Actually, upon reading your post again, the type II errors are not what you are saying in your first paragraph. Lazy and filling in facts with the most probable is MUCH different than “People make up stories…” Dude, settle down. What you are talking about is the Type III errors, which I said I would not tolerate.
Give the benefit of the doubt, will ya? And read more thoroughly too.
All of these instances are God exercising his sovereignty as Creator/Ruler of the Earth. He never claimed he would not harden anyone’s heart, and he reserves the right to do whatever he sees fit, because he is God. (He said in James that he would never tempt, but this is different.)
These are not chances to show off his power, it is part of his divine plan. You can’t make an omelette without cracking a couple eggs, right? It’s a tough fact, but one that God hopes his followers will trust him on.
You’re welcome to creative redefine morality the in the self-sealing way you redefine the concept of fact, but the fact remains that in Ex 7:3 god says that he is going to manipulate events so that he can have a chance to commit a showy genocide to demonstrate his power. Either you hope that is the literal truth or you don’t, but neither option is much of a victory for your position.
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Actually, I clearly did.
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I’ve already addressed that argument.
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Ok, I guess this boils down to a simple question:
If someone gets drunk and is raped, is it their fault?
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It was already a complete sentence. You switched from saying that Lot slept with his daughters to saying that he overindulged in alcohol.
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The Bible specifically states that Lot didn’t know what was going on at the time.
Fuel, both of your cites rely on the same inscription which I already debunked above. Regardless of what you may find on Christian apologist websites there is no objective support for the assertion that the Lapis Tiburtinus refers to Quirinius, and this is not a theory that has any currency in legitimate historical scholarship. It is an assertion propounded only by Christian apologists who simply want it to be so.
The fact does not change that we know who the governor of Syria was in 4 BCE and it wasn’t Quirinius. The fact does not change that we know that there was no census recorded prior to 6 CE and that we know that Judea, as a client kingdom, was not subject to a census before 6 CE.
Your second site tries to bolster the inscription with citations from early Christian historians like Justin Martyr and Tertullian but draws some completely specious and erroneous conclusions from them.
Huh? 
How is he suggesting that? He is suggesting, if anything, that the nativity occurred in 6 CE.
Incorrect. Martyr says that Quirinius was governor at the time of the nativity and governor in 6 CE. The author of the linked piece is deciding a priori that Martyr intends for the nativity to be read as occurring in 4 BCE. Martyr doesn’t say that.
Once again this is incorrect. Before 6 CE Judea was not a Roman province but a kingdom with a king. Quirinius was indeed the first governor of the region in 6 CE. The author does not explain the reasoning for his assertion so I can’t address it other than to say that he is factually wrong.
There is much more in both of your cites that I could address but I’m not permitted to do the amount of pasting that would be required for a point by point rebuttal.
Let me just assure you that there is absolutely no evidence that Quirinius governed Syria twice and there is solid evidence he was not the governor at the time of Herod’s death.
There is also no evidence for, nor reason for a census prior to 6 CE, and it is simply not credible that a census could have taken place without any Jewish resistance or without any notice being taken by historians.
I should also remind you that it is incumbant on those who are making the assertions about a prior governorship and census to prove those assertions, not upon anyone else to disprove them.
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Are you aware that Josh McDowell’s scholarship is so sloppy that most Christians- and even many fundamentalist Christians- consider his books to be worthless?
Let’s start with your first claim. 24,970 surviving manuscripts. So? Those manuscripts are copies of copies of copies. The question is, what kind of bottleneck did the manuscripts pass through? I can make my own translation of the Bible and run off 30,000 copies at Kinko’s. Is my translation more authoritative after I make the copies?
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John Warwick Montgomery is a fundamentalist Christian apologeticist. Think of what you’ve done: you’re a fundamentalist Christian, trying to prove Christianity. When you’re asked for a cite, you cite a fundamentalist Christian, trying to prove Christianity. What’s his cite? A fundamentalist Christian, trying to prove Christianity.
I hope you won’t be offended if I point out that this is the kind of think Jack Chick does. He’ll claim that Catholics worship Isis, but the only evidence he cites is another anti-Catholic screed, published by… Chick publications.
Do you have a neutral source who will back your assertion? A cite to the primary literature, preferably?
Huh? I’m having a hard time figuring out what Kenyon could have meant by that statement. As you’ve quoted it, it’s so clearly untrue that I have a hard time believing that the director of the British museum could have said it.
Paul wrote some letters to different churches. Do we have the original letters, in Paul’s own handwriting? No. Do we have copies made directly from his originals? No. What’s the time frame involved here? Ten years? Fifty? A hundred? Actually, it’s 250-300 years, so we’re probably talking a copy of a copy of a copy of a…
On the other hand, we have plenty of original letters from ancient Babylon. When MSS experts read those letters, they are reading the very letter that some guy composed 3,000 years ago, in the very handwriting of the guy’s secretary. You can’t beat that.
So how on earth could Kenyon claim that “in no other case” do we have such a short time between composition and earliest extant MSS?
Here is a criticism of McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict, if you’re interested:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/index.shtml
Backtrack to the “Christian Apologetics” page and you’ll find more on him.
And you are going to tell God that he can’t manipulate his own creation however he sees fit?
If you write a play, do you expect your characters to agree with the storyline and plot? They are just figments in your imagination, of course they don’t agree, they can’t think for themselves! This deal with God is the same thing, only his creation is real and the characters can think for themselves! Only they don’t see the whole storyline and they have finite minds, so what seems like a viscious action from God to them is in reality a divine pathway to a perfectly fair ending for the vast majority of the characters in the story. (How do you know that Pharoah didn’t receive a complimentary seat in heaven for being a major tool in God’s plan?)
Dockery, Matthews and Sloan (Dockery, FBI, 182) “It must be said that the amount of time between the original composition and the next surviving manuscript is far less for the NT than for any other work in Greek Literature… Although there are certianly differences in many of the NT manuscripts, not one fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed doctrine.”
Here’s an online essay on the differences between the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Masoretic text, and the Septuagint that might be of interest:
http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1990/4/4jerem90.html
If I might add another comment on textual accuracy:
The problem with comparing the Bible to Plato is that it’s apples and oranges. You act as though somehow it’s a double standard to be more critical of the Bible than of Plato, even when the Bible is (you claim) better supported by manuscripts.
But when I read Plato, I accept or reject his ideas depending on whether they make sense. If Plato had a good idea, but it got corrupted in the copying process and was replaced by a bad idea, well, no damage done. I’ll use my brain to evaluate the idea, and reject it as bad.
The Bible is a different story. You’re making an extraordinary claim: the Bible is absolute, inerrant truth. It is also beyond human reason. With our limited perspective, we cannot comprehend the mind of God. So if something is in the Bible, we’d better believe it. And yet, you simply don’t have the original text of the Bible. You simply do not know word-for-word what the original copies of the Bible said. So what’s the point? This “inerrant Bible” is now long lost, so it does us no good. All we have left are corrupted texts. In theory, we could use our heads to evaluate which parts of the Bible are true or not- but that’s not what the inerrantists want us to do. Like the guy said: now that we know the inerrantists’ Bibles were based on the wrong text all along, what will they do?
In short, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that if you want us to believe in an inerrant Bible, you’d better be able to produce an actual text which you can prove to be the inerrant Bible.
Who are these people? What is this citation? How am I supposed to know that “FBI” means?
And please, don’t switch your argument without acknowledging it. You said that “in no other case” could the Bible be beaten. The fact that you could say something so utterly wrong- and could go on as if nothing happened once the error was pointed out to you- casts doubt on all your other cites.
Anyway, your claims about “Greek Literature” are clearly wrong. The MSS for the NT are about 300 years old. The Last Temptation of Christ was written by a Greek a lot more recently than that. Thus any paperback copy of the novel that you pick up in a bookstore is an example of Greek literature that beats the Bible in terms of elapsed time before earliest MSS.
This webpage claims that the earliest extant MSS for Virgil come from the 2nd or 3rd century- roughly the timeframe for the NT. What do you make of it?
(Also, I hope you take it as constructive criticism when I say that that site is the kind of thing you should have provided from the start. Thus far, you’ve said little more than “here’s a big smart guy who said you should believe that I’m right.” That kind of argument from authority doesn’t really help us to evaluate the accuracy of the claim, and, as already pointed out, it leads to serious problems when we can’t even be sure of what, exactly, the authority’s original claim really was.)
The claims for the “elapsed time” for the New testament center on various papyrus scrolls and fragments dating to the second century. (The oldest, P48, is of several lines from the Gospel of John dating to around 125.) There are quite a few partial texts that do date to the second century that are in substantial agreement with the fourth century texts of the complete works.
On the other hand, while this argues in favor of the reliability of the fouth century codices (since they do not seem to have deviated from the second century fragements), I would never make a claim that the second century fragments established their own validity. There are two separate issues:
I think our likeness refers to God’s tribeing nature. Since God is three beings that also just happen to be one being. Also since the Angels existed at the time our could also refer to God plus the Angels.
As for likeness I am not sure about that one. Since Jesus is part of God and God is beyond time. Maybe we have a bit a temporal feedback loop going. A possibility I heard is likeness is metaphorical. Just like we have a Soul, a Mind and a Body. God has the father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Of course God could simply just look like a human. Afer all bothing is stopping him.
Or, there might not be any god whatsoever and y’all are just human suckers without the logical wherewithal to realize you don’t need magic fairies and can just live out your lives and then die and shut up about it.
Well, it is consistant that God twist things around so that lots of people die and a few are saved.
Unfortunately I do believe hardening a persons heart goes against “free will”. If God feels it is ok to Harden a person’s heart, how come he didn’t “soften” anybodies heart before he flooded the world?
I love how people can say that God is all loving, caring, yadda yadda, then turn around and say something like this.
FWIW (IMHO, not much), I have run into literalists who put this spin on the “harden Pharaoh’s heart” passage: At the time of the Exodus, God was producing an enormous quantity of signs (plague of frogs, Nile running blood, etc.) for the purpose of strengthening the faith of those questioning. But this served to act as a compulsion on Pharaoh to take Moses at his word. The “hardening of his heart” was an act intended to restore Pharaoh’s free will, so that he could trulky choose whether or not to let the Israelites go.
IMHO, this sounds like a bit of special pleading, aimed at “saving” the literal wording of the Bible from an accusation of God forcing an attitude for which he then punished. But I thought it was only fair to present it as an alternative understanding of that passage.
Fuel, the problem with this thread from the get-go was that you didn’t state in a clear manner just what it was that you wanted to debate. It didn’t help matters that you were MIA for the next page and a half while other posters were responding to what they thought you were asking. When you finally did show back up it was only to redefine what you were trying to get at. As ** Diogenes** said, you keep moving the goal posts. In one post you try to make a distinction between inerrancy and logical errors and say it’s the essence of the Bible’s message that matters (“Keep in mind that for the Bible to be inerrant in the purest and most functional sense of the word, it’s the end result that matters the most: the message conveyed and received as intended by God.”), in another you say “I am concerned with any and all errors, logical and otherwise.”
Later on you decide that there are three, not two, types of errors, but even then they are so ill defined that it’s unclear where myth-making fits.
Dude, learn to write better!
bnorton, here’s what happened. People assumed that I was claiming that there were no errors in the Bible because I said I haven’t heard any in th OP. The majority of the people who post threads such as this are hardcore inerrancy people, correct? Well, I was different and this assumption was probably applied to me automatically. I got totally screwed becuase of the bad internet connection and I thought I was going to have all these books to read from that weekend and I didn’t get to use them due to bad internet. I tried to come back and explain away everyone’s assumptions by explaining that I was fully prepared to accept errors and was not the normal type of person who comes along asking about this.
This weekend I am back at my parents’ house so I will hopefully have the connection and books.
I never moved any of my own goalposts, I moved the ones you set up for me.
Did you read my reply to Apos a couple of my posts back?
How can you assume yourself a worthy being to determine if God was fair or not? Questioning God’s antics and categorizing them as “harsh” or “unfair” is not possible. It’s simple, I have accepted God as sovereign, and you haven’t. How can you call God unfair when he created the concept of unfair?!
Forget everything you know about life and unfairness and be empathetic to God:
You don’t think he could have changed the rules of “unfairness” for a split second so that he could carry out his plan without breaking one of his rules?
Even if he did break the rules, can’t he choose to break them?
Even if it was wrong to harden Pharoah’s heart, maybe it was because more good was to come of the bad deed? God reserves the right to do that. And you can’t see the greater good, but maybe it’s there hidden from you by your logical, finite mind.
Accepting God as soveriegn is logical… it’s is congruent with obeying a supposed Creator. He created, he can play with his Creation however he wants. God promised certain things (free will, never tempt), but reserves the right to do anything else he wants.
Christianity is not an easy thing to believe in. Maybe that’s what sets it apart from all the other religions. It’s not trying to make everyone happy, it’s telling the stark truth.
He can… but that doesn’t make any given manipulation moral or just. If it could, then words like “moral” and “just” would be menaingless, and you and your god would effectively be a nihilist by definition.
Again, you’re perfectly welcome to invent ad hoc explanations that try to save the story, but at this point, the burden of proof falls heavily upon you to prove the validity of the particular story you tell. I could just as easily make up some random unprovable story that I claim proves what Charles Manson did was all for the eventual good.