Errors in the Torah and Septuagint - Fact or Fiction?

Great Debates
161

I have a question for sfworker, since I think I see a slight problem. Just so I understand you, does this describe your position well?;

You believe the original “Word of God” is flawless.

The Bible in it’s current state is not flawless; this is because of translation errors.

These errors occurred many years ago; no current Bible reflects the correct Word.

So two questions; the Bible is the Word, but “broken” - it’s incorrect, flawed. How, then, can we assume any part of the Bible is correct? For if the Bible is only slightly different from the Word - in which case we may use it as an understanding of God - then the flaws in the Bible are also likely present in the Word (making it flawed, and hence suggesting God doesn’t exist). On the other hand, if the Bible is very different, and thus those flaws cannot also be ascribed to the Word itself, then we also can’t use the Bible to gain an understanding of God; it’s just too dissimilar from the Word. Could you explain (what I see as) this contradiction?

162

Having read Diogenes’ (very long) link regarding the contradiction in dating the nativity between Matthew and Luke, I have to say I’m completely convinced. Luke is indisputably dating the nativity to 6AD, and Matthew equally indisputably dating the nativity to 6-4BC. One or the other (or both) have simply got to be mistaken.

163

For anyone who’s interested, a more condensed and somewhat more reader friendly version of Carrier’s essay can be found here at the ErrancyWiki site. It’s quicker and easier to read because it’s only meant to be a summation while the essay linked up thread takes more pains to walk through the cites.

164

So you’re an agnostic then? You remain unconvinced?

There’s a wall back there somewhere, do try not to backpeddle into it.

Cheers,
G

165

Nope. If we were debating the existence of God, the meaning of Life, or the relationship of the Beautiful to the True, this statement might work. But in discussions of questions of historical or scientific fact–like say the chronolgies from a pair of biographies of a religious leader written a couple of thousand years ago–you can’t just reduce everything down to “well, that’s just a matter of opinion”. Even in questions of historical fact there are legitimate areas of uncertainty, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes.

The Bible undeniably contains errors of fact. Exactly what the fact of Biblical errancy means, from “the Bible is wrong here, so the whole thing is bollocks and we should chuck it” to “the Bible was written by men who (like all human beings) had imperfect knowledge of the world and were products of their time, but nonetheless reveals to humanity some form of Divine Truth”–that’s a debate that’s not going to be settled. But to deny that the Bible is factually in error in many places requires willful ignorance of the obvious truth.

166

This is the original OP if I am not mistaken.

It was followed up by.

bolding mine

Then, doesn’t this mean that you have read the original texts?

Now, I’m not the grand debater that some of these guys are and I’m not totally against what you’re trying to say. I’m just trying to keep up with a thread that seems to have went to…well, to hell.

Is it correct for me to interpret what you are saying NOW is that there are no original texts. That everything written that WE have today are interpretations.

So what original texts were you reading when you said “I haven’t seen…”

Y’all have me confused now. :confused:
Could somebody please explain?

BTW this has got to be an IMHO thread by now, huh?

167

Baronsabato wishing neither to hijack, nor get lost in this thread, I replied to you in a new one.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7688708#post7688708

168

So is this one about dead now or what?

169

I don’t think the thread itself is dead; some of the ancillary discussions are interesting, even if our guest seems determined not to do any significant debating himself.

170

Yes, it does, actually.

Both of them are “holy” books of a religion. By definition, then, they are a compendium of lies. And the answer to your question becomes Yes.

171

But Mary was not descended from David, she was descended from Aaron, wasn’t she? Luke states that Elizabeth was descended from Aaron, and that Mary was her cousin. Any geneology that goes back to Aaron could not include David.

Or maybe I’m missing something, as it seems a glaring enough point that someone would have brought it up before.

172

Not that I wish to defend the historicity of these accounts, but there’s no reason Mary couldn’t have been defended from both David and Aaron. Those two men lived hundreds of years apart; it’s easy to imagine their bloodlines intersecting. What’s harder to imagine is people actually keeping track of their ancestry in a civilization without printing presses, birth certificates, etc., for anyone other than royal families, which Mary, obviously, was not a part of.

173

That whole thing about Luke tracing Jesus’ bloodline through Mary is a complete load. It is not something that “some scholars believe,” it is something that apologists use to try to harmonize the accounts, but it’s completely unsupported by the text. Sometimes they try to argue that calling Joseph the “son of Heli” was a conventional way to say that he was Heli’s son-in-LAW, but that’s not a convention which actually ever existed. Moreover, bloodlines through the mother were irrelevant anyway. Lines of succession in general – and the royal bloodline of David in particular – could only be inherited from the father. The Jewish Messiah is, by definition, the heir to the throne of David by direct patrilineal descent. If he’s not descended from David through his father, he’s not the Messiah.

There’s no reason to even attempt to read Luke’s genealogy as referring to anyone but Joseph unless you’re looking for an excuse to reconcile it to Matthew.

174

Since when are historical facts allowed in discussions of apologetics?

175

Oh, facts are allowed still but it tends to muck up the works for the literalists (sp?).

176

Let’s set aside, for the sake of argument, the debate between those who believe religious texts are human documents and those who believe they are divinely-inspired. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that they are divinely-inspired in the strongest possible sense: “written by the very hand of God.”

A sacred book in which every word and character is written by God – an all-perfect being – would have to be perfect. A perfect being doesn’t make mistakes. But from this it does not follow that every sentence in the book that appears to make a factual or historical claim must be factually or historically true. This is the faulty assumption that animates sfworker’s question: contradiction and/or factual and historical untruth in the scriptural text is not the same thing as ERROR. The text is perfect, therefore every word in it is as it ought to be, therefore there are no errors. It does not follow from this that there aren’t contradictions and factual untruths. There may be, and if there are, then there ought to be.

What ‘perfect’ means in the case of a divinely-wrought document is teleological: every word and character in the sacred book ought to be there, and adequately fulfils God’s purpose in giving the book to humanity.

This would mean that it is possible for there to be factual untruth and even contradiction in scripture. It just means that this factual untruth or contractiction is there for a reason, and ought to be there.

There’s an assumption in the literalist position that verges on the religious definition of blasphemy: the assumption that WE know how the sacred text ought to have been written. Who are we to dictate to God how the Bible (Koran, Torah…) should have been written?

-=-

As a side note, the only religious/philosophical writer I’ve found that explicitly acknowledges something like this argument is the medieval Islamic philosopher Averroes. (Granted, I haven’t made anything close to a comprehensive study of it.)

“The apparent contradictions [in scripture, or between scripture and what is learned through observation and reason] are meant to stimulate the learned to deeper study…The reason why we have received in scripture texts whose apparent meanings contradict each other is in order to draw the attention of those who are well-grounded in science to the interpretation which reconciles them.”

(Averroes, from “The decisive treatise determining the nature of the connection between religion and philosophy” in The Philosophy of the Middle Ages p.303)

Best,
I Tichy

177

Aww dang. I just reread my post – it is, as Sellars used to say (Wilfrid, not Peter) ‘fraught with ought’. Sorry about that.

I still stand by it as an argument, though.

178

I’ll buy that to a point. If you want to define the bible as fiction rather than fact, then regardless of what’s in there, you can say it was meant that way.

Of course it also does not follow that someone should use a work of fiction go guide how they live their real lives. Nor should a fictional book, be considered evidence to the divinity of its author.

Now you’re putting the cart way before the horse. There is no reason to think the bible is “divinely-wrought” other than its own say so, which you have admitted is likely fictional. Second as far as works of fiction go, the bible kind of sucks. It’s long, it’s repetitive, it’s boring, the authors can’t keep their facts straight from one chapter to another and often from one verse to another. In contrast Candide, now that’s a great work of fiction.

179

No, it isn’t. Is it technically possible that anything is not technically possible?

Why do you use “possible” in your first phrase, and “probable” in your second?

Here’s another possibility that I believe you have been challenged on repeatedly with no response from you – What if God exists with all the attributes that you claim, and he provided his inspired word for us to read, only* it isn’t the Bible?* What if it is some other religious text? Are you not begging the question? How can you prove the Bible to be the true word of God by using the Bible as a referrant? Why is not the Bhagavad Gita the inspired word of God? The Upanishads? The Book of Mormon? The Qu’ran? We have access to these documents as well. What makes you pick one religious text over another, technically, logically, or otherwise?

180

The problem with that whole approach is that it’s logically possible to posit: 1. There is a real entity congruous with YHWH, the Trinity, and/or other Judaeo-Christian concepts of “God” AND 2. The Bible is a collection of literary works of various forms, some or none of which were “inspired” in the sense of being dictated by Him or otherwise caused by Him to be written in the precise form they exist.

I grant that to a large proportion of Dopers, there is little or no evidence for the existence of such a God. And to a lot of conservative evangelical Christians, the connection is that He did in fact intentionally and willfully cause the words of the Bible to be written in the form we see them. But I submit that there is a large middle ground there, where “God exists” does not necessarily infer “And He made Ezekiel write the bit about the wheels in the air and the valley of dry bones just as we have it” or “And He demanded the genocide of the Amelekites, because it says so right here!”

Now, considering that the Bible is the one major common-consent source for knowing what this God is supposed to be like, that leaves a lot of wiggle room. And on thinking over the points badchad has made, I see his criticism of my own stance quite clearly.

But I offer that bit of to-me-obvious critique as a means of getting past an impasse. Once there, we can address later why I or someone else might see a plausible mode of sorting accurate-if-slanted information from tribal myth in the Bible.