Does the Bible have Mistakes? [Aquila Praefortis versus elfdude]

[pacifism]

As the title says, this debate is about whether or not the Bible indeed is perfect in and of its original manuscript. I also think that is not planning on being a Christian vs. agnostic?/atheist? debate. I am not entirely sure if we will also debate how reliable the Bible or parts of the Bible are, but I am willing to do so.

elfdude’s stance: the Bible is inaccurate, contradictory and overall poorly written.
Aquila Praefortis’ stance: the Bible is the true, inerrant word of God, and therefore has no mistakes in and of its original manuscripts. And I did refer to myself in the third person.

This is a very defensive argument on my part, since there is no actual viewpoint or stance I can actually attack, at least I think. But my argument mostly consists of the following.

For contradictions

1. Some apparent inaccuracies of the Bible can be solved through proper knowledge of ancient times. For example, Matthew 20:29 says “and as they went out of Jericho, a great crowd followed him.” Mark 10:46a says “and they came to Jericho. And as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great crowd”, but Luke 18:35a says “as he drew near to Jericho. . .” This is referring to the same event, which was Jesus healing “two” blind men (which I will get into later.). But Luke said Jesus was entering Jericho, but Matthew and Mark say Jesus was leaving Jericho. The answer is they are both correct. There were two Jerichos. One was the old, abandoned Jericho tel (a hill of ruined cities on ruined cities), and one was the inhabited Jericho very nearby.

2. Some apparent inaccuracies of the Bible can be solved through what I call multiple options. When I say that, I mean that the authors of the Gospels had several options to choose from on an event, and they chose different ones. For example, Matthew 20:30a “And behold, there were two blind men sitting by the roadside . . .” Mark 10:46b says “Barimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside . . .” and Luke 10:35b says “a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging.” Matthew says there were two beggars, but Mark and Luke say it was only one. The answer is that Mark and Luke were only mentioning the more “important” or more vocal of two.

3. Some apparent inaccuracies of the Bible can be solved through more precise translations. For example, Leviticus 11:6 says "and the hare, because it chews its cud but does not part in the hoof, is unclean to you." This seems like a scientific mistake on the account hare do not chew their cud. However, how "chewing its cud" is thought of in English as a group of animals such as goats, cows, sheep, etc. called ruminants. They swallow their food, partly digest it in a stomach, then regurgitate the partly digested food for more chewing, which then goes to a different stomach. But in Hebrew, the better translation would be close to "raising up what has been swallowed". Hare do that. They eat their food, swallows it, and it goes right through the hare. Then the hare makes a special kind of droppings which it actually eats again to actually absorb the nutrients. The Hebrew word for droppings (gehrah) refers to something defiled and worthless, while in this case obviously wasn't. Not to mention the ancient Hebrews were outdoor people by necessity, so I would expect them to know how a hare behaves.

Since my stance doesn’t have an object or stance to attack (since I am on defense in this), I’ll let elfdude start us off with some mistakes, contradictions, etc. in the Bible.

[Elfdude]

I'm sorry for a terribly late response, I never saw that you had posted and started.

As the title says, this debate is about whether or not the Bible indeed is perfect in and of its original manuscript. I also think that is not planning on being a Christian vs. agnostic?/atheist? debate. I am not entirely sure if we will also debate how reliable the Bible or parts of the Bible are, but I am willing to do so.

elfdude’s stance: the Bible is inaccurate, contradictory and overall poorly written.
Aquila Praefortis’ stance: the Bible is the true, inerrant word of God, and therefore has no mistakes in and of its original manuscripts. And I did refer to myself in the third person.

This is a very defensive argument on my part, since there is no actual viewpoint or stance I can actually attack, at least I think. But my argument mostly consists of the following.

That's a pretty fair characterization of my position. My central position however is that the bible is ambiguous and that if any accuracy or truth was ever present in the bible it still requires human interpretation to understand.

BTW, What do you mean by the word of god?

1. Some apparent inaccuracies of the Bible can be solved through proper knowledge of ancient times. For example, Matthew 20:29 says “and as they went out of Jericho, a great crowd followed him.” Mark 10:46a says “and they came to Jericho. And as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great crowd”, but Luke 18:35a says “as he drew near to Jericho. . .” This is referring to the same event, which was Jesus healing “two” blind men (which I will get into later.). But Luke said Jesus was entering Jericho, but Matthew and Mark say Jesus was leaving Jericho. The answer is they are both correct. There were two Jerichos. One was the old, abandoned Jericho tel (a hill of ruined cities on ruined cities), and one was the inhabited Jericho very nearby.

This is a simple issue in the bible not qualifying when or where. This builds into the idea that the bible is ambiguous. While you're more than welcome to interpret the bible this way, the fact that it can be interpretted in two different ways speaks to the fact that this is an inherently ambiguous story. Your method for choosing that meaning in this story may be correct, but at the same moment it may also be wrong. Neither of us can guess at the intent of the original authors. Now Ernst Sellin is responsible for this little piece of argument you're using. He had discovered that there were two jerichos, and thus both statements could be simultaneously true. However I must question the solving of what the intent of the authors was some 1800 years after the event itself. Certainly they might've been referring to two different jerichos. They might have been referring to the same jericho. They might have been referring to two different blind men, or they may have been referring to two different events. This contradiction is not solved so easily and the only way for you to solve it is external to the bible itself. I.E. that is you require your own invention of reasoning and justification of the story.

Since your position is the bible is naturally true, your selection of the answer is predictable but it does not mean the bible is less than ambiguous. When your friend and you both understand an inside joke and make statements that no one else around you understands that does not mean that someone can say, "OH I get it now they were laughing because of" because your intenet in the inside joke is unknown hence it's an inside joke. Thus from the outside it doesn't matter if it has meaning specifically intended or not, it's ambiguous and there's no specific method for solving that issue without appealing to the author themselves.

The bible is ultimately rife with ambiguities just like this making achieving a reliable meaning from it even amongst christians who roughly hold the same type of beliefs as you do impossible. At best certain guiding principles from tradition can be appealed to. That is, it has been explained this way before and that seemed nice so we'll stick with that. In fact many of the principles of the bible hold drastically different meanings when in context of the culture even. For example the quote those who live by the sword die by the sword is often taken as a incitement of war by Jesus as wrong. However in hebrew culture at the time all men carried swords, it was in fact an expectation that they did so. So, rather than being an indictment of those who cause war, jesus is quite literally telling all of hebrew brethren that they should expect to die by the sword and fight for their principles. In a way this is also a good moral, but the ambiguity of the meaning inherently detracts from any attempt to create a moral from it. Should we fight for our ideals and die by the sword? Or should we cast away our swords and die otherwise? The bible unfortunately is entirely incapable of resolving this simple distinction.

Let's look at the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham on mount Moriah. God commanded that Isaac be sacrificed to him by Abraham. Almost anyway you view this the story seems pointlessly one sided and punitive. No one is able to really explain why a good god would ever command someone to sacrifice their son. Now the traditional explanation of this story is that god didn't really want Abraham to kill his son, he just was testing his faith. Since Abraham had resolved to kill his son, Abraham passed and god knew he was true. Now barring the amount of emotional torment a parent would undergo in sacrificing his son. There's another perspective entirely which is unavailable to the christian bible but is rather common in Jewish communities. The idea that god would never have commanded such a thing.

Lets go back to context. At this point in time in history, child sacrifice was actually extremely common. In fact in these times the surprising thing wasn't that god commanded a sacrifice, but rather that he should intercede to stop a sacrifice. This has been interpretted as god stating definitively I will never command a sacrifice or ask that of you. A step further even indicates that Abraham had misinterpretted god in the first place. In the end, it is not god interceding and stopping abraham that prevents the sacrifice but abraham's own decision that the act is evil that stops it. After that the angel appears to confirm that abraham was correct, god does not want human sacrifice. Thus the story transforms into this:

Abraham is spoken to by god, God wants abraham to prove his loyalty, abraham believes this means sacrificing his child. Abraham is caught between a rock and a hard place and does everything he can to avoid sacrificing his son. Ultimately Abraham is unable to go through with the act. God confirms that he had it right.

This is an entirely different morality than that of the blind faith in god morality that most christian scholars take to interpet this. I shouldn't have to spell out anymore how ambiguous this is. The truth of the matter is most every lesson in the bible can be interpretted multiple ways such as this which makes me question who really possesses the word of god, is it the bible that is the word of god or is it the astounding fact that we can derive good ideas from it at all despite the ambiguities that proves the word of god is central to individuals themselves and the bible might even mislead that rational moral self. Of course I do not believe in god much less the christian one but even when I delve deeply into the beliefs of christians I find, and I'm sure you will too that ultimately how they interpret something is entirely their own and by definition the bible must be ambiguous then.

2. Some apparent inaccuracies of the Bible can be solved through what I call multiple options. When I say that, I mean that the authors of the Gospels had several options to choose from on an event, and they chose different ones. For example, Matthew 20:30a “And behold, there were two blind men sitting by the roadside . . .” Mark 10:46b says “Barimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside . . .” and Luke 10:35b says “a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging.” Matthew says there were two beggars, but Mark and Luke say it was only one. The answer is that Mark and Luke were only mentioning the more “important” or more vocal of two.

This is a convenient explanation and a justification but you cannot know the truth or validity of it. To put it simply, this is your interpretation. Regardless of your opinion it's still entirely plausible that two of the three were simply wrong. Which is to say you don't know that and you cannot know that.

3. Some apparent inaccuracies of the Bible can be solved through more precise translations. For example, Leviticus 11:6 says "and the hare, because it chews its cud but does not part in the hoof, is unclean to you." This seems like a scientific mistake on the account hare do not chew their cud. However, how "chewing its cud" is thought of in English as a group of animals such as goats, cows, sheep, etc. called ruminants. They swallow their food, partly digest it in a stomach, then regurgitate the partly digested food for more chewing, which then goes to a different stomach. But in Hebrew, the better translation would be close to "raising up what has been swallowed". Hare do that. They eat their food, swallows it, and it goes right through the hare. Then the hare makes a special kind of droppings which it actually eats again to actually absorb the nutrients. The Hebrew word for droppings (gehrah) refers to something defiled and worthless, while in this case obviously wasn't. Not to mention the ancient Hebrews were outdoor people by necessity, so I would expect them to know how a hare behaves.

However for a message to be unambiguous the translation and understanding of that must also not be ambiguous. Which is to say you've proven that the bible itself can be interpretted many ways, is explicitly contradictory and requires human intellectual investment to achieve a coherent meaning as opposed to the bible itself being the word of god, clear, concise and a center from which christian morality extends. I would assert the opposite, only because christians invariably do have morals can they interpret the bible to support or detract from those morals. Different people invariably have different morals which means the bible (due to ambiguity) will be interpretted differently by those people.

I've only covered the most vague areas here but your position that the bible is True is iffy, it might be true if you view it in a certain way. The position that the bible is inerrant is demonstrably false, there are explicit contradictions which require outside information to resolve. The bible is the word of god, god is perfect, how can a bible be less than perfect? (I'll give you a hint, it was written by men!). The idea that the bible doesn't have mistakes and is true and etc is ultimately ambiguous. Furthermore depending on your interpretation of certain stories there's almost certainly other stories which your methodology of interpretation breaks down which both prevent reliable interpretation and defies the claim of accuracy.

[pacifism]

Although it's a day late, I wanted to congratulate on your twienty-fifth birthday yesterday. And I need an apology of my own, since I didn't really reply to individual sentences, but the main points. On close examination some of the things you say in a single sentence are quite deep.

I'm sorry for a terribly late response, I never saw that you had posted and started.

Apology accepted. I really should have told you, but, the debate has started, so all is well now. Besides, I spent four days thinking, writing, and procrastinating this.

That's a pretty fair characterization of my position. My central position however is that the bible is ambiguous and that if any accuracy or truth was ever present in the bible it still requires human interpretation to understand.

It should be; I practically quoted you. But I was unaware of your central position.

BTW, what do you mean by the word of god?

It pretty much goes back to the Bible. II Timothy 3:12-17 [emphasis added] those five verses and setting is because I am a firm believer in reading in context, in which case Paul is sending his final instruction to Timothy, perhaps his top student, before his execution in 68 A.D.
“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”

Essentially, God had a hand in man’s hand when man wrote part of the Bible. This commits a bit of a fallacy of equivocation, since “hand” in the first part refers to an active role, while “hand” the second time refers to your actual hand.

This is a simple issue in the Bible not qualifying when or where. This builds into the idea that the bible is ambiguous. While you're more than welcome to interpret the bible this way, the fact that it can be interpreted in two different ways speaks to the fact that this is an inherently ambiguous story. Your method for choosing that meaning in this story may be correct, but at the same moment it may also be wrong. Neither of us can guess at the intent of the original authors. Now Ernst Sellin is responsible for this little piece of argument you're using. He had discovered that there were two Jerichos, and thus both statements could be simultaneously true. However I must question the solving of what the intent of the authors was some 1800 years after the event itself. Certainly they might've been referring to two different Jerichos. They might have been referring to the same Jericho. They might have been referring to two different blind men, or they may have been referring to two different events. This contradiction is not solved so easily and the only way for you to solve it is external to the bible itself. I.E. that is you require your own invention of reasoning and justification of the story.

Your position is the bible is naturally true, your selection of the answer is predictable but it does not mean the bible is less than ambiguous. When your friend and you both understand an inside joke and make statements that no one else around you understands that does not mean that someone can say, "OH I get it now they were laughing because of" because your intent in the inside joke is unknown hence it's an inside joke. Thus from the outside it doesn't matter if it has meaning specifically intended or not, it's ambiguous and there's no specific method for solving that issue without appealing to the author themselves.

The bible is ultimately rife with ambiguities just like this making achieving a reliable meaning from it even amongst Christians who roughly hold the same type of beliefs as you do impossible. At best certain guiding principles from tradition can be appealed to. That is, it has been explained this way before and that seemed nice so we'll stick with that. In fact many of the principles of the bible hold drastically different meanings when in context of the culture even. For example the quote those who live by the sword die by the sword is often taken as an incitement of war by Jesus as wrong. However in Hebrew culture at the time all men carried swords, it was in fact an expectation that they did so. So, rather than being an indictment of those who cause war, Jesus is quite literally telling all of Hebrew brethren that they should expect to die by the sword and fight for their principles. In a way this is also a good moral, but the ambiguity of the meaning inherently detracts from any attempt to create a moral from it. Should we fight for our ideals and die by the sword? Or should we cast away our swords and die otherwise? The bible unfortunately is entirely incapable of resolving this simple distinction.

Finding the Koine Greek for this passage (where Peter cuts off Malchus’ ear and Jesus rebukes Peter) has proved elusive. But it seems similar to Genesis 9:6, which say “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image”. But what is also important, I think, are the words “lives by” in “whoever lives by the sword, dies by the sword”. I do not know for certain, but those two words seem to express someone who is using his sword as a weapon quite often.

The Bible can be considered ambiguous in the sense that the Bible is sometimes inexact or unspecific on certain things. But ambiguity does not necessarily equate with inerrancy. The Bible is not written as a textbook, nor do the authors of the Bible intend to, much to some people’s aggravation. What we must do is (yes, use our human intellect. God gave me a brain, and so I will continue to use it.) to look at the context and other verses in the Bible, even from different books, sections (like Paul’s epistles, Gospels, Pentateuch, etc.), or testaments; as well as look into the original language it was written in (because only the originals have no copyists errors and are the inerrant word of God) and learn Near East ancient history. So with these four things (immediate context, other sections of the Bible, original language, and ancient history) you can determine the correct meaning fairly well, with knowledge of who would be right on different views. Naturally, there will be disputes, but these are fairly minor and unessential (like infant baptism), not essential stories or doctrines. This is my main, but by no means the single response to the ambiguity in the Bible that you center around.

When it’s all said and done, I find it quite possible to find the author(s)’s purpose, but for reasons such as time, how the person’s brain works, or willingness, most do not seek to go deeper than the ink on the paper. With proper setting, understanding the author, and the context, the meaning can usually be discovered. However, that is not say reading the Bible is easy. Some parts are very deep or difficult.

Let's look at the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham on mount Moriah. God commanded that Isaac be sacrificed to him by Abraham. Almost anyway you view this story seems pointlessly one sided and punitive. No one is able to really explain why a good god would ever command someone to sacrifice their son. Now the traditional explanation of this story is that god didn't really want Abraham to kill his son, he just was testing his faith. Since Abraham had resolved to kill his son, Abraham passed and god knew he was true. Now barring the amount of emotional torment a parent would undergo in sacrificing his son. There's another perspective entirely which is unavailable to the Christian bible but is rather common in Jewish communities. The idea that god would never have commanded such a thing.

Let’s go back to context. At this point in time in history, child sacrifice was actually extremely common. In fact in these times the surprising thing wasn't that god commanded a sacrifice, but rather that he should intercede to stop a sacrifice. This has been interpreted as god stating definitively I will never command a sacrifice or ask that of you. A step further even indicates that Abraham had misinterpreted god in the first place. In the end, it is not god interceding and stopping Abraham that prevents the sacrifice but Abraham’s own decision that the act is evil that stops it. After that the angel appears to confirm that Abraham was correct, god does not want human sacrifice. Thus the story transforms into this:

Abraham is spoken to by god, God wants Abraham to prove his loyalty, Abraham believes this means sacrificing his child. Abraham is caught between a rock and a hard place and does everything he can to avoid sacrificing his son. Ultimately Abraham is unable to go through with the act. God confirms that he had it right.

This is an entirely different morality than that of the blind faith in god morality that most Christian scholars take to interpret this. I shouldn't have to spell out anymore how ambiguous this is. The truth of the matter is most every lesson in the bible can be interpreted multiple ways such as this which makes me question who really possesses the word of god, is it the bible that is the word of god or is it the astounding fact that we can derive good ideas from it at all despite the ambiguities that proves the word of god is central to individuals themselves and the bible might even mislead that rational moral self. Of course I do not believe in god much less the Christian one but even when I delve deeply into the beliefs of Christians I find, and I'm sure you will too that ultimately how they interpret something is entirely their own and by definition the bible must be ambiguous then.

Simply put, I do not agree with this, nor do I completely understand how exactly you reached this view. I listen to the “traditional interpretation”, as you call it, and for good reason. It isn’t that God wouldn’t command Abraham to sacrifice his only son whom he loves (Genesis 22:2, 12, and 16) it is that God couldn’t command Abraham to kill Isaac. There were times previously where Abraham had to choose between his Lord and himself, and he often elected to take matters in his own hands (Like in Egypt and Gerar with Sarah, or that relationship with Hager) instead of his Lord’s plan. But now Abraham had over three days to stop and disobey (Genesis 22:4), but he did not. He proved himself when he failed the other times. Genesis 12:1-3, 13:14-17, and 15:1-21 show that Abraham was promised descendants who would live in the land, despite Abraham had no children, Lot (his nephew and would have been his heir) was gone, Sarah was getting old, Ishmael had to go (being illegitimate, and rude shown in Genesis 21:1-10), and it seemed Isaac would be killed. Isaac was practically the only realistic way of God’s covenant with Abraham being fulfilled. Abraham was promised descendants, and you need a child to have descendants. Ultimately, especially because Sarah dies afterward, God would have an even more intricate plan if Isaac were to die.

This is a convenient explanation and a justification but you cannot know the truth or validity of it. To put it simply, this is your interpretation. Regardless of your opinion it's still entirely plausible that two of the three were simply wrong. Which is to say you don't know that and you cannot know that.

I cannot speak with absolute certainty in a reasonably manner on this. It is the most plausible answer (with the possible exception of two very similar acts of healing entering and leaving Jericho.) I know of, so I chose it. Furthermore, it makes sense, which is among the reasons why I chose to listen to it.

However for a message to be unambiguous the translation and understanding of that must also not be ambiguous. Which is to say you've proven that the bible itself can be interpreted many ways, is explicitly contradictory and requires human intellectual investment to achieve a coherent meaning as opposed to the bible itself being the word of god, clear, concise and a center from which Christian morality extends. I would assert the opposite, only because Christians invariably do have morals can they interpret the bible to support or detract from those morals. Different people invariably have different morals which mean the bible (due to ambiguity) will be interpretted differently by those people.

I've only covered the most vague areas here but your position that the bible is True is iffy, it might be true if you view it in a certain way. The position that the bible is inerrant is demonstrably false, there are explicit contradictions which require outside information to resolve. The bible is the word of god, god is perfect, how can a bible be less than perfect? (I'll give you a hint, it was written by men!). The idea that the bible doesn't have mistakes and is true and etc is ultimately ambiguous. Furthermore depending on your interpretation of certain stories there's almost certainly other stories which your methodology of interpretation breaks down which both prevent reliable interpretation and defies the claim of accuracy.

Not flat-out saying something can be good. It makes you think and connect and search for the meaning and truth. Knowledge of any value has to be sought out. But still, the Bible says you cannot understand some parts of the Bible unless you listen to the Bible. For example,

First Corinthians 2:14-16 “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself judged by no one. For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

Second Peter 3:15-18 “And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do with other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.”

I think there are a few more, but I can’t remember them (or know them in the first place.).

[Elfdude]

Although it's a day late, I wanted to congratulate on your twienty-fifth birthday yesterday. And I need an apology of my own, since I didn't really reply to individual sentences, but the main points. On close examination some of the things you say in a single sentence are quite deep.

I'm glad you're taking time to digest them and thank you for the belated birthday wishes. Another year older it seems.

Apology accepted. I really should have told you, but, the debate has started, so all is well now. Besides, I spent four days thinking, writing, and procrastinating this.

No worries, it takes as long as it takes.

It should be; I practically quoted you. But I was unaware of your central position.

While what you quoted got at the gyst of the issue I think ambiguity is an important facet of how I prove that. I do not need to attack the original message as it is, I merely have to question our understanding of it and the entire house of cards falls down. It seems that you're starting to understand this but perhaps a few more points of contrast will help.

It pretty much goes back to the Bible. II Timothy 3:12-17 [emphasis added] those five verses and setting is because I am a firm believer in reading in context, in which case Paul is sending his final instruction to Timothy, perhaps his top student, before his execution in 68 A.D.

“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”

Essentially, God had a hand in man’s hand when man wrote part of the Bible. This commits a bit of a fallacy of equivocation, since “hand” in the first part refers to an active role, while “hand” the second time refers to your actual hand.

Glad you pointed out the fallacy of equivocation. So regardless if god 'breathed' the scripture out the issue is the quality of the recording per se. For example, if we listen to the greatest song ever in a recording studio but on the radio it doesn't sound half as great there's certain essences of the message (song) that have been lost. Now let's take that radio recording, and duplicate it, even more essences have been lost. The resolution for example possible on thousands of dollars of recording equipment is quite different than that on a AM/FM radio. Which doesn't mean that the duplicate recording is bad, it certain still is the same song, but only so far as the poorer recording equipment can define it. Have you ever watched a video recorded from a tv live? It's terrible. This is in essence the same issue with the scripture as the word of god and because of this we must supplant our own ideas of what the 'missing' music sounds like and this is why Thomas Aquinas stated that literal belief in the bible was tantamount to blasphemy or heresy.

In his eyes it did not matter how perfect a message god delivered us, invariably by our own lack of perfection we sullied the message upon hearing it, reading it, percieving it or duplicating it. Many such interpretations like a game of telephone have picked up their own significance throughout the years, significance which is not explicitly apparently in the bible alone i.e. the scripture. Thus this makes us question the ability of us to understand any text as legitimately the word of god as we possess no ability to assess perfection, to understand perfection or etc.

For a moment, let's entertain the idea that god was verbatim explaining the universe and everything to a bronze age monk. Is koine greek a perfect language? Is hebrew a perfect language? Neither is the case I think we can both agree. So tell me, even god wanted to indicate a perfect message how might he do so with nothing to work with but imperfect media? Sure he could've invented a new language that was perfect and every human today would understand everything else that everyone else said perfectly with no misinterpretation of intent or meaning. But he didn't.

Ultimately it'd be like trying to explain the theory of everything to a flea. Something is lost in translation inevitably.

Finding the Koine Greek for this passage (where Peter cuts off Malchus’ ear and Jesus rebukes Peter) has proved elusive. But it seems similar to Genesis 9:6, which say “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image”. But what is also important, I think, are the words “lives by” in “whoever lives by the sword, dies by the sword”. I do not know for certain, but those two words seem to express someone who is using his sword as a weapon quite often.

All hebrew men were expected to both carry and know how to use their sword.

Here's the original greek:

τότε λέγει αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, Ἀπόστρεψον τὴν μάχαιράν σου εἰς τὸν τόπον αὐτῆς; πάντες γὰρ οἱ λαβόντες μάχαιραν, ἐν μαχαίρῃ ἀπολοῦνται

Directly translated it reads (in order):

Then he says to him, - Jesus "Return the sword of you into the place of it all; indeed the ones having taken sword by sword will perish"

That's dramatically different than any message I've ever seen a pastor or priest use. Let's clarify some issues with conjugation:

And then Jesus says to him, "Return the sword of yours to where it belongs; it is true that the ones having taken the sword by sword will perish"

Now one can choose to say that Jesus is telling the person who just struck the high priest (i'm not sure if it clarifies who it was that chopped the ear off) not to go to battle or that all war is bad as it's commonly used. Alternatively Jesus could also be telling the person that the time for battle is not yet, considering everyone in jerusalem was expected to fight and jesus commanded them not to, it seems less like he was indicating peace and more like prudence. Alternatively he could simply be worried his friend will be imminently killed for his actions and seek to spare him, as in, HEY GUY THATS THE HIGH PRIEST YOUR INSULTING DAMNIT. There are further interpretations too as the dozens of bible versions I know each have their own personal translation, some which embellish it some which do not.

Again, trying to explain the universe to a flea things get lost in translation. Now to return to our recording studio metaphor, it's a bit suspicious that for whatever reason, the recording studio produced a version of a song which seems like it's a recording of a recording? That is exactly what the bible is. For example you do not seem to like the dead sea scrolls or the other 'lost' books of the bible. These were passages that may be direly important to understand the stories of other books. However the majority of these books were eliminated from cannon by people attempting to perpetuate the power of the orthodoxic and catholic viewpoints. Which means, if god had a hand in writing them then why were they removed? A casual perusal of the bible will reveal an over arching sentiment of listening to your masters, listening to your kings and in general establishing control from the top down. The entirety of christianity is designed to indicate the average man is all but worthless, with their masters slightly above them and their masters and so on until we reach god. While you may argue that truth as much as you wish that's not the central point.

If I say, Do not listen to your masters.

And you omit not, who's message are we looking at? Certainly I wrote them all originally, but because of your mistake (be it on purpose or by slip up) has changed the meaning of what I said massively. That's what happens with one word. What do you imagine happens if I omit an entire book? You can no longer state that the message "Listen to your masters" is my word than you can state that the bible is god's word.

The Bible can be considered ambiguous in the sense that the Bible is sometimes inexact or unspecific on certain things.

Amongst others, yes.

But ambiguity does not necessarily equate with inerrancy.

Ah, but it does prevent the assessment therein. Which means practically speaking, there's no possible way to confirm it's lack of error which in turn equivocates to no possible way to say it's any particular person's message. We can no more claim that the message is the work of god than we can state in general EVERYTHING indirectly at least is the work of god. They're both ideas predicated on complete faith in not the bible, not christianity, but rather YOUR personal interpretation of what that bible and Christianity means.

Furthermore lets look at YOUR interpretation of the word of god. This is a particularly faulty assumption you're making which is a fallacy of composition. I.E. if the bible is breathed by god or if the bible is inspired by god that's the same as god authoring it with his stamp of perfection. This is quite clearly not the case and the bible is fundamentally not perfect. For example, the majesty of our local cathedral was inspired by god. Does this mean the church is perfect? Hell no (or probably not anyways), it just means the architect was (again probably) full of himself.

Does the bible really say that is is inerrant and true? Frankly the bible only really states one thing as truth that I can detect, and that is that humans have the capacity to understand what is good and what is evil. To me, it's obvious that this truth supplants ALL OTHERS IN THE BIBLE. Whether jesus exists or not is moot, whether you tip your hat to him or not is moot. Because God is truth, and truth is good and humans can understand what is good therefore we as humans can understand good or evil and through them we can understand god and truth, but there is no guarantee that we can understand each other, the written text or anything like that. Thus the entirety of the bible begins to seem to be nothing more than a vestigial structure in christianity, the false idol of far too many people who believe it is truth.

The Bible is not written as a textbook, nor do the authors of the Bible intend to, much to some people’s aggravation.

Intent is another aspect of ambiguousness, this is also something you do not know and are in turn inventing, i.e. heresy and blasphemy. I wouldn't recommend this because as you say, the bible is truth which means the penalty for this is pretty harsh. Of course that opens a much larger can of worms but let's digest what we have right now.

What we must do is (yes, use our human intellect. God gave me a brain, and so I will continue to use it.) to look at the context and other verses in the Bible, even from different books, sections (like Paul’s epistles, Gospels, Pentateuch, etc.), or testaments; as well as look into the original language it was written in (because only the originals have no copyists errors and are the inerrant word of God) and learn Near East ancient history.

Ok, so you've widened your search. What about the countless passages removed from the books? What about the countless books destroyed or otherwise damaged? What if the only books still in the bible are equivilant to my sentence of Do what your masters tell you while the remaining books indicates the word not after do. This is something you must seriously consider if you really want to claim the bible as truth.

So with these four things (immediate context, other sections of the Bible, original language, and ancient history) you can determine the correct meaning fairly well, with knowledge of who would be right on different views.

Fairly is a far cry from perfection. Frankly, if we were to find the bible was perfect no one could dispute god existed. This in of itself is the greatest testimony that God at least the god painted by the christian bible does not exist.

Naturally, there will be disputes, but these are fairly minor and unessential

O.o Different and unessential... in an orthodoxy? A lot of people certainly died over minor and unessential differences I guess. No, an orthodoxy means dogma/message/interpretation is holy. Christianity is a dogma

(like infant baptism), not essential stories or doctrines. This is my main, but by no means the single response to the ambiguity in the Bible that you center around.

I would say whether or not your infants go to hell when they die is very important for a lot of christians so I'm not sure that's a great example. Let's talk about homosexual marriage? Let's talk about killing? Let's talk about when killing isn't allowed and when it is and make this really complicated. You seem to be deliberately picking rather unambiguous concepts here and not really attempting any difficult ones. It's really important when it comes to killing someone that you have your message right.

When it’s all said and done, I find it quite possible to find the author(s)’s purpose, but for reasons such as time, how the person’s brain works, or willingness, most do not seek to go deeper than the ink on the paper.

This means that going from the bible alone, the real message indicates a whole variety of different possible messages. You're essentially saying a black and white gradation is enough to understand the impacts of colors on a painting. This is clearly not the case. Furthermore you have no idea how complete that painting you're looking at is, or how original it is.

Simply put, I do not agree with this, nor do I completely understand how exactly you reached this view. I listen to the “traditional interpretation”, as you call it, and for good reason. It isn’t that God wouldn’t command Abraham to sacrifice his only son whom he loves (Genesis 22:2, 12, and 16) it is that God couldn’t command Abraham to kill Isaac

Now you're debating the original wording explicitly. Why can't god command him to kill Isaac? Now traditionally most christians believe that he did command Abraham to kill Isaac as a test of faith. Your interpretation is by no means the traditional interpretation of this story.

There were times previously where Abraham had to choose between his Lord and himself, and he often elected to take matters in his own hands (Like in Egypt and Gerar with Sarah, or that relationship with Hager) instead of his Lord’s plan. But now Abraham had over three days to stop and disobey (Genesis 22:4), but he did not. He proved himself when he failed the other times.

So who did he prove himself to if it was not god's command? Frankly by your interpretation it's difficult to see anything that he proved other than being gullible.

Genesis 12:1-3, 13:14-17, and 15:1-21 show that Abraham was promised descendants who would live in the land, despite Abraham had no children, Lot (his nephew and would have been his heir) was gone, Sarah was getting old, Ishmael had to go (being illegitimate, and rude shown in Genesis 21:1-10), and it seemed Isaac would be killed. Isaac was practically the only realistic way of God’s covenant with Abraham being fulfilled. Abraham was promised descendants, and you need a child to have descendants. Ultimately, especially because Sarah dies afterward, God would have an even more intricate plan if Isaac were to die.

A lot of this is just your own theory crafting about the story. I don't see your point.

I cannot speak with absolute certainty in a reasonably manner on this. It is the most plausible answer (with the possible exception of two very similar acts of healing entering and leaving Jericho.) I know of, so I chose it. Furthermore, it makes sense, which is among the reasons why I chose to listen to it.

Right, so your a blasphemer and a heretic. Got it. I must wonder if God does really exist if he's really going to go by his words in the bible upon judgement because sadly that means almost every christian today is a heretic and will burn. It makes more sense in my humble opinion that if you don't understand what the word of god means, don't pretend that you do and assert your own interpretation. I imagine god doesn't like people saying he said what he hasn't.

Not flat-out saying something can be good. It makes you think and connect and search for the meaning and truth. Knowledge of any value has to be sought out. But still, the Bible says you cannot understand some parts of the Bible unless you listen to the Bible.

I'm not debating that knowledge requires this, but you're mistaking wordly knowledge for divine knowledge. This is the very nature of the debate and you cannot cross that line. By making divine knowledge like worldly knowledge divinity becomes arbitrary.

For example,

First Corinthians 2:14-16 “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself judged by no one. For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

Second Peter 3:15-18 “And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do with other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.”

Yeah I don't see anywhere where it says the bible can't be understood without others. From my perspective you've selected two passages which don't support your view at all. While both indicate a desire to continue learning and critical thought regardless of your perceptions, neither seems to indicate that the way to do that is with scriptures.

[pacifism]

Glad you pointed out the fallacy of equivocation.

I wanted my summary to sound more poetic. Too bad that’s logical suicide.

So regardless if god 'breathed' the scripture out the issue is the quality of the recording per se. For example, if we listen to the greatest song ever in a recording studio but on the radio it doesn't sound half as great there's certain essences of the message (song) that have been lost. Now let's take that radio recording, and duplicate it, even more essences have been lost. The resolution for example possible on thousands of dollars of recording equipment is quite different than that on an AM/FM radio. Which doesn't mean that the duplicate recording is bad, it certain still is the same song, but only so far as the poorer recording equipment can define it. Have you ever watched a video recorded from a TV live? It's terrible. This is in essence the same issue with the scripture as the word of god and because of this we must supplant our own ideas of what the 'missing' music sounds like and this is why Thomas Aquinas stated that literal belief in the bible was tantamount to blasphemy or heresy.

In his eyes it did not matter how perfect a message god delivered us, invariably by our own lack of perfection we sullied the message upon hearing it, reading it, perceiving it or duplicating it. Many such interpretations like a game of telephone have picked up their own significance throughout the years, significance which is not explicitly apparently in the bible alone i.e. the scripture. Thus this makes us question the ability of us to understand any text as legitimately the word of god as we possess no ability to assess perfection, to understand perfection or etc.

For a moment, let's entertain the idea that god was verbatim explaining the universe and everything to a bronze age monk. Is Koine Greek a perfect language? Is Hebrew a perfect language? Neither is the case I think we can both agree. So tell me, even god wanted to indicate a perfect message how might he do so with nothing to work with but imperfect media? Sure he could've invented a new language that was perfect and every human today would understand everything else that everyone else said perfectly with no misinterpretation of intent or meaning. But he didn't.

Of course you cannot consider one language more perfect than another. But do you suppose that only the words have to be perfect, or the entire language? Do you suppose that the Bible can be perfect with things in it we do not understand, or is it God’s fault we are finite beings and cannot understand some things in our depraved state? But God just might have invented a perfect language, until man decided to build a city together and, in their arrogance, construct a tower that would reach the heavens to show Man’s, not God’s, glory and achievement. I’m talking about the Tower of Babel. There could very well have been a perfect language before then.

Thomas Aquinas stated that literal belief in the bible was tantamount to blasphemy or heresy.

Since Thomas Aquinas was a thirteenth century Dominican Monk who helped Christian apologetics (and business) quite a bit and spoke out against the Roman Catholic Church, I will require a source or a direct quote to know this for certain.

Ultimately it'd be like trying to explain the theory of everything to a flea. Something is lost in translation inevitably.

Mind-blowing and inerrancy are not equivalent.

That's dramatically different than any message I've ever seen a pastor or priest use. Let's clarify some issues with conjugation:

And then Jesus says to him, "Return the sword of yours to where it belongs; it is true that the ones having taken the sword by sword will perish"

Now one can choose to say that Jesus is telling the person who just struck the high priest (I'm not sure if it clarifies who it was that chopped the ear off) not to go to battle or that all war is bad as it's commonly used. Alternatively Jesus could also be telling the person that the time for battle is not yet, considering everyone in Jerusalem was expected to fight and Jesus commanded them not to, it seems less like he was indicating peace and more like prudence. Alternatively he could simply be worried his friend will be imminently killed for his actions and seek to spare him, as in, HEY GUY THATS THE HIGH PRIEST YOUR INSULTING DAMNIT. There are further interpretations too as the dozens of bible versions I know each have their own personal translation, some which embellish it some which do not.

These swords were more like double-edged, long daggers than true swords, which was not uncommon for Galilean fisherman to carry. These particular short sword/knives had a variety of uses, more often than not for violence (like a modern day pocketknife; the blade alone can be used as a screwdriver, wedge, dinner fork, branch trimmer, whittling tool, cheese knife, etc.). But let’s look at the context and the fact there can be multiple correct meanings that can be drawn from a statement.

Firstly, Peter elected to attempt to combat a large force of men with clubs and (probably actual) swords, as well as a detachment of Roman soldiers (the best soldiers in the world at the time), with courage, hope, and ignoring the fact they only had two short sword/knives in their group of thirteen, most of them still shaking off sleepy drowsiness. Either way, Jesus did not seem to consider the act to be reasonably built on self-defense. We also know that attempting to spread the word of Christ through earthly warfare has only harmed the Christian cause. So the verse is not only a call for prudence (which seems to be in such short supply these days) as well as to not being violent.

Now one can choose to say that Jesus is telling the person who just struck the high priest (I'm not sure if it clarifies who it was that chopped the ear off)

I believe John’s gospel says it was Simon Peter, and all four gospels say the high priest’s servant-slave’s ear was cut off.

Here's the original Greek: . . . αὐτῆς; πάντες . . .

I have actually just begun studying Koine (common) Greek at home yesterday ago. In Koine Greek, the semicolon actually translates to a question mark. A period above the base line translates to a semicolon.

Again, trying to explain the universe to a flea things get lost in translation. Now to return to our recording studio metaphor, it's a bit suspicious that for whatever reason, the recording studio produced a version of a song which seems like it's a recording of a recording? That is exactly what the bible is. For example you do not seem to like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the other 'lost' books of the bible. These were passages that may be direly important to understand the stories of other books. However the majority of these books were eliminated from canon by people attempting to perpetuate the power of the Orthodoxic and catholic viewpoints. Which means, if god had a hand in writing them then why were they removed? A casual perusal of the bible will reveal an over arching sentiment of listening to your masters, listening to your kings and in general establishing control from the top down. The entirety of Christianity is designed to indicate the average man is all but worthless, with their masters slightly above them and their masters and so on until we reach god. While you may argue that truth as much as you wish that's not the central point.

If I say, do not listen to your masters.

And you omit not, who's message are we looking at? Certainly I wrote them all originally, but because of your mistake (be it on purpose or by slip up) has changed the meaning of what I said massively. That's what happens with one word. What do you imagine happens if I omit an entire book? You can no longer state that the message "Listen to your masters" is my word than you can state that the bible is god's word.

Are you trying to pull the copyist’s errors accumulation trick, the church tampered the Bible trick, or both? I will humor both.

For the former, we have enough manuscripts for the Old and New Testaments to be able to cross-examine for copyist’s errors. So if we have even five copies of “do not listen to your masters.” Like this;

Do __ listen to your masters.

Don’t listen to your masters.

Do not listen to your _______.

Do not listen to your masters.

Ignore your authorities.

We can still construct what you said. Now imagine that we have not five, but thousands of copies of what you have said.

I will go even a step further. Estimates of variants in the Greek New Testament manuscripts vary from 200,000 to 400,000 with 138,162 words in the published Greek New Testament. If a single fourteenth century manuscripts misspells a word, that is one variant. If a thousand manuscripts write “Lord” and the others write “Jesus”, that is one variant. The most common are misspelling/spelling variants (a common one is “John” vs. “Johnn”, with disregard they mean the same.), or indefinite articles (the moveable nu rule of Greek at the end of the word where the next word starts with a vowel, I think. The English equivalent is the articles “a” vs. “an”.). 70%-80% of all textual variants are like this, with literally no impact on the English version. Next are obvious blunders. There is a manuscript in the Smithsonian Institution where the scribe wrote “and” (kai) instead of “Lord” (kurios). Then there are synonyms (does John 4:3 say “When Jesus knew” or “When the Lord knew”?? Should the real New Testament say “Mary” or “the Mary”?) that mean nothing. Also, Greek is a highly inflected language, where the order of words isn’t as important than for English (as you shown about the live by the sword, die by the sword in the original Greek), but these are counted as variants. About 1% of variants are meaningful, and none contradict biblical doctrines. It is actually fewer “variants” than expected at closer scrutiny, granted there are nearly 6,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, as well as 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 10,000 minimum of Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, and other manuscripts, and we can construct the entire New Testament with manuscripts from the second and third century manuscripts and writings of the Apostolic Fathers. The average ancient Greek author, by comparison, will have about 20 manuscripts roughly a thousand years after the originals.

The latter is only slightly more difficult to solve than the former. All the extra-biblical texts (i.e. the Gnostic gospels and the Apocrypha) are not credible to be biblical material. They are not written by prophets (Apocrypha) or apostles (Gnostic gospels), the Apocrypha was written in the time where there were no prophets of God and the Gnostic gospels were written too late to be more historically valid than the actual gospels. Those lost books are really only reflecting what early Christian cultists believed. These books were written in the late second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, even twentieth century. One earlier Gnostic gospel quotes from half the books of the New Testament with an increased grammatical development, showing that that “gospel” was written after the New Testament. They contain questionable doctrines we do not see Jesus or apostles saying in earlier writings. No apostolic father believed those were Scripture. By around the late second century twenty-five of the twenty-seven books (James and Revelation took a little longer) of the New Testament were nearly universally recognized as God’s word by Christians. Those other books of the Bible disqualified themselves since they were not able to fit the requirements of being able to be considered Scriptures; 1) apostolic origin/authority, 2) containing doctrines Jesus and the apostles taught, and 3) near universal recognition from the scattered church. The Church didn’t just plug these in and see what came up. Most of the Church seemed to know what was Holy Scriptures and what wasn’t, it was like a sixth sense. Maybe that’s because it was Holy Scriptures, it was so easy of them to distinguish it. We knew what was Man’s work and what was God’s work (2 Peter 1:20-21).

Your discernment is worse than I thought if you think the New Testament has been error-ridden over the years and the Church tampered with what is and isn’t God’s Word. The canon is the parent of the Church, not the canon is the child of the Church.

you do not seem to like the Dead Sea Scrolls

I didn't know I don't like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Ah, but it does prevent the assessment therein. Which means practically speaking, there's no possible way to confirm its lack of error which in turn equivocates to no possible way to say it's any particular person's message. We can no more claim that the message is the work of god than we can state in general EVERYTHING indirectly at least is the work of god.

Of course it is more difficult to prove the Bible infallible and inerrant in and of its original manuscripts than to prove the Bible isn’t. The former requires an answer to every reasonable objection, but the latter only requires one unanswerable point.

They're both ideas predicated on complete faith in not the bible, not Christianity, but rather YOUR personal interpretation of what that bible and Christianity means.

Alright, I’m biased. Who isn’t? Is Christianity supposed to be this World of Forms-like aspiration no one can achieve?

Furthermore let’s look at YOUR interpretation of the word of god. This is a particularly faulty assumption you're making which is a fallacy of composition. I.E. if the bible is breathed by god or if the bible is inspired by god that's the same as god authoring it with his stamp of perfection. This is quite clearly not the case and the bible is fundamentally not perfect. For example, the majesty of our local cathedral was inspired by god. Does this mean the church is perfect? Hell no (or probably not anyways), it just means the architect was (again probably) full of himself.

The cathedral was inspired by God, Scriptures were breathed-out by God (2 Timothy 3:16).

Does the bible really say that is inerrant and true? Frankly the bible only really states one thing as truth that I can detect, and that is that humans have the capacity to understand what is good and what is evil. To me, it's obvious that this truth supplants ALL OTHERS IN THE BIBLE. Whether Jesus exists or not is moot, whether you tip your hat to him or not is moot. Because God is truth, and truth is good and humans can understand what is good therefore we as humans can understand good or evil and through them we can understand god and truth, but there is no guarantee that we can understand each other, the written text or anything like that. Thus the entirety of the bible begins to seem to be nothing more than a vestigial structure in Christianity, the false idol of far too many people who believe it is truth.

John 17:17 says “sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth”. Word, in the Greek, is logos, which Stoics at the time used to refer to an entity we would call God. John used logos especially in his first chapter of his gospel reference to (“In the beginning was the word. The word was with God, and the word was god. He was with God in the beginning. . . . and the word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us.” John 1:1-2, 14).

Intent is another aspect of ambiguousness, this is also something you do not know and are in turn inventing, i.e. heresy and blasphemy. I wouldn't recommend this because as you say, the bible is truth which means the penalty for this is pretty harsh. Of course that opens a much larger can of worms but let's digest what we have right now.

You do know most books of the New Testament say who the book is being written to and why, right? Knowing when, where, and to whom the book is written to can help determine the why of the passages in the book. That, knowledge of what was happening at the time, and reading the context, you can determine the author's purpose.

Fairly is a far cry from perfection. Frankly, if we were to find the bible was perfect no one could dispute god existed. This in of itself is the greatest testimony that God at least the god painted by the Christian bible does not exist.

Let’s apply that to science. Only the universally recognized scientific facts are to be accepted. No Hypothesizes, Ideas, Theories, even some Laws. That would be a great hindrance to mankind. This argument hinges on if we were to find the Bible perfect. Do you think everyone will find the Bible perfect? Hint: only some Christians think the Bible is perfect.

O.o Different and unessential... in an orthodoxy? A lot of people certainly died over minor and unessential differences I guess. No, an orthodoxy means dogma/message/interpretation is holy. Christianity is a dogma

Certainly, but I meant if it was impactful on your immortal soul. But I guess that’s what I get for, strictly speaking, being non-denominational.

I would say whether or not your infants go to hell when they die is very important for a lot of Christians so I'm not sure that's a great example.

Infants don’t go to hell. I remember finding a verse/verses that show this, but I can’t remember specifics.

Let's talk about homosexual marriage?

The Bible strictly condemns homosexual marriages and homosexuality entirely.

Let's talk about killing? Let's talk about when killing isn't allowed and when it is and make this really complicated. You seem to be deliberately picking rather unambiguous concepts here and not really attempting any difficult ones. It's really important when it comes to killing someone that you have your message right.

Of course you need to make sure. Murder is wrong. Manslaughter is still considered wrong. The Bible tells us we are made in God’s image, we are called to respect that. My advice is not to kill people in the first place without due process of the law. Or are you talking about self-defense? Deuteronomy said to kill murderers.

This means that going from the bible alone, the real message indicates a whole variety of different possible messages. You're essentially saying a black and white gradation is enough to understand the impacts of colors on a painting. This is clearly not the case. Furthermore you have no idea how complete that painting you're looking at is, or how original it is.

I am saying that people do that, and it is wrong of them to do so. Those people need to look deeper than the words before them.

So who did he prove himself to if it was not god's command? Frankly by your interpretation it's difficult to see anything that he proved other than being gullible.

Not gullible, loyal.

A lot of this is just your own theory crafting about the story. I don't see your point.

My point was that Abraham was promised descendants and was running out of heirs to fulfill the promise. Besides, is it impossible of God to raise Isaac from the dead if Isaac was killed? I think not. Hebrews 11:17-19 says so.

Right, so you’re a blasphemer and a heretic. Got it. I must wonder if God does really exist if he's really going to go by his words in the bible upon judgment because sadly that means almost every Christian today is a heretic and will burn. It makes more sense in my humble opinion that if you don't understand what the word of god means, don't pretend that you do and assert your own interpretation. I imagine god doesn't like people saying he said what he hasn't.

So if I knew a guy who keeps telling me the Bible is ambiguous, that’s his interpretation. And if this guy had an outright rejection of the Bible, should that be morally better than trying to seek the meaning? But yes, for especially obscure passages, many Christians and I do not assert their interpretation. The rule of the thumb is “the main things are the plain things. The plain things are the main things.” Important things are also spoken of in different books (multiple times in the Bible). I remember asking my dad why God commanded something, and he didn’t answer because the Bible never said why.

Yeah I don't see anywhere where it says the bible can't be understood without others. From my perspective you've selected two passages which don't support your view at all. While both indicate a desire to continue learning and critical thought regardless of your perceptions, neither seems to indicate that the way to do that is with scriptures

Exactly. You couldn’t understand because you are a natural person without the Holy Spirit (First Corinthians 2). But let me ask you, is Romans 3:23 ambiguous? Is Romans 6:23 ambiguous?

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” –Romans 6:23


Oh, yeah, quick thought on a sentence of your first reply:

No one is able to really explain why a good god would ever command someone to sacrifice their son.

Let’s talk about Jesus, God’s Son whom God sent to Earth to be killed as a sacrifice for our sins . . . .

[Elfdude]

I wanted my summary to sound more poetic. Too bad that’s logical suicide.

No worries.

Of course you cannot consider one language more perfect than another. But do you suppose that only the words have to be perfect, or the entire language?

The message must be conveyed with out error. To do so the message must not deviate, must not be ambiguous and must be 'true'. I've attacked the first two parts of this but you don't seem to understand why this is an issue, or you're unwilling to admit it is.

Do you suppose that the Bible can be perfect with things in it we do not understand, or is it God’s fault we are finite beings and cannot understand some things in our depraved state?

That's a silly argument, we can't understand our language because we're depraved. Of course we're not talking about our failures here but god's. You don't seem to have a good grasp of what this whole infinite power knowledge and goodness thing implicates. Regardless of our failures, anything which is composed of by or at the command of god is perfect because god is perfect, not only in a way that allows him to correct for any errors we might have but also allows him more direct routes as well. You've shifted god from being good, all knowing and powerful to malevolent or capricious and perhaps a little bit lazy or you've severely truncated his power and or knowledge.

But God just might have invented a perfect language, until man decided to build a city together and, in their arrogance, construct a tower that would reach the heavens to show Man’s, not God’s, glory and achievement. I’m talking about the Tower of Babel. There could very well have been a perfect language before then.

So there was a perfect language before then, god ****ed it up because he enjoys the irony of telling man he's on his own and simultaneously punishing him for acting as such? This makes even less sense and far cry from a counter point you've opened another can of worms for which your bible cannot account for. After the tower of babel all language fragmented and man could no longer understand another. This is a pretty interesting piece, in fact assuming that man has difficulties understanding other's messages and intent is a large reason for the issues in the bible in the first place. On the other hand were the bible to still be understood that would be very strong evidence to the divinity and accuracy of its message.

Since Thomas Aquinas was a thirteenth century Dominican Monk who helped Christian apologetics (and business) quite a bit and spoke out against the Roman Catholic Church, I will require a source or a direct quote to know this for certain.

The quote was with regards to transsubstantiation and the idea that it occurred literally. Thomas took the stance that any lowly man who was so conceited as to believe he understood the bible perfectly and without err should be rightfully deemed a heretic. He used a simple analogy of different quotes in the bible to prove this, such as jesus stating I am the door, I am the vine etc to show that the bible was filled with metaphor and who knew which parts were metaphor or not was only possessed by god and perhaps those in paradise.

Saint Augustine had a similar opinion on the bible believing that it was written inspired by god but given voice imperfectly by man necessitating the regular change and update of the bible. One of his infamous quotes is that the bible has errors in it and no one is denying that, but how stupid must Christianity sound to those of us who know these obvious falsehoods, how stupid must it make Christianity seem when Charlestons and blasphemers use the words of the scriptures to validate the false. He had a very low opinion of literal translation. However he did hold one thing in truth which was that God's true bible is the world around us. Man's forgery is just that, a forgery.

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

Mind-blowing and inerrancy are not equivalent.

Not sure how this is relevant or even begins to respond to the point made.

These swords were more like double-edged, long daggers than true swords, which was not uncommon for Galilean fisherman to carry.

They were short swords similar to the roman gladius but slightly smaller.

These particular short sword/knives had a variety of uses, more often than not for violence (like a modern day pocketknife; the blade alone can be used as a screwdriver, wedge, dinner fork, branch trimmer, whittling tool, cheese knife, etc.). But let’s look at the context and the fact there can be multiple correct meanings that can be drawn from a statement.

You can't demonstrate that there are any correct meanings from the bible. You are not god for one. You are man for two, and the bible is about 2,000 years old.

Firstly, Peter elected to attempt to combat a large force of men with clubs and (probably actual) swords, as well as a detachment of Roman soldiers (the best soldiers in the world at the time), with courage, hope, and ignoring the fact they only had two short sword/knives in their group of thirteen, most of them still shaking off sleepy drowsiness.

Right...

Either way, Jesus did not seem to consider the act to be reasonably built on self-defense. We also know that attempting to spread the word of Christ through earthly warfare has only harmed the Christian cause. So the verse is not only a call for prudence (which seems to be in such short supply these days) as well as to not being violent.

This is your interpretation of the verse. Nothing more. I'm not sure how else to more plainly state that.

I believe John’s gospel says it was Simon Peter, and all four gospels say the high priest’s servant-slave’s ear was cut off.

Right...

I have actually just begun studying Koine (common) Greek at home yesterday ago. In Koine Greek, the semicolon actually translates to a question mark. A period above the base line translates to a semicolon.

Right?

Are you trying to pull the copyist’s errors accumulation trick, the church tampered the Bible trick, or both? I will humor both.

Copyist errors do exist in every edition of the bible. There exists no true 'original' bible to work off of, at least not one that anyone can agree upon. The church did tamper with the bible. The fact that several books are missing are testament to this very fact.

For the former, we have enough manuscripts for the Old and New Testaments to be able to cross-examine for copyist’s errors. So if we have even five copies of “do not listen to your masters.” Like this;

Do __ listen to your masters.

Don’t listen to your masters.

Do not listen to your _______.

Do not listen to your masters.

Ignore your authorities.

This is a gross oversimplification and not true. Furthermore you have no idea if the interpretation is due to cohort effects, time of translation effects, sociology etc which makes it damn hard to decide whether any are valid.

We can still construct what you said. Now imagine that we have not five, but thousands of copies of what you have said.

We do not. Ancient bibles are extraordinarily rare. In fact the original manuscripts called autographs are not owned by any organization or known to exist in any library. You're working off at best a 300 year after the fact conglomeration put together by the catholic church.

Time for a history lesson.

The original book of the old testament is popularly attributed to Moses (this is due to Deuteronomy) who stored the original manuscripts in the arc of the convenant. This lasted for several hundred years with many additions and revisions and etcs. We hold almost zero record of this period of time. With the fall of israel and the enslavement of their people the books were scattered and many were lost entirely. After the return from the bablyonian overseers the israeli tribes gathered or reauthored the stories which were mostly orally preserved.

Towards 0 BCE 70 jewish scholars re translated the writings into koine greek. Called the 70 or the septuagint. The oldest fragments of these writings which survive today are from 1st and 2nd century BCE which is not the origination date of 6-700 or so BCE. These are not originals.

In the 1947 the dead sea scrolls were unearthed (which is funny that you reject them as cannon), the dead sea scrolls contain the most complete iteration of the original jewish bible. It does show that in many ways the translation has maintained similarities which is great but there are definitive differences and clear alterations by the future christian church. Anyways, I have far less issue with Judaism than Christianity.

Now as far as the writing of the new testament is concerned this is quite a bit more problematic to your central position. Of the four books and twenty three other 'texts' that were cannonized none is found in their original forms. Some claim the bible was accepted as it is by 397 AD but this is debatable. The earliest NT bible was composed by a guy we know as Marcion. This man was a docetist which essentially means he believed that the material world was evil and the spiritual existence beyond the essence of good, however because of this Marcion removed EVERY passage attesting to both jesus's divinity and humanity. The next incarnation of the bible was the Muratorian bible which included the four gospels, acts, pauls 1 2 and 3 john jude and the revelation. This was in 170 AD.

The final incarnation of the bible (what we use today) as far as books was finalized in 397 at the council of carthage. However continued revision and alteration of the message occurred for at least another two hundred years before alterations of the biblical cannon itself became taboo. However we do know of many other books quoted at the time that were not included, we know of many verses which are missing, we know of many stories which have been altered. The numbers of omitted words in the messages can only be guessed at and overall the stories while preserving the same impression have changed drastically as society has. So either god had a lot more prophets than either of us knows about or a lot of uninspired christians with their own opinions decided to leave their mark on the future of the religion.

I will go even a step further. Estimates of variants in the Greek New Testament manuscripts vary from 200,000 to 400,000 with 138,162 words in the published Greek New Testament. If a single fourteenth century manuscripts misspells a word, that is one variant. If a thousand manuscripts write “Lord” and the others write “Jesus”, that is one variant. The most common are misspelling/spelling variants (a common one is “John” vs. “Johnn”, with disregard they mean the same.), or indefinite articles (the moveable nu rule of Greek at the end of the word where the next word starts with a vowel, I think. The English equivalent is the articles “a” vs. “an”.). 70%-80% of all textual variants are like this, with literally no impact on the English version.

Variation is only part of the issue however.

Next are obvious blunders. There is a manuscript in the Smithsonian Institution where the scribe wrote “and” (kai) instead of “Lord” (kurios). Then there are synonyms (does John 4:3 say “When Jesus knew” or “When the Lord knew”?? Should the real New Testament say “Mary” or “the Mary”?) that mean nothing.

So you're admitting that there are errors in translation and you can't identify which are which because you can't compare to an original text which doesn't exist.

Also, Greek is a highly inflected language, where the order of words isn’t as important than for English (as you shown about the live by the sword, die by the sword in the original Greek), but these are counted as variants.

Inflection, tone and body language is not communicated via text. This is a large issue. In english we indicate the degrees of meaning by adding descriptors and etc to the language, greek and hebrew did not do this. In fact a huge amount of the meaning was dependent on how you spoke something. This is why I like the Islamic hadiths, they maintain records on every interpretation of every verse in the Koran historically as best they can. i.e. in islam there's essentially two bibles, the koran and the hadith, without the hadith the koran is meaningless.

About 1% of variants are meaningful, and none contradict biblical doctrines.

Explain contradict. There's several forms of consistency we're looking at here:

1. Cannonical consistency - did the cannon remain the same - Asnwer is no, cannon changed drastically during Israeli exile and christian formation. Since the bible itself does not speak to which parts are real cannon or not all christians are forced to rely upon extra biblical authorities to validate the cannon. For a comparison:

Judaism - 24 books
Samaritanism - 5 books
Catholicism - 73 books
Protestant - 66 books
Eastern Ortho - 78 books
Ethiopian Ortho - Variable 81+/-

2. Manuscriptional consistency - The manuscripts as you said are pretty much the same, by manuscript consistency we mean the consistency of the books within the cannon to each other. For example there's an obvious one such as in the First Epistle of John bears witness as the explicit (written) validation of the trinity. This however does not appear in any manuscript before the tenth century. Another major difference is the difference between the septuagint and masoretic old testaments such as the battle of david and goliath. The masoretic appears to be the more original text but the septuagint avoids many contradictions and simplifies the story immensely which is preferred by most today despite clearly being different.

3. Narritive consistency - Most of the issue with narrative consistency uses stories within the bible itself to show issues within the biblical writings. Christian apologetics tend to get lost in these trying to defend them or come up with ways to interpret them in a way that isn't contradictory. Most of these issues are fairly minor, but it's important to remember that the christian apologetic's interpretation is not an original, but yet another translation.

The more important contradictions are when a contradiction changes an enormous subset of interpretations, the history of ancient israel is contradictory in many places both narratively and manuscriptionally, why God allows suffering for example is contradicted many times, and why jesus' sacrifice was necessary is also contradictory. If you want to get into these more I would suggest reading the book: Jesus, Interrupted Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible. This one is much better at actually going through legitimate contradictions within the narrative itself as opposed to poor websites like evilbible.com.

4. Theological Contradictions - This is contradictions within the inherent logic within the bible. Christian theologians tend to agree that the NT has a single focus, and that is on christ as salvation of man. However the OT has dozens of theological interpretations. This is particularly cumbersome to a book that's supposed to be the word of god on the subjects of reality, spirituality and morality. Especially when many such theologies are mutually exclusive. In fact this has become one of the central issues facing christian theologians, how to rectify the many different perspectives with the same god. The nature of god, the nature of sin, the mosaic laws, predestination, perspective on women, hell and even prophecies all contradict in several different ways. I'd recommend this article: The Task of Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament Theology - Between Judaism and Christianity

Unfortunately most of your discussion on this subject seems utterly irrelevant to this.

It is actually fewer “variants” than expected at closer scrutiny, granted there are nearly 6,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, as well as 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 10,000 minimum of Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, and other manuscripts, and we can construct the entire New Testament with manuscripts from the second and third century manuscripts and writings of the Apostolic Fathers. The average ancient Greek author, by comparison, will have about 20 manuscripts roughly a thousand years after the originals.

Not sure what relevance this has.

The latter is only slightly more difficult to solve than the former. All the extra-biblical texts (i.e. the Gnostic gospels and the Apocrypha) are not credible to be biblical material.

Why?

They are not written by prophets (Apocrypha) or apostles (Gnostic gospels), the Apocrypha was written in the time where there were no prophets of God and the Gnostic gospels were written too late to be more historically valid than the actual gospels.

Uh, Apocrypha is a catch all term for any book a particular denomination does not consider cannonical. The Apocrypha passages from the Kings James Bible for example has existed in the bible as cannon for some 2,000 years. As far as the apostles or the prophets, there's evidence the number of apostles has changed. For example there's paul the 'apostle', barnabus in acts is referred to as an apostle, junia is referred to an apostle (though her name was masculinized due to sexism), there's silas, timothy and appollos. There's of course the idea of Mary as an apostle as well or an apostle to the apostle or equal to the apostle as well etc etc. The variance on this is vast. As to why you consider the books not cannon, I cannot say, they have equal right by any account to be the bible as the books you accept.

Those lost books are really only reflecting what early Christian cultists believed.

You're different how? Besides engaging in the cult of Christianity at a later date. Why do you get to choose which books are cannon?

These books were written in the late second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, even twentieth century.

You'll have to be specific. The Apocrypha of the KJB have existed for quite some time and were only removed from the bible 100 years ago.

One earlier Gnostic gospel quotes from half the books of the New Testament with an increased grammatical development, showing that that “gospel” was written after the New Testament. They contain questionable doctrines we do not see Jesus or apostles saying in earlier writings.

You'll have to be specific.

No apostolic father believed those were Scripture.

But your understanding of the apostles is based on the cannon of the bible itself, which is based on the apostles, which is based on teh cannon which is ugh circular logic.

By around the late second century twenty-five of the twenty-seven books (James and Revelation took a little longer) of the New Testament were nearly universally recognized as God’s word by Christians.

Amongst others yes. This the cannon consistency I talked about earlier, this does not affect the narative consistency or manuscript consistency nor does it validate why the cannon is how it is other than, because they decided it should be.

Those other books of the Bible disqualified themselves since they were not able to fit the requirements of being able to be considered Scriptures; 1) apostolic origin/authority

Several books removed are authored by recognized apostles both in the bible itself and by other denominations. This indicates alteration of the cannon. Every person above, I listed as an 'additional' apostle is referred to in the bible as an apostle.

2) containing doctrines Jesus and the apostles taught

You only know these doctrines are what jesus taught because someone decided it was cannon. If you had been brought up to see the other books as valid you would. You have not created a definitive or even a visible non ambiguous reason why these books aren't cannon.

3) near universal recognition from the scattered church

Appeal to popularity doesn't state anything about their legitimacy. Divinity and dogma is not a democracy last I checked.

The Church didn’t just plug these in and see what came up.

Yeah, they kind of did.

Most of the Church seemed to know what was Holy Scriptures and what wasn’t, it was like a sixth sense.

I'm sorry but no. I'm going to cut the rest of the response short. I lost a large body of my post with a reset and I don't have the patience to go through the numerous contradictions and how they apply.

Maybe that’s because it was Holy Scriptures, it was so easy of them to distinguish it. We knew what was Man’s work and what was God’s work (2 Peter 1:20-21).

This is another contradictory passage which contradicts with explicit passages that we can't tell the difference. I lost the response but leviticus is the only passage I'm aware on homosexuality which means the bible is not against it in the least, in fact paul says himself that to be beholden to the law is to be victim of sin.

Exactly. You couldn’t understand because you are a natural person without the Holy Spirit (First Corinthians 2). But let me ask you, is Romans 3:23 ambiguous? Is Romans 6:23 ambiguous?

You have lost this debate.

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” –Romans 6:23

Yes. They are both ambiguous. Who is all in the first? This is a major debate amongst christians. Romans 6:23 is also ambiguous as it seems to be talking about the afterlife but in very less than explicit terms leaving the entire concept hard to interpret.

Oh, yeah, quick thought on a sentence of your first reply:

Let’s talk about Jesus, God’s Son whom God sent to Earth to be killed as a sacrifice for our sins . . . .

I have no idea what this has to do with or what it means.

I'm sad I lost as much of my post as I did, the save feature didn't keep up with my typing I guess. Ohwell.

I think this debate is pretty much done, you've already admitted to my central points and as such cannot maintain your central one intellectually. The bible is quite clearly in error in many places, it's quite clearly contradictory in many places, it's quite clearly cannonically contradictory, it's narrative is incoherent, it's manuscript has been altered and it's theology is at odds with itself. It doesn't seem you have a very good grasp of the history of the bible itself and I would highly encourage you to review that.

All in all though I have to appreciate the fact you tried and seemed pleasant throughout this exchange. If you can offer some real points for me to dig into I will. Otherwise, good luck and I hope you've begun to see some of the huge variances.

[PunitorMaximus]

In my opinion the bible is nothing more but a collection of myths, legends and folklore stories of an ancient nomadic semi-desert tribe.
It's pretty accurate to compare them to religious codexes of other cultures like the egyptians, hittites, myceaneans, phoenicians, mesopotamians, mesoamerican civilizations and so forth.
nothing that is written in the bible can reasonably considered to be true without comparison to other scripts of neighbouring civilizations.
If an event, such as Noah's Flood is mentioned in other texts of other cultures in the same era (f.e. the epic of gilgamesh mentions a flood) we can start to assume that there really was a big flood in the early bronze age.
Thus making such excessive discussions senseless to me.
The bible is just as perfect as the indian vedas, scandinavian myths or the aztec codexes. That means not at all.

No offense guys, you can belive what you want, just wanted to state my (and the current scientific) opionion on this. Cheers

PS: Even if you take the Bible literally it's wrong: Alma f.e. is aramaic and means "young woman" AND "virgin".
Whoever translated the Aramaic legends about Jesus' birth into ancient greek language made a HUGE mistake