Or what you can interpret because your special?
Lies cop outs and cowardice. It's noted how you gave up on arguing the consistency of the texts. I guess that we can chalk those up to parables that are figurative. How about repentance and the 10 commandments. Or are you stupid enough to believe that God showed up to Moses in the form of the burning bush to hand down those commandments?
Where is this "new evidence"?
I have no doubts that people believed it literally. Christ set the record straight that it was not a literal history and Paul backed him up. ("For once God winked at people's ignorance, but no longer." - I forget where that is, but it is in the Epistles.) It is a parable and a prophecy that is repeated over and over and over again in every generation. Writing a literal history wouldn't have a FRACTION of the impact that a spiritual parable does.I know it's just a story, the whole book is just stories.
Just to ask a question since you know a lot about da bible, from the versions I've read it seems like there is no really mention of the fall of Lucifer, it just kinda puts him as banished to to torture souls and corrupt people without explaining how it came to that. It's been awhile since I read it maybe I'm forgetting something but I don't remember reading that part
(Some things I would consider historical, but perhaps not quite history--the Gospels and the Epistles contain a lot of stuff that I would consider firsthand accounts. But much of that also is a parable and a prophecy. Too much to get into at the moment, but, for example, Peter backsliding into the cir cision party and getting a chewing out by Paul likely happened--and happens to a certain few people in every generation.)
And don't worry about the whole Lucifer thing. It is just another parable. If you as someone who doesn't read the Bible gets confused......no disdain from me. But for people who have spent their entire lives in the "church" and think that there is some guy running around with horns and a pitchfork. LMAO.
Last edited by Skull-1; 10-07-2013 at 08:52 PM.
For those who would like a more detailed description than I have been able to provide on some aspects of my argument. Reprinted without permission. Hopefully it is of some use to someone. I certainly enjoyed it. And yes, I am a proponent of the Majority Text for numerous reasons. What we read in our English Bible is not a pure translation of anything. It takes a lot of research to figure it all out. There are enough signposts and failsafes for the discerning reader, but one has to be careful.
(ALL EMPHASIS MINE.)
http://lmf12.files.wordpress.com/201...cfallview1.pdf
LESSON 1:
The Alexandrian Text was a text, confined to Egypt, whereas the Majority
Text has been found throughout the Christian world, which means throughout the Roman Byzantine Empire (hence the alternative name for the Majority Text is the Byzantine Text). MS Aleph (or Codex Sinaiticus) is not to be trusted. It errs, and errs badly on occasions. Unfortunately the pool of MSS making up its Text-type (Alexandrian/Egyptian) is too small to know where it has departed from its text-type. For this reason, and in contradistinction to the Majority Text,
it is sometimes referred to as the Minority Text. It is in a minority as regards extant manuscript witnesses and geographical spread. This small base of manuscripts cons utes an inherent weakness in establishing what is the Egyptian/Alexandrian Text-type. The Majority Text, on the other hand,
does not have this inherent weakness because of the multiplicity of MSS in its pool, and its unbounded geographical spread. However, we lack a critical edition of both Text-types.
The NU88 text is basically the text of two manuscripts, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. It is the direct descendant of Westcott and Hort’s 1881 edition. This can be proved by the observation that in the Gospel of John the NU has altered the Westcott-Hort text in only 167 places (most of them spelling differences), and in every instance it has replaced those readings with the Majority Text. Westcott &
Hort worked on the simple rule that where B and a agreed, that was the original text. They departed from this rule on only eight occasions (all of them spelling differences).
An exact copy of the original text which had been exactly recopied for ten generations and is dated to 1000 years after Christ, is to be preferred to a first copy which was carelessly copied and which can be dated to 100 years after Christ. It is, therefore, a sound principle of textual criticism that the date of a manuscript has absolutely no bearing on its faithfulness to the original text. The date of a manuscript is meaningless and irrelevant. It is a common error among text-critics to assume that the older a manuscript is, the more faithful it is to the original text. The two concepts are unrelated.
LESSON 2:
Bruce Metzger’s A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament illustrates how we can all find a way of justifying our preferred reading. He was not making his comments from a neutral position. He made it known that he regarded the Aleph-B text as the nearest thing to the original text and he regarded the Byzantine Text as an inferior Text-type because he uncritically followed Hort’s subjective opinion (not based on facts) that the Majority Text was the creation of the Byzantine Church in the fifth century. This overriding, flawed assumption influenced every decision he made in his Commentary. We need a neutral commentary, not one whose set aim is to produce an eclectic text, but one which will explain how the Text-types come to differ from each other at each point of disagreement.
In the end, scholarship must choose between Text-types, not between MSS, and certainly not a pick-and-mix approach to establish the autograph text, as is done in all modern attempts to reconstruct the original text. The significance of the Majority Text is that it is not an eclectic text. Because of this feature it stands apart from all previous editions, revisions, and reconstructions of the Greek text of the New Testament.
THE SUPERIORITY OF THE MAJORITY TEXT
The object of this Appendix is to show that the Reformation Churches were misled in 1881 into giving up the Majority Text (also called the Byzantine text, the Koine Text, the Textus Receptus, or simply MT90) in favour of a local Egyptian Text. The Egyptian text came into prominence through Westcott
and Hort in the late nineteenth century. Their text was based mainly (if not solely) on two manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. The criterion used was, where these two manuscripts agreed against the MT, their text was to be preferred every time. This criterion still dominates all modern Greek texts of the New Testament.
Westcott and Hort succeeded in replacing the Majority Text with a local, Egyptian text using three false assumptions, namely, that the older a manuscript was the nearer it was to the original text. Secondly, that scribes were more likely to add words here and there in the copying process, than omit them. The latter criterion can be double-edged, in that if a copyist thinks this has happened to the copy he is about to re-copy and sets out to omit what he regards as redundancies, then he will end up with a shorter text, which is the case with the Egyptian text. It is about 3% shorter overall when compared to the MT. All modern English translations are based on this local, Egyptian text, which is a corrupt form of the Majority Text.
Their third assumption was that the Majority Text did not exist before the fifth century. They believed that it was created by an individual called Lucian. It is then postulated that his text was then taken up by the major centres of Christianity, particularly Constantinople, where it became the official text of the Church, resulting in the loss of almost all other text-types. There is no evidence for this conjecture. No modern scholar now accepts this concocted scenario, but it was accepted in 1881 as a probable fact, and the damage was done before it could be challenged. As a result the Revised Version of 1881 was not the revision of the Authorized Version that it was intended to be, but a version heavily influenced by Westcott and Hort’s new Greek text.
WHY SHOULD CONSERVATIVE SCHOLARS BE SU IOUS OF THE EGYPTIAN TEXT?
The reason why the Egyptian text should not be accepted is that it is a corrupt text.
There are two blunders in the Egyptian Text that should alert all conservative-evangelical ministers of the Gospel to the nature of that corrupt text. In Matthew 27:49 Vaticanus and Sinaiticus have transported part of John 19:34 to this place. Their addition, which appears to have come from memory as the Greek words are in a different order, reads: “Now another taking a spear he plunged into his side and out came water and blood.” What betrays this addition as a blunder is the position where it was added in Matthew’s narrative. In John, it occurs after Jesus is dead, and the spear thrust was to make sure Jesus was dead. But in Matthew, it is added at a point where Jesus was still alive.
The second blunder in the Egyptian text occurs in Luke 4:44, where “Galilee” was replaced with “Judaea” in the Egyptian text, resulting in Jesus conducting two major preaching tours in two places at the same time. The error is found mainly in the local, Egyptian text. Apart from these obvious blunders, there are over 200 instances in the Gospels where the Egyptian text has omitted words due to ioteleuthon (‘similar ending’). This mechanical error occurs when the same word occurs nearby and the scribe’s eye shifts forward to the same or similar word, resulting in an omission.
The sheer volume of these mechanical errors in the Egyptian text suggests that it goes back to an early, sloppy copy, or a rushed copy made by a careful scribe. There is also internal evidence that the copy from which all the Egyptian manuscripts are descended was made from an old, worn copy, which was unreadable in places. In these instances the scribe had to guess what the text read.
On top of these obvious blunders and scribal mistakes, there are, in addition, thousands of minor changes to the Majority Text, hundreds of which do not affect the translation, but the fact that these alterations were made at all should make one su ious of following a scribe who is that careless in copying out the Word of God for the next generation.
In the following section it can be shown that: Wherever Vaticanus differs from Sinaiticus, Sinaiticus agrees with the MT, and wherever Sinaiticus differs from Vaticanus, Vaticanus agrees with the MT. This means that all disagreements between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus came about because one or other has departed from the Majority Text. The MT lies behind both manuscripts, and their differences are due entirely to their failure to reproduce it.
(SNIP)
There are about 9,166 differences between the Majority Text and the combined errors in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in the four Gospels alone.
(A glaring error occurs in MS B which contradicts itself at Acts 10:19. There it states that two men came to visit Peter in Joppa, but in 11:11 it states there were three. It is the only manuscript to contain this contradiction.)
There are two important facts that emerge from a comparison of the texts of Eras, CP and MT. The first remarkable fact is that in only six cases do Eras, CP and MT all disagree. The second remarkable fact is the figure of 82 agreements between Eras and CP against the Majority Text. This shows that the Greek MSS consulted by Eras and CP came from a common ancestor, albeit probably an ancestor four or five generations back, when these 82 divergences from the MT were introduced.
From these two totals we can make the following important observation: Wherever Erasmus differs from CP, CP agrees with the MT, and wherever CP differs from Erasmus, Erasmus agrees with the MT. This means that all disagreements between Erasmus and the Complutensian come about because one or other departs from the Majority Text.
Why is this important? The answer is that we find an identical situation between MS B (Codex Vaticanus), MS a (Codex Sinaiticus) and the Majority Text. This can be demonstrated from a comparison between Vaticanus (B), Sinaiticus (Sin.) and the Majority Text (MT) in the Gospel of John. Three important facts emerge.
The first is that in only 29 cases do Vat., Sin., and MT all disagree.
The second fact is that Vat. and Sin. agree against the Majority Text in 666 cases. This shows that the text copied by Vat. and Sin. came from a common ancestor, albeit probably an ancestor four or five generations back. If we deduct the 666 divergences from the MT—plus the 29 where they each disagree—from their combined disagreements with the MT, which is 1529 variants, we can make the following important observation: Wherever Vaticanus differs from Sinaiticus, which happens 610 times, Sinaiticus agrees with the MT, and wherever Sinaiticus differs from Vaticanus, which happens 890 times, Vaticanus agrees with the MT.
An identical study was carried out on Luke’s Gospel which produced the same pattern. There are 14 cases where Vat., Sin., and MT all disagree. The second fact is that Vat. and Sin. agree against the Majority Text in 1157 cases. It is this large number of shared disagreements that cons utes the Egyptian Text as a distinct text-type, and so distinguishes it from the MT. These shared disagreements are found in the local Egyptian text (*95).
(*95 - It was never a universal text, like the MT. This shows that the text copied by Vat. and Sin. came from a local, Egyptian common ancestor, albeit probably an ancestor going back to the second century.)
If in Luke we deduct the figure of 643 divergences of Vaticanus from the MT—plus the 14 where they each disagree—from their (B+a) combined disagreements with the MT, which is 1425 variants, we can make the following significant observation: Wherever Vaticanus differs from Sinaiticus, which happens 643 times in Luke, Sinaiticus always agrees with the MT, and wherever Sinaiticus differs from Vaticanus, which happens 768 times, Vaticanus always agrees with the MT.
The conclusion is inescapable, namely, all disagreements between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus come about because one or other departs from the Majority Text.
In the copying of Luke, Sinaiticus has moved further way from the text of
Vaticanus, which is closer to the MT. It is the same in the copying of John. Sinaiticus has moved further way from the text of Vaticanus, which is closer to the MT. The same goes for Matthew and Mark; Vaticanus is closer to the Majority Text.
(SNIP)
The only English version I would recommend at the present time is the New King James Version (NKJV), but it can only be a stop gap translation because it does not translate the Majority Text as its main text. We need to lay the TR aside and give a straight translation of the Majority Text to the next generation.
Last edited by Skull-1; 10-07-2013 at 10:04 PM.
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