One advantage of having the Bible as a written document is the promotion of literacy. And it has been an instrumental factor in promoting literacy across many cultures. The rise of literacy of the English language can be largely attributed to the Bible. Just 70 years before William Shakespeare put pen to paper, there was …
TRANSPONDER wrote: ↑Tue Oct 26, 2021 12:22 pm Your St. Nick example is excellent. King Arthur is another and Troy a third. These are reliably based on true persons, but there are huge mythical elements that bury the original real historical thing. Jesus is a fourth example. I’ll go further and say the entire Bible …
TRANSPONDER wrote: ↑Mon Oct 25, 2021 6:37 am is this God’s Book or just another tome of fairy -tales? This is a false dichotomy of either the Bible must be 100% factually correct or either just a tome of fairy tales. And this mentality of only having two possible extreme positions is not just limited …
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The Bible is a complex book that cannot be simply viewed from a single perspective and then entirely judged by that perspective. It is a book utilizing many literary devices, several of which don’t even exist today. Just because one views it from one perspective and doesn’t understand it doesn’t mean the Bible itself is …
Professor Ken Schenek gives some good insight into the minds of the Biblical authors in this video and how our modern mind skews our understanding of the Bible. Though this video is more specific to the gospels, the principles he mentions applies on how they thought back then compared to how we think now. https://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1053605#p1053605
Can you show that the Septuagint was used by Jews? “Greek scriptures were in wide use during the Second Temple period, because few people could read Hebrew at that time. The text of the Greek Old Testament is quoted more often than the original Hebrew Bible text in the Greek New Testament[10][11] (particularly the Pauline …
nobspeople wrote: ↑Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:35 am So, how can we trust the Bible if it’s not inerrant? Only by faith and want. No other way. There will always be an element of faith, but it doesn’t need to be blind faith. As for the “errors”, there are several possibilities to account for this. …
nobspeople wrote: ↑Thu Oct 14, 2021 10:43 am If we accept the bible has errors, omissions, contradictions… how are we to determine which items are ‘correct’ and which are ‘in error’? Same as with any source of authority. There is no authority that is inerrant – government, teachers, professors, police, managers, doctors, politicians, preachers, or …
Difflugia wrote: ↑Wed Oct 13, 2021 10:13 am I can’t, though, reconcile calling it the Word of God unless there is something qualitatively different about the Bible than any other human literature. If the Bible is presenting the fruits of human effort to understand God, how is that different than a devotional, even if it’s …
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Mithrae wrote: ↑Tue Oct 12, 2021 12:52 pm Once upon a time we had a Jewish member (cnorman perhaps) with a signature line saying something like “The Torah is the word of God… and some of it is even true!” In other words, it is errant but still the ‘word of God.’ Yes, my belief …