That’s precisely what I did do. My first post responding to Tom’s misquotation begins (in response to his supercilious request that I “get [my] facts straight”)
[size added for emphasis]
All he needed to do at that point was go back to the beginning of his previous post and check the attribution of the quote he started with. He refused to do that, but that refusal in no way is my responsibility. I gave him more than enough information about where he commited the error, and instead of checking what I gave him, he just continued to attack me personally. I then responded by telling him a second time to examine the beginning of his post:
and again, instead of going back to the beginning of his post, he puffs himself up pridefully and dismisses my directing him back, like a dog to his vomit, to that spot:
and now claims that he was justified in making that error because of past interactions he has had with me. This is simply an admisssion of bad faith on his part in how he regards me–as someone he feels completely justified in ignoring and dismissing. It’s true, I have refused sometimes to supply him with cites that he demanded. Maybe the truth is that Tom has a record of distorting information when it’s cited, and I don’t want to play his silly game of “cite? and gotcha!” when it’s irrelevant to my larger point. Instead of using our previous exchange as his weak excuse for not checking my reference here, maybe this current thread can stand as a reason I’m frustrated by Tom’s constant demand for cites that he doesn’t respect when he’s supplied with them.
Now on to the substance: Is the claim that there were no historians at all who were contemporary with Christ? Were any of the Romans writing history in the first third of the first century capable of hearing about the miraculous events in Judea? Is it possible that someone could have performed miracles before thousands of onlookers and been tried, tortured and killed as a result yet this --or even a rumor of this–wouldn’t appear in any writing, letters, legal documents at all? Certainly there have been documents that have claimed to support such things, but they have all (as far as I know) been discredited as deliberate forgeries by Xians desperate to show such evidence (but alas incompetant at forgery). Tom is giving himself all the benefit of the doubt in asserting that there is clear documentation that the first Gospel was written as early as he claims it was (I think even Catholic scholars are uncertain of the dating, but none claims an earlier date than Tom and some concede a later date, though I’m going on memory here). My claim, if we’re quite done disputing what “or so” means, is that a lo-o-o-o-ong period of time elapsed between Jesus’s thoroughly undocumented lifetime and the first post mortem documentation. I doubt there’s definitive documentation appearing as early as 20 years after the supposed crucifixion (would be interested in seeing some, though) and much of the dating of the Gospels extends into the 2nd century.
For thousands of years now, Xians have relied on Biblical accounts of these events as true, thinking that non-Xians could not definitively prove them wrong, so at the least the factuality would remain open to doubt and possibility. But when science and history advance, and are able to demonstrate that no such thing as the atmospheric changes that allegedly occured upon Jesus’ death, or the celestrial events that alledgedly occured upon his birth, could have possibly occured, they just retreat into the claim that these things were parables, or symbols, or mistranslations or “Vas you dere, Sharlie?” or other specious nonsense. My own favorite is “It’s not important that these things happened as the Bible says.” Not important! You’ve been blowing this smoke up people’s asses for millennia and now it’s not important! Jesus wept!
I also love the logic used here: there were no contemporary accounts because that wasn’t how things were done in those ancient times, no one wrote down things, and none of the writings would have survived anyhow, so it makes no sense to have contemporary accounts of Jesus’s life–yet when Gospel after Gospel starts appearing twenty (?) or sixty or ninety years after he dies, then suddenly it makes a world of historical sense to have people writing this stuff down all over the place and the accounts being scrupulously saved and handed down to us in pristine fashion with very little being lost or changed. As with much else, Xians want to have history proving both that first century accounts were rare and unpreserved AND that they were common and well-preserved, all depending of course on which half of the first century you’re talking about, the eyewitness part or the after-the-fact fictionalizing part.
You have spent the past four months repeatedly lodging false charges of unfairness in Moderating against me. You have provided not one single citation for any of those accusations. Not one in four months with accusations in the double digits. Every quotation I have provided has been a direct and unmodified quotation, with one containing an incorrect attribution (but which did not say anything to which you would violently object). Is it your “fault” that I missed what you were talking about? Of course, not. On the other hand, you certainly spent a lot of time stamping your foot and whining about the unfairness of it all when a simple “I did not write the first quote in post #210” would have gotten an immediate correction and apology. I have quoted you multiple times in this thread and with your record of false charges, I see no reason for me to wander back through a 200+ post thread examining the first quotation in my every response when I know that I have not invented a quotation or changed one.
If you feel that I no longer give you much respect, you will have to note just how hard you have worked to get to that point.
Interesting how you change your terms to adjust your argument (and still get it wrong).
The earliest “documentation about Xianity” (your actual claim) would be Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians written in the early 50s, around 20 years after the period when Jesus is supposed to have lived. The earliest extant Gospel, (that of Mark), was written in the late 60s, placing it around 40 years subsequent to the supposed death of Jesus. The Gospel of John was written, in its first version, in the 90s, placing it about 65 years after the supposed time of Jesus. This final Gospel does have additional material that appears to have been added in the early second century. Note, however, that the basic text was laid down 35 years before your “century or so.”
The dates I have provided are the dates that have the widest acceptance among scholars of the New Testament–Catholics, Protestants, or non-believers. (There are a number of Fundamentalist Christians who would posit that those works were written earlier, but I have not used those dates.)
So, first you change the subject from “documentation about Xianity” to records about the life of Jesus.
Then you continue to hold on to your incorrect dates, even after you have been challenged. (Relying on your clearly faulty memory in the middle of a debate does nothing to make your point.)
Of course, you could have simply admitted that you were only exaggerating for effect and what you really meant was that you simply knew we had no eyewitness information. However, if you are going to post errors and cling to them in this Forum, then, in the interest of the Straight Dope you are going to get corrected.
You then go on to demonstrate that you really don’t understand the subject you are tackling with your insistence that had there been a miracleworker at the time, his life would have been noted by someone. Why? With all the things that go on in the world (and the paucity of any writings from the first century), why would one expect to see documentation regarding a guy who preached for a couple of years and whose biggest miracles and death occurred in just a month or two in one of the most distant backwaters of the Roman Empire? You should try discovering just how much first-hand (not recreated) information we have regarding Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus, arguably the two most important figures of the Roman Empire within the “century or so” leading up to the life of Jesus. It ain’t much.
In order to make your odd claim, you also have to ignore the fact that even major events in your own country just a generation or two before your birth are not widely known, even though the existence of the prnting press and the daily newspaper distributed that information much more widely at the time they occurred. Why should we expect to find any information, at all, from a society that posessed only laboriously hand-copied manuscripts and no mass distribution of news? You are using the arguments of Creationists that we do not have enough fossils to “prove” evolutionary descent while ignoring the very rare circumstances that we need to get a single fossil.
Do you have any, like, evidence that Christians relied on the bible because they believed they could never be challenged? (That is the clear meaning of your syntax, so please don’t wiggle away from your claim.)
Again, you demonstrate your utter ignorance regarding the way that history and biography were written in the first century (and continued to be written up until the around the eighteenth). History and biography were both, foremost, moral tracts before the Enlightenment. Authors were not expected to lie–and many made serious efforts to get their facts straight–but the primary purpose was to create an uplifting tale that would inspire readers to emulate the good aspects of a person’s life or to take pride in the accomplishments (even if manufactured, somewhat) of the history of their people or ancestors.
Claims that anyone held onto the bible because they knew it could not be disproven are just silly. Those claims are meaningless in the context of the authors, the audiences, and the successive generations who revered the works. (This is true of all biographies and histories, not simply Christian literature.)
Even your claim that religion retreated only in the face of science is demonstrably false. Augustine of Hippo, writing between 401 and 415, long before “science” challenged any aspect of Scripture, wrote
There has always been an understanding that Scripture is a religious or spiritual work, not a recitation of “scientific” facts. That understanding has occasionally been forgotten by individuals, but it is not some new claim that was invented in the face of scientific advance.
There are many reasons to not believe in the spiritual, or not believe in Christianity. It seems odd, to me, that you always attack such belief from the perspective of your own ignorance. You have some wonderful arguments to use against people who hold the bible to be the literal Word fo God, but they are pretty silly when used to attack the wider scope of Christianity or belief, in general. (And they are especially risible when you keep getting your own “facts” wrong. You are not only tilting at windmills, you are riding a hobby horse and waving a piece of rope for a lance.)
There is a bricklayer somewhere (or a pig farm) that could use all that straw from which you have built this argument.
No one has claimed that a gospel was written 20 years after the life of Jesus–that is simply your deliberate falsehood.
No one has claimed that nothing was ever recorded.
No one (in this thread–you might go look at a Fundamentalist website) has claimed that any of the writings are pristine.
And no one has claimed that there were many, many Christian writings.
Works were written to help preserve the existing faith. That is a point on which Polycarp, Diogenes the Cynic, and I would all agree completely. They were saved by the group that believed them for exactly that reason. They were not common, although the point you are probably distorting to pretend that they were called common was not that there were many such texts. Rather, I previously noted that your claim that all such writings are "based’ on Scripture was in error and that there were some other texts that were clearly not based on Scripture (to say nothing of the clear fact that none of those works were “Scripture” when they were written).
Now, provide us a list of the biographies of each Roman Emperor from 1 through 100. How many individual works are there? How many written descriptions do we have regarding the eruption of Vesuvius? How many works do we have that describe crop failures or the loss of grain fleets or other events that had a direct effect on the lives of people throughout the Mediterranean?
It is hardly surprising that a group of believers would collect, save, and re-copy the works that are used to express their belief.
Tom made a mistake which when it was specifically pointed out to him he admitted it. If only you could follow that example. You might have given a specific post number or quoted the specific mistake as you finally did posts later. The mistake he made is totally irrelevant to the substance of the discussion you have disagreed on which might explain why he missed it. So why don’t we move on from your "Tom made a mistake " anger dance.
There’s no reason for him or anyone to respect cites that are inaccurate and or/irrelevant to the point being discussed. Do you think people should acquiesce simply because you made some effort?
I and others would readily admit that there is little or no real evidence to support conclusively that Jesus actually existed outside the texts that make up the Bible and other texts about him that weren’t included in that collection.
The dispute was that you make specific and careless claims that are non factual and then want to waste time resisting a simple admission of your mistake. Still you want to use the largest font available to point out Tom’s which he admitted when he saw it.
Here’s a prime example of the kind of inaccurate blanket statements you continue to make and then ignore or whine about any attempt to correct you. You criticize Christians for their lack of concern about facts while exhibiting a real lack of concern for them yourself. I can only guess about your motives, but that’s somewhat irrelevant as well. If you’re satisfied with very little credibility in these discussions that’s up to you. Personally, every time I try to engage you in serious discussion you demonstrate that it’s not worth it. Have a nice day.
And to make to points relevant to Tom’s post, one a nitpick:
Tom is in error in saying “No one has claimed that a gospel was written 20 years after the life of Jesus…” It is accurate that *nobody arguing in this thread has so claimed, which is his evident meaning. But in the interests of complete accuracy, many conservative evangelicals (whether strictly fundamentalist or not) claim that Matthew was the first Gospel written and that it had an extremely early date – they tend to nitpick between them on the dating, but “within the first 20 years” would be acceptable. This claim is rejected by all Biblical scholars who take a more objective view based on textual criticism; not having data at my fingertips, I will leave it to Diogenes, if he passes by, to recount what leads them to that conclusion.
The second point, however, is one not advanced previously in these discussions, AFAIK. And it is worth taking into account in the interests of accuracy in discussions. A very substantial school of Biblical criticism attributes the reason for the late dates of the Gospels to the conception of the “historical Jesus.” Schweitzer was a leading exponent of this view.
In short, many of the early Christians, perhaps most, believed quite fervently that Jesus’s return – the Second Coming – was in fact imminent. There was therefore little or no need to write down what could be relayed word-of-mouth by eyewitnesses, in the interests of preserving it for posterity: there would be no posterity, as Jesus’s return and the Last Days would occur within a few years, during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses.
It was only when time passed, eyewitnesses began dying off (whether from martyrdom or simply from old age), that it became to be felt necessary to record the life and teachings of Jesus for a new generation who were not around when he lived and who might never encounter the surviving few eyewitnesses.
I was going to address the same thing Polycarp just did about “no one” believing that the first gospel was written within 20 years of Jesus’s death. A few months ago I had a cub scout leaders meeting (yes, I’m an atheist cub scout leader), in a local Baptist church, in a room where they apparently have Bible study classes.
Before the meeting, I was reading the papers stuck to the walls, and one discussed the gospels, when they were written, and the target audience of each. What struck me was that they had placed Matthew as the earliest, with a date of around 0045, I think.
And Polycarp, I can understand why the early Christians thought Christ’s return would be imminent - it’s mentioned several times in the gospels themselves: Mark 9:1, Matthew 16:28, 23:36, 24:34, Luke 9:27, John 21:22.
What I don’t really understand is why they bothered to put these predictions into the gospels, since that time had already passed.
There is a statement that Eusebius (early fourth century) attributes to Papias (late first/early second century): “Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew language and everyone interpreted as he was able.”
(That is the complete text of the attributed statement.)
With the strong association of the current Gospel of Matthew with the Jewish people, there was, for many years, a belief that the current Gospel might have been a re-working of an earlier work.
The problems with this claim are that the Greek Matthew was clearly written in Greek, not translated from Aramaic or Hebrew, Jesus would have spoken Aramaic, not Hebrew, so there is a debate over whether Papias meant Hebrew or Aramaic, casting more doubt on the statement, and the Greek Matthew is much more than a collection of “sayings.” Other literary examinations push Matthew back even further from any purported “Hebrew sayings.”
It has been so long since I encountered anyone who still held hope for a “Hebrew” (or Aramaic) Matthew, that I tend to think of only the arguments for a late 50s/early 60s Mark when I think of claims for the “first” Gospel.
And you don’t have a a problem understanding why a reasonable person might regard this merely as a convenient excuse for a lack of documentation? I mean, you’ve got Jesus deputizing his disciples to go and spread the word throughout the land about His ministry and His imminent return and either they misunderstand him and confuse “in a couple of millennia” with “Don’t buy any green bananas,” or else He was mixed-up about when He was coming back. If He understood that He wouldn’t return for at least 2000 years (and what kind of a competent God, much less an omniscient one, would get so bolloxed up with his schedule?), maybe He could have taken a disciple aside and told him to try to document some of this stuff? “Because there will be several skeptics in the next few thousand years who might be easily persuaded to join the faithful if they could be given a scrap of evidence? Maybe instead of getting your asses martyred later on, maybe you could contrive to preserve some plausible evidence while I’m still alive, and then find a way to get it recorded? You know, instead of writing all sorts of stuff later on, when I’m already dead for a good long time-- and, bellieve me, verily I do appreciate your adoption of writing and preserving texts–but couldja maybe get started asap, and not twenty or ninety years later? It’ll make this whole ‘Spreading the word’ business a lot more efficient, in My humble opinion. I’d put your convert rate up 10% easy, if you;d just do this way. Just a suggestion, now, but believe me, I’d do it like this if I was you, I’m just saying.”
Do you worship an inept God, or a fictional God, or a sadistic God (who could have made converting and preaching much easier for you but chose against that path–“Nahh, that’ll too easy for them poor fuckers. Bwahahaha.”) I can think of a handful of hard-core atheists on this messageboard alone who’d come over in two minutes, carrying sheaves and singing “Hosanna,” with just a shred of something resembling evidence. But apparently your God, who wants so fiercely for us to embrace him, couldn’t be troubled (or couldn’t remember) to provide this minimal evidence. What a shame it didn’t work out for Him.
Oh, I know I am going to receive your sternest correction, especially on matters where I’m not even attempting to provide specific data (as is clearly implied in “a century or so” to denote “a fucking long time”) and you’re going to rant and rave (and misquote) to obfuscate the point I’m trying to make. You’re not fooling anyone (well, maybe some of your most obedient acolytes) into believing your version.
,
As I keep saying, if youve got the most powerful being in the universe hellbent on having his good news spread far and wide, you’d figure he would come up with a miraculously incontrovertable bit of evidence from his own time that would astonish atheists and agnostics for years to come. There’s stuff surviving from that period–for an all-powerful being, it doesn’t seem that hard to arrange. If He’s not all-powerful, of if He’s just a fiction, well, that’s an entirely satisfactory explanation of why we don’t have any evidence.
. This “deliberate falsehood” has already been confirmed as true. It has been cited many times, by many people, and you referred to this figure of 20 years yourself earlier in this thread. Was it just to argue against that figure? Then please stop arguing against yourself; I can refute your points all by myself just fine.
It’s not that whole cock-and-bull story is highly improbable–it’s that it’s so transparently so that your position is essentially “Remove all of the tatters of evidence we’ve propped up for so long, and we’ll still claim that it’s all true–because it doesn’t rely on any text, bwhahaha, it’s all based on an oral tradition of faith that every Xian comes to in his heart.” But if the texts have a highly questionable provenance, and you rely on mysticism and oral tradition as the source of your beliefs, why can’t it make sense to you that a rational person would regard Xianity with extreme skepticism?
You’re free, as I keep saying, to believe in any myths you choose, but why keep insisting that your version of reality, with all its holes and improbablities, that as a rational person you must concede, must be accepted by others? I don’t understand why rational creatures such as you and Polycarp want so badly to reinforce a credo that the vast majority of Xians misunderstand and misapply, while most atheists and agnostics actually live lives much more in line ethically and morally with most of Christ’s supposed actual teachings.
It seems to me you’d be outraged at the practices of your fellow Xians, applying crude and silly versions of Biblical teachings to modern-day issues, and would seek to deprive them of a platform to express their beliefs and to disqualify them from seeking public office and to receive your extreme disrespect, rather than demonizing and antagonizing atheists with whom you share most of your values other than theological ones. But, I admit, there’s a lot I just don’t understand about your way of thinking.
It’s not true that NOBODY attributes any extremely early dates to the gospels, but those who do are the most extreme of the fringe traditionalists, and they do so outside of the current of modern scholarship (even specifically Christian scholarship). Theire is little or no scientific method applied to their conclusions, mostly just tendentious apologetics and faith.
By far, the mainstream view (even among Christian scholarship) is that Mark Mark was the first Gospel written, that Mark seems to know about the destruction of the Temple and that Mark, therefore had to have been written sometime after (or very shortly before) 70 CE. Some put it in the late 60’s, claiming it was probably written during the first Jewish revolt, but not necessarily that the temple had been destroyed yet.
In any case, Matthew and Luke are both literarily dependant on Mark, so both had to have been written after Mark. Historians generally assign a time period of about ten years between Mark and Matthew, because it is about the normal time it would take for a book to be copied and disseminated widely.
I also have to concur that it’s widely believed and accepted among historians and NT scholars that the earliest Christians believed the Second coming was imminent (Paul evidently believed this, and his letters are the earliest extant Christian writings), and that the Gospels were written in the wake of a couple of significant historical events. One was the destruction of Jerusalem and the other was Jesus’ failure to appear before “this generation” had passed(interpreted by many at the time to mean that Jesus would appear before the last apostle had died).
Both these events caused some radical changes in the way the new religion was interpreted and communicated.
Incidntally, there probably WERE earlier ‘gospels" of a sort which predated the canonicals, but there were likely just collections of sayings rather than narrative stories or “biographies.” Both Matthew and Luke are believed to have used a sayings source called Q. The Gospel of Thomas is also a sayings gospel and may (in its earliest form) have represented an earlier (possibly even a pre-Markan) example of the genre. We at least have Papias’ testimony that some kind of very early sayings gospels existed, even if he wasn’t talking about Canonical Matthew.
You claimed that it was “a century or so” before anyone provided “documentation about Xianity.” Now you are changing your claim to a “gospel was written 20 years after the life of Jesus” and then falsely claiming that I have made the same claim. I have never made that claim, and, in contrast to my accidental misattribution, your claim is a direct falsehood. I noted that “documentation about Xianity” (your phrase) occurred within 20 years of the supposed life of Jesus, not that any gospel was written then. As to the comments of Papias and any claims that they provided an actual date of 20 years following the death of Jesus, your “cited many times, by many people” claim is something you are making up as you go along–in direct contradiction of your own “century or so.” Putting a date to the “Aramaic Matthew” is a rather recent event that did not attract the attention of very many people, but hang onto that scrap on belief if it makes you feel good.
The only points in this thread that have been “refuted” are yours. When you claim that a non-existent gospel 20 years after the death of Jesus supports your own contention that nothing was put down for “a century or so” then it would seem that I am not the one arguing against myself.
As to ranting and raving, note who has had to post stuff in extra large fonts simply because he could not be bothered to make a point clearly on his first (or second, etc.) try.
I have never suggested that a non-believer would view Christian belief with anything other than skepticism. Do you have any more strawmen in your bag, there?
Ahh! I see you do:
Never in my life have I insisted that my belief or any belief in Christianity be accepted by anyone. Since you attack a position I do not hold, you appear to be simply typing to enlarge your posts.
As to some “vast majority” of Christians who “misunderstand and misapply” the message of the Gospels or the faith of Christianity, you are, again, inventing positions for people whom I suspect you do not understand. There are a number of Christians, (primarily in specific regions of the U.S. and a couple of other English speaking nations) who hold scripture to be a matter of literalness. They are, by no means a majority and only a person who allowed his own provincial lack of awareness to overwhelm his understanding would confuse the Falwells and the Dobsons with any majority of Christians. Even among those persons who do hold scripture to be literal, the message they take from scripture–in common with the real majority of Christians–is the moral and personal messages, not the niggling little contradicitions that so lather up neophyte atheists.
As to who is more ethical or moral: you may conjecture to your heart’s content (just as your counterrpart fundy Christians do), but my experience has not shown me that either believers or non-beleivers are more moral or ethical and I do not look to religious belief explicitly for ethics in any event. (This thread should keep the crows out of the SDMB corn for the next decade.)
Now, you are (as I have stated repeatedly), free to object to the moral lessons or other aspects of (Christian) belief. However, your constant attempts to make your misunderstanding of how and why scripture was written the focal point of your rage is what reduces your arguments to such ineffective posturing.
We have an expression in French that really describes what Tomndeb and the others have been doing for the past dozen or so posts: Analyser de la chiure de mouche It translates as “analyzing fly shit”. Look, the point is not even if the gospels were written 30 or 40 or 60 years after JC died, or 100.
The real point here, the elephant in the room, is that the Bible, and for that matter the Koran, are ridiculous and even laughable contenders for the title of divine message prepared by an omnisicient God for the benefit of the human race.
If the Koran or the Bible are really Books written by the creator of the universe as they claim to be, then they would logically be the most important books ever written, right?
Hey folks! Reality time! Look at the absurdities, contradictions, and just plain unscientific bullshit in both of these books and ask yourself, "Is this the best that an eternal and omnipotent creator of all things visible and invisible could have come up with to communicate with us?
If you want some idea of the unfathomable stupidities and absurdities contained in either book (or the Book of Mormon for that matter) see the Ske[ptic’s Annotated Bible, Koran and Book of Mormon at http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/index.htm
I will not go into a whole list of them. You can look them up.
Let me ask a simple question of the Christians here who are **not ** Mormons. Have you read the Book of Mormon (I have)? Does it strike you as a genuine record of something that genuinely happened in pre-Columbian America, or does its outlandish absurdity and claims strike you as a book written by Joseph Smith to bamboozle people?
Well, I look at the Bible and the Koran and I say: GOD wrote this? Don’t make me laugh.
Deal with the elephant in the room, will you folks?
However, since I do not bother to engage in acrimonious complaints about beliefs, I am simply upholding the tradition of the Straight Dope of attempting to ensure that people who wander around making wild claims get their facts correct.
See, here is one of those pesky facts that you have gotten wrong. There are a limited number of Christians and (currently) rather more Muslims who actually believe that either book was “written by the creator of the universe.” In order to go off and hammer people for holding that belief, you have to find people who hold that belief. When the various neophyte atheists wander into this Forum trying to attack Dopers for holding beliefs because the bible said so, it is only an act of promoting the Straight Dope to note that their claims are silly and based on a strawman form of argumentation. Criticizing believers for holding that a work was “written by the creator of the universe” when the believers do not, themselves, actually believe that, demonstrates a fair amount of ignorance on the part of the critic.
And I look at amateur atheists making silly claims that attack things I do not believe and hand them the shovel to clean up after their elephant since they are the ones who dragged it, trumpeting and resisting, into the room.
I find it truly surprising to see Valteron buying into what he himself chastizes others for: I at least and several others,** Tom** among them, have been at pains to distinguish between the Bible and what God may or may not have to say. It is a collection of writings, by human beings, allegedly “inspired” by God, which collectively reports the understanding that the Jewish people and First Century Christianity had of the God whom they worshiped, insofar as anyone happened to write that material down. For example, it’s eminently clear that Satan as depicted in Job is conceived of far differently than he is in Matthew or Revelation. The very clear and simple issue of Jewish-Gentile intermarriage is very strongly condemned in Ezra and equally strongly praised, by heavy implication at least, in the contemporarily-written Book of Ruth. God’s expectation in terms of keeping the ritual Law is strongly stressed in Leviticus and Numbers, and equally strongly relegated to a much lower place in some of the Psalms, Isaiah, and much of the New Testament.
The Bible is a precious resource for the comparative study of what it is that God may have said through the people who wrote it – but one should never take what got filtered through their preconceptions, and perhaps added to by the unscrupulous, as equivalent to something explicitly dictated by Him. That doctrine is held by a certain segment of Christianity which we have been at pains to dissociate ourselves from.
We – at least I – have been dealing with the elephant. I refuse to be responsible if others insist on taking elephant dung and flinging it around to obfuscate.