The few Christians who believe that also tend to think the Bible was originally written in English. I’ve even encountered a couple who believed that it wasn’t even dictated but directly poffed into existence or something like that: they weren’t very clear on the details, or on why would God poff into existence things such as a letter saying (paraphrased) “when I came to visit you, y’all fed me, housed me and helped me get a job, for which I am grateful”.
Actually, no. There are Evangelicals in the US which are more literal than your average 14th-century Christian. Augustine, Ildefonso de Toledo and others said time and again that when science and the Bible disagree, the Bible should be interpreted as not being literal.
And what the bloody fuck does that librarian on LSD have to do with the Bible being literal is beyond me.
fyi, the Torah is also said to have been dictated. But I think the rest of the Jewish Bible, and all of the Christian New Testament, is just “divinely inspired”. Hmm, The Book or Mormon was maybe written by God? But translated by a divinely inspired Joseph Smith?
Sure. I know lots of religious people who would give God credit for that.
Yup. And texts in ancient times were, in general, more allegorical and less intended to be taken literally than the current style of “non fiction”.
The statement: “they considered [the Bible] the literal truth” is so vague and broad that it makes no sense. The Bible is not one book. It is a collection of 73 books that were written by dozens of different authors in multiple languages and genres and over the span of many centuries.
Some parts of the Bible were written as historical record, some parts were written as poetry, some parts were written as biography, some parts were written for the purpose of teaching.
And the first Christians did not have access to anything like the Bible as we know it today (even if they did, most of them would not be able to read it). They had The Church. The Church came first.
Well, God became incarnate in the person of Jesus and founded a society that we call the Catholic Church that is still going strong today with over 1 billion followers. After the crucifixion, he did rise from the dead. Resurrection from the dead is pretty convincing to me in proving his divinity.
I’m referring to Christians whose beliefs and practices go back to the Apostles.
There are plenty of Christians whose beliefs/practices are novel (16th century or later), especially in the US where Protestant evangelicalism reigns supreme.
Over a billion followers means most of the world’s population has yet to either hear the “good news” or is unconvinced by it.
And who can blame them? In a time where there were already plenty of religions and myths of divine people walking along us Omnimax God chose… to spread his word via human word of mouth the same as all the myths.
Many Christs have been written about well before this one, and also after, who are also said to have been resurrected, why give credence to this one in particular when the evidence is so weak and credulously told? There is nothing that proves his divinity, it’s a faith thing, your heart aches for it to be true, and it promises you and your loved ones an afterlife if only they have faith and believe that this happened. But leave proof out of it.
If you have evidence then please present it.
It might be slightly off topic but I’m sure we’d all welcome hearing proof of the divine for the first time ever.
Do you seriously imagine that the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church are unchanged from the time of the apostles? The Eastern Orthodox church also traces its beliefs and practices back to the time of the apostles (the Great Schism was in 1054) - and look how different they are.
It was 3 centuries after the apostles before Christians even began to standardise their beliefs from the multiple variations that existed then.
If the apostle Peter were to walk into St. Peter’s today and attend mass, he’d wonder which religion the service belonged to - certainly not his. You may claim that the differences and changes are divinely inspired, but other Christian denominations strongly disagree with that.
On the contrary, Protestants from the 16th century onward have felt that they are going back to the original religion of the apostles, by getting rid of all the novel alterations in beliefs and practices, and all the weird rococo additions, that the Catholic Church gradually picked up over the centuries.
I’m saying that I disagree with your assertion that the evidence for the divinity of Jesus is “weak and credulously told”. I believe that the testimony of the Apostles/the Church and the Gospel accounts are reliable, and I believe that the evidence is good.
Yes, the beliefs are unchanged, though they have of course been developed and deepened. The liturgy has evolved, but is actually remarkably unchanged. The Eastern Catholic Churches (fully Catholic - in communion with the Pope) have liturgies that are very similar if not identical to the Orthodox. I think you overestimate the differences.
Naturally. As theologians begin to deviate from the deposit of faith, someone needs to step in and pull them back into orthodoxy.
Oh really? Can you back up this assertion with evidence?
They can feel whatever they want, but where is the evidence that the Apostles held their novel views regarding justification by faith alone, sola scriptura, invisible church, etc?
Much of the Old Testament purports to be historical accounts, much like Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain). Much of the New Testament purports to be epistles, much like Benjamin Franklin’s Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress. Do you reject the teachings of Gibbon or Franklin because they were not gods?
The Gospels themselves do purport to include the words of God’s only begotten son as allegedly recalled by eye-witnesses, along with their reactions thereto:
This basically boils down to “Christians that believe what I believe agree with what I believe.”
I don’t suppose you’ve every heard of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy?
It is nice that you believe what you believe, but would you mind presenting this evidence that you rate as “good” so that we may form our own beliefs as to its veracity?
One of the criteria that was used by those “senior clergymen” in deciding what should be included in the New Testament was “Apostolic authority”: they were books that were (believed to be) either written directly by, or based on the testimony of, the apostles. In other words, they were accepted as true because they were written by human beings who were in a position to know what they were writing about.
Moderns are more skeptical about apostolic authorship (of at least some books). For instance, though some of the more conservative Christians still insist that the Gospel of Matthew was written by one of Jesus’s Twelve Disciples, most mainstream scholars today reject this view—without necessarily inferring that we can’t trust what that book says about Jesus, just that such trust has to rest on other grounds.