Dogface
And which church would that be?
Polycarp:
You left out the part about no jot and tittle passing from the law until heaven and earth pass away (slip your mind?), which is pretty strong indication that Jesus mildly inconveniencing himself on the cross did not qualify as all being fulfilled. As do his instructions to follow and teach others to follow the law in Matthew 5:19, why give these instructions at all if they were only going to expire in just a few weeks?
You have difficulty in learning some things don’t you Polycarp? Jesus gave more rules than the above two. While he did say the above two were most important he didn’t give you a pass on the others, regardless of how much you don’t like them.
Wow, such academic knowledge, it’s curious how you missed some of the important stuff I listed above. Me thinks the parts you don’t like just don’t register with you.
And anyone who can distinguish between the two doesn’t need to read the bible to understand how to effectively behave in today’s society.
Good thing God thought of that and made prophecies available.
Can you give a cite to that effect that would have any relevance at all to this discussion?
Or do you always just talk out of your arse…
What “prophesies” would those be?
As a matter of fact, can you cite a single legitimate (meaning proven) predictive prophesy anywhere in the Bible (or anywhere else, for that matter).
**
Was the OT canon even formalized by that time?
In any event, clearly there’s only one way for the Bible to declare itself to be the word of God. The Bible is not one book, but a collection of books typically published in an omnibus edition. Either every book of the Bible must refer to itself as the word of God, or somewhere in the Bible there has to be a) a statement of which books are the word of God, and b) a statement that the list is itself the word of God. Since the Bible provides neither, then it nowhere declares itself to be the word of God.
The canon actually presents a pretty real problem for believers of various stripes, because it goes unexamined. Everybody has a different canon: Jews, Samaritans, Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Copts, Ethiopians, etc. If you’re going to say “I just believe on faith that this is the word of God,” then you have to face the fact that most people making that argument are wrong, so it must not be a good argument. If you’re going to use logic, then a lot falls apart. Jeremiah has to be kicked out as a false prophet, for one thing.
Frankly, the Timothy argument seems a little strange to me. What do you people think the author of Timothy did- look at the Bible on his shelf and think, “yep, it’s all good for instruction”? Maybe he saved some effort when writing his letter by taking his Bible down and copying out 2 Timothy longhand?
The bible as a whole cannot claim itself to be the word of God, or anything else, as the bible did not exist when any one part of it was written.
In other words, no one piece of the bible can refer to the bible, as those pieces were not assembled into what we now think of as the bible until well after the last them was written.
Diogenes, tho I know all the other explanations against the Christian interpretation, the Seventy Weeks (490 years) of Daniel Chapter 9 predicting that time would elapse from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem to the cutting off of the Anointed One & His Seven-Year Covenant (458 BC-33 AD) looks pretty good to me.
Also, the continued survival & thriving of the Jewish people, even to the point of restoring their nation after almost two millenial of exile and the most extreme attempt in history to eliminate them, is something attested to throughout the Jewish Scriptures.
Btw, the books of the Bible, in claiming Divine inspiration, also refer to each other, not just to themselves, the Prophets & the Writings in the Hebrew Bible attest to the Torah, which attests to itself. The Christian Testament attests to the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. 2 Peter 3:15-16 attests to the writings of Paul. The Apostles epistles attest to the words & deeds of Jesus (which are recorded in the Gospels). Revelation attests to itself, but it recapitulates the prophetic themes & historical pattern of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament & applies them to the present distress of the fall of Jerusalem & the persecution by Rome as well as all of future Christian history unto the Return of Jesus & our passage into Eternity, so its claim is just a reaffirmation of the inspiration of its Hebraic-Christian source material.
OK. This isn’t circular. It is predicated on the notion that the person that it is being addressed to already accepts the notion that the Bible is a truthful document, and the question is only whether it is the word of God or the like.
In general, I imagine that that these arguments are typically addressed to liberal Christians or others about whom the assumption is being made that the Bible is accepted to some degree. It is likely not addressed to atheists or similar such who are also considering the possibility that the Bible is completely unreliable.
I can’t absolutely guarantee that no one has ever put forth a circular version of the argument. There are billions of people out there, many of whom are utter nitwits. But I am pretty sure that the typical use of the argument is as I have described it, and to present the typical usage as being the circular version is most likely a misrepresentation.
Not to avoid sounding circular. To avoid being circular.
Whether it is an arbitrary predicate is a judgment call. As is whether it is unconvincing. But I am not going to argue that. I am addressing whether it is circular.
Most likely true. But that is because they have already accepted, for other reasons, that the Bible is reliable. Once that is accepted, proofs like the one from Timothy are valid.
Izzy, IMHO you are missing the point.
Any argument which depends on the Bible to validate the accuracy or reliability of the Bible is ipso facto circular, because it assumes the accuracy or reliability of what it sets out to prove.
The assumptions that God inspired the Bible totius porcius, or that the human writers of the Bible accurately reported their experiences of Him, bring in external testimony and are not circular.
If one can know, apart from the Bible, that God exists and is truthful, or if one can demonstrate from archaeology, secular history or legend, or other sources, that the human writers accurately reported such things as those modes of inquiry are able to show, then you have two potential external sources for validating it.
But it does not and cannot function as a standalone document that validates itself.
That’s not true, at least not quite in the sense that people might use it. First, for a “canon” to “go unexamined”, there must be a hard-and-fast “canon”. The Orthodox Church does not have an iron-clad legalistic, pharasaic sort of “canon” where there are zillion mile high walls between “canon” and “everything else”. Instead, there are gradual steps. Even within standard compilations of Scripture some books are considered more important than are others by the Orthodox Church.
Of course, you already know there was no “Bible” at that time. However, given what was written at the time, I’d say that St. Paul was quite familiar with the Scripture of his day, given that he was a bit of a scholar.
No, Polycarp, it is actually you who has missed the point, which is a bit strange since I’ve made it several times. Somehow you seem to have gotten the idea that I’ve said that belief that the Bible is divinely inspired is circular, and you’ve gone to some length to explain why this is not so. But that is not something I’ve said or believe. What I have said, again, is that once you accept that the Bible was authored by honest sincere people inspired by God, it is not circular to use the descriptions in the Bible about itself to decide what it’s nature is. Therefore, to use the argument that the Bible itself claims to be the word of God if directed at someone who accepts that the Bible is divinely inspired is not at all circular.
In sum, to say “it doesn’t make sense to say that sincere religious people inspired by God wrote “these are the words of God” if this is not actually true” is not a circular argument.
Have you read Daniel? Sorry, I’ll have to wait until I get home to get deeper than that.
To Izzy,
I don’t know what to tell you. I am an agnostic who has engaged in many debates with various flavors of Christians. For any Christian who asserts a belief in the divine authorship of the Bible I always ask them why they believe it. The Timothy passage is the most common response I get. They cite it as the reason that they believe it and as the reason that I should believe it. it has been done on this very board by H4E and others. If you don’t trust me, ask Poly if he’s heard Christians try that argument. Ask any atheist who’s ever argued with Christians. I promise you, fundies use Timothy as a way to try to convince non-believers to believe in the divinity of the Bible and they do it frequently.
FriarTed and Svt4Him:
Of course I’m familiar with the Christian interpretation of Daniel and I am spectacularly unimpressed by it. Daniel was written during the Seleucid occupation. It used the Babylonian exile as a template for an apocalyptic book about the 2nd century BCE Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid King, Antiochus. It does predict the Messiah (as an explicitly human king, not a God) but it also predicted that the world would end after the death of Antochus (it also predicts a war that never happened and gets the location of Antiochus’ death wrong) so Daniel is an example of a failed predictive prophesy not a fulfilled one.
I know all about the Christian spin put on this book. Instead of hashing it out point by point I will just say that this is a case of people making the prophesy fit what they want it to than any truly convincing or definitive precognition being demonstrated in the text.
Friar, I know that you, especially, are aware of the arguments against this being a predictive prophesy of Jesus so I won’t go into them. Suffice it to say that to interpret Daniel as being predictive of Jesus is an interpretation grounded in faith and not something that would be readily come to from a purely objective standpoint.
Oops; I gotta go back to Sunday School…
If not the jot-and-tittle verse, isn’t there something in the Revelation about not adding to or taking away from scripture? Doesn’t that verse pretty much make the claim that the Bible is divine?
Trinopus (3/5 of a Pentateuch?)
According to John 1:1-5, the Bible is not the word of God:
“In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … Through [the Word] all things came into being…”
Clearly, the Word is not a book. (Or, if you think it is a book, what was it written on? What language was it in?)
It seems to me that people who say the Bible is the Word of God weren’t paying much attention when they read it. And people who take the Bible “literally” are guilty of idolatry: the book is more important than the truth.
(And, as AndrewT pointed out, no one really takes it literally anyway these days.
Trinopus: that would be Rev 22:18-19, which curses anyone who adds to or takes away from “this book”.
Problem is, when Rev was written it wasn’t attached to the rest of the NT, much less the Hebrew Scriptures. So “this book” originally meant Rev itself, and nothing else.
Tacking Rev onto the NT doesn’t make these verses apply to the other books of the Bible any more than tacking it onto the Annotated Code of Texas would make God’s curse fall on any legislator who dared change a law.
To complicate matters even more, many early Christians didn’t accept the book of Revelation as genuine. Martin Luther didn’t think much of it either, IIRC, and wanted to cut it out of the NT. (He succeeded in removing several books from the OT, and so Protestant Bibles today don’t include the Apocrypha. He failed to convince others that the NT should also be edited. All this just goes to say that “the Bible” is simply a collection of whatever books the collector thinks should be in it. So what books, other than Revelation itself, could 22:18-19 be referring to?)
Many times. Is there a thesis you’d like to present?
Great points, but your cite stops too short, FriendRob.
John 1:14 “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…”
John 1:17 “The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ.”
Izzy: I see your point. But what Diogenes said is the complete and total truth. Less than a month ago, over on the Pizza Parlor, His4Ever quoted the II Timothy passage in refutation of a point I was trying to make, and got several supportive posts about it.