Oh shoot, I put link= instead of url in my hyperlink. Let’s try this again:
Here’s the article!
Opus, you apparently missed, or misunderstood the word 'critical", ie not that there are not some differences, but none are critical to either faith. Ie, the dead sea scrolls do not have something like, say, in genesis, an addition to the 7 days- saying “and a minute with the Lord is like a 1000 years with us”, or in Levit- “but pork is OK to eat if made into bacon 1st”, or in Matthew (as has been written in an SF story) “He was brought down from the cross- more dead than alive”. Even the jeremiah deletion, is yet another inconsistancy which can be explained away by those who wish to do so- as so they do the other dozens of inconsistencies.
Still, the level of copying that went on is fantastic, if you consider the huge period of time over which it went. The accuracy is staggering- even if not "inspired’ or “inerrant”. In a way, to those of use who beleive the OT was copied by all-too-human hands, the consistancy between the current Hebrew OT, and the DSS is amazing.
And, yes, those of us who are familiar with the NT- are familair that the VII does not match the Hebrew OT- in fact, that is where the “young girl/virgin” “problem” came out of. Clearly Matthew, who was a pretty good OT scholar, was familiar with the VII, and based his writing from there. This is no news to us. That is where your cite bogs down- he thinks the VII/hebrew thing is big or current news.
ben- “Go away, boy, you bother me”.
That’s a quite different question than the one in the title. After all, the allledged purpose of the Bible is to convince people that Jesus s God. There are plenty of passages that dissuade me from agreeing, and from that viewpoint they are faulty. But whether they are wrong is quite another matter. There are those that refuse to believe that the Bible is wrong, regardless of how much evidence is presented. For instance, one gospel says that, after seeing the empty tomb, Mary told no one. Another says that she told the disciples. The response? The statement “she told no one” means “there was some period of time in which she told no one”. You see, as soon as the obvious meaning of the passage is shown to be false, inerrentists just switch to a discussion of what the writer “meant”, trying to distract people from what’s really important: what the writer wrote. Once your standard is whether what the writer meant is wrong, there’s no way to prove a passage wrong, because one can simply say that the writer “meant” to write something else that is true.
pldennison
I’m surprised to see such an ignorant statement coming from you. One of the first things that is taught in almost any Relativity course is that there are priliveleged reference frame. The sun is one, and the Earth is not. The idea that Relativity says that “everything is relative” is an amazingly common misperception, but I would have thought that someone who participates in the fight against ignorance as much as you do would not share it.
Since when is that the standard?
Note also, that the “fundies”, or at least some of them, are far from being “ignorant”, and do know that there are other translations, even old ones, than they one they use. This is no way weakens their case for “inerrancy”- since they beleive that all the other versions are mis-translations & miscopies, and the one they use is inspired. “Old? Sure, but it was miscopied from the original, god-inspired one, and mine was not”. Hard to argue with that.
Actually, the passage in question states that certain insects WALK on four legs – not that they only have four legs.
See also:
Ooh. You’d do well on question 4 of the quiz I wrote for Intro to NT then. 
http://www.cs.cuc.edu/freethought/bible.html
You also have to consider this: The Bible is one of a very few series of documents from that ancient times that tell history of a people from a relatively objective viewpoint. The failings and foibles of the Israelite patriarchs, the judges and the kings and queens are in there. The negative prophesies of Jeremiah–who, if he were from another state, even Greece, he would be immediately executed by his countrymen–are in the canon. Jesus’s apostles are not always displayed in a positive light. And even Jesus depicted is sometimes a little arrogant; he even sassed his parents. We see little of this objectivity from the Egyptian depictions of their Pharaohs, or of leaders of other kingdoms. The fact that there are some unsavory and disturbing passages in the Bible, even those that are about the authors, is a good indication of its relative accuracy of the history they chronicled.
I do think, however, that there are more than a few verses missing about the women’s actions in Israel.
The Protestant fundamentalist position is that the “original autographs” of the Bible, i.e., the actual first manuscripts of the Gospels, Epistles, or the books of the Old Testament, are inerrant. In the case of the New Testament, this would refer to the original Greek manuscripts. The inerrantists admit that those “original autographs” are no longer available, but deny that this compromises the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. Generally speaking, I don’t think Biblical inerrantists have much truck with things like the “Q” theory of the origin of the Gospels.
A pretty authoritative view of the Protestant fundamentalist/Biblical inerrantist view can be found in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
DITWD:
You want “critical” differences? There are a bunch.
Masoretic text of Dt. 5:29
'Oh that they had such a heart in them, that they would fear Me and keep all My commandments always, that it may be well with them and with their sons forever!
DSS text:
'Oh that they had such a heart in them, that they would love Me and keep all My commandments always, that it may be well with them and with their sons forever!
Is divorce allowed?
Mark 10:11
And He *said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her;
vs.
but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
What of the Trinity?
1 John 5:7
For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
1 John 5:8
And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.
(Some manuscripts)
1 John 5:7
For there are three that testify:
1 John 5:8
the Spirit and the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.
(Most manuscripts)
There’s one version of Matthew stored at the Vatican which reads “and Jacob, the father of Joseph, the father of Jesus, who is called Christ.” So long virgin birth!
What is the nature of God?
The Masoretic text of Is. 45:7 says that god causes both good and disaster. The DSS text says that he creates good and evil. Quite a difference, no?
Wow, thanks for the answers guys. All very informative. I’ve got some good “ammo” here for when I next debate with my Christian friends just how literally we are supposed to take the bible.
And Opus, I never realised such obvious differences ocurred in those translations. Which translation are Christians supposed to accept as the truth?
Different? Sure- but none of those are critical to any major 'sticking point" of any major faith. Would any of these, by itself, overthrow any tenent of any faith? Do they contradict the Jewish Law? The Messiahood of JC? No. Sure, they provide fertile ground for talmudic & biblical scholars to argue, but they would have no effect on any faiths beleifs.
Mainly because it is so easy to reinterpret away differences. At Outreach Judaism they emphasize the many texts that show that Jesus did not fill the requirements of being the Messiah. That does not, however, make their arch-enemies Jews for Jesus disappear. Once a meme is started, it’s hard to stop.
Xenu.net may point out all the flaws and contradictions in Scientology it wants, but the believer will still find reason to believe. It’s the nature of the game, and what encourages me to shrug my shoulders at the whole thing. It’s just not worth it to argue contradiction anymore. Provide some links, and if people see the Bible as contrived philosophy and ancient history, wonderful.
If not, well, more power to them so long as it doesn’t intrude on my life. 
For the ultimate sceptical bible site, just click here
One aspect that has not been mentioned previously is that the Genesis creation story is in itself self-contradictory, if read carefully, and thus refutes, in and of itself, that it can be taken literally. This is because it is composed of two separate origin myths that have not been completed reconciled by the author(s). One of the myths, the familiar “seven-day” one, runs from Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3, while the other includes Genesis 2:4-25.
These stories differ, among other things, in the order in which things are created. The first says, e.g., that birds were created on the fifth day (Gen 1:20-21), and beasts and male and female humans together on the sixth day (Gen. 1:24-30).
In the second story, which does not describe the events in terms of specific days, God creates man before the others (Gen. 2:7), then the beasts and birds (Gen. 2:19), and finally woman (Gen. 2:22). There are many other differences between the two stories, but you get the picture.
I am sure biblical literalists have fancy ways to reconcile these accounts, but if you read them carefully it’s quite clear that there are two very distinct stories involved that are contradictory in their details.
Pardon me Gaspode, but you’ve got that exactly backwards. Using the scientific method it’s impossible to prove anything definitively TRUE. It is quite possible, however, to prove something FALSE. The very heart of the scientific method is the falsifiable hypothesis. I’m sure you must have been writing in haste.
With regards to the OP, the hypothesis that the universe, the Earth, humans, etc. were created in a six-day period about 6000 years ago has been exhaustively tested by the scientific method and conclusively falsified in physics, astronomy, geology, biology and anthropology. The literal truth of the biblical text can also be refuted by the many inconsistancies previously listed (and many others) as well as textual analyses of historical sources. None of this will stop fundamentalists from believing it, though. It all depends on what you accept as “proof.”
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by The Ryan *
**
I don’t recall pldennison claiming that relativity says “everything is relative”, so it’s not fair for you to paint him with that brush.
Where did you get the idea that the Sun is a privileged frame? Certainly not from relativity theory. Special relativity consists entirely of the replacement of the Galilean transformations with the Lorentz transformations in order to account for the observed constancy of the speed of light. Everything else is derived from that. The privileged nature of inertial frames is not questioned in Special Relativity. In General Relativity, a theory of gravitation is developed which is invariant with respect to inertial and non-inertial frames.
Reference frames attached to the Earth or the Sun are non-inertial because they rotate, but they are approximately inertial (that is, Newton’s laws of motion are valid) because the influence of the rotation is normally small. There is no difference between the two in relativity. I recommend the article on relativity in the Encyclopedia Britannica 1973 edition; look at the box on p. 100.
You ought to be more careful with your facts before you go around using words like “ignorance”.
Ablett:
Those aren’t just different translations; those are differences in the original texts!
I thought of another one after I posted. In the Samaritan Pentateuch, Moses receives the revelation from God at Mt. Geniza, not Mt. Sinai! Tell me that’s not a big difference.
Most Christians accept the KJV as the most accurate, although the NIV is gaining in popularity. Both are piss-poor translations.
**Colibri
**
True it was written in haste and without adequate clarification but that doesn’t excuse my promotion of misinformation and I hang my head in shame.
What I should have said I suppose is that it is impossible to prove any non-blanket, non-negative statement false or untrue. In other words if the Bible ever said “All birds are incapable of flight and shall be unto the end of time” then this could be disproved simply because of the blanket ‘all’ and the negative nature of ‘incapable’. Even if it had said “All birds can fly” it becomes impossible to disprove. Maybe an ostrich can fly but chooses not true. We can provide all the evidence in the world demonstrating the aeronautic capabilities of ostriches approach those of a house brick, but can never disprove ostrich flight. If the Bible says “ Israel is inhabited by dragons” then we can never prove that this was not true at the time, or that it isn’t true at this time and we are simply haven’t found them yet. What we can say is that the evidence overwhelmingly points to the fact that Israel is not inhabited by dragons and that ostriches can’t fly.
This is what I intended, and it does make it damn near impossible to ‘prove’ the Bible untrue in any matter. It rarely if ever makes blanket statements on any subject that can be tested and that extend for all time, and I’ve never seen a blanket negative on non-theological topics. When it says things like “X was king in the year YYYY” and we can find no corroborating evidence and every other source states this is untrue it still doesn’t constitute proof. Even silly statements like “The Earth has four corners” can not be proved untrue even in a literal sense. We can find no evidence that it is now or ever was so, and can provide scads of archaeological, geological and experimental evidence that it couldn’t ever have been so, but that doesn’t prove it untrue. This is the situation we have with the apparent errors with The Flood and The Exodus. No evidence for, lots against but impossible to prove.
So I withdraw my statement and replace it with
Sorry Ablett the answer is a definitive NO until someone finds a disputable blanket, negative assertion in the Bible. This is simply because using the scientific method it is a logical impossibility to prove any non-blanket, positive to be wrong or untrue.
I really should be begging you pardon Colibri and thanking you for providing me with the opportunity to clarify myself.
Cheers.
Hah! I take it you haven’t read Asimov’s Guide to the Bible? Just because the writer says something that criticizes previous (or even current) generations does not mean that that writer is being objective. Would you consider Timothy McVeigh to be objective just because he criticizes the American government?
I don’t recall saying he did. Why are you allowed to make inferences from other people’s posts, but I’m not?
In the context of discussing whether the Earth moves around the sun or vice versa, the sun is a priviledged reference frame because it is inertial (or at least, closer to inertial).
For most approximations, they are both inertial. However, for the purposes of this discussion the sun is inertial while the Earth is not.
False.
I think that it is entirely appropriate to use the word “ignorant” to describe an incorrect view, I do not see how I have not been careful with my facts.
Sorry, Cabbage, but you’re wrong on this one.
Look, after Genesis 6:3, Abraham lives 175 years, Isaac 180, Jacob 147, Levi 137, etc.
Jewish commentaries have explained it in one of two ways:
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God was giving the human race 120 years to repent before bringing the flood.
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Man’s life would gradually be reduced to 120 years. That doesn’t mean that it is an absolute limit, but the number of people who live beyond it are darned few.
Zev Steinhardt