Why do people believe in the Bible?

Yes. I’ve read all of the New Testament, and the vast majority of the Old, including pretty much all of the passages regarded as troublesome.

You didn’t hear me say you should.

I use the Bible to support my reasoning when I’m in discussions with others who either accept that the Bible has some sort of authority, or are doing so for the sake of argument in a discussion involving Christianity or Judaism. If I’m debating politics with a Buddhist or an atheist, I’m not going to be quoting the Bible in support of my position.

Clarification: I believe in God, and my personal experience/perception is that God speaks to me through the Bible in ways that He doesn’t through other works, whether we’re talking about the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien or the theology of Rowan Williams. I can’t tell you why this is so, or even provide any evidence that it is true, other than my testimony.

But if you want to know why I “believe in the Bible”, as you put it, that’s a good part of the reason.

You know I hadn’t read the acknowledgements in Part V of who wrote the bible, but now that I did I certainly appreciate the amount of input I’ve received thus far (especially Tomndebb) who has been very insightful in this matter.

But back to the Dead Sea Scrolls (which I’m humbled to say that I am at least 4 decades behind the times, possibly 5… but I’ve done some recent ((read: just now)) research and found some interesting points.)

In the Dead Sea Scrolls:

“God alone hath no equal. He hath had no beginning, nor will he ever have a end, … He hath no sons, nor brethren, nor companions.”
Gospel of Barnabas:17

Big problem if given to direct interpretation. If he hath no sons, then who is Jesus?..

“… Verily ye have erred greatly, O Israelites, in calling me(Jesus), a man, your God. … I confess before heaven, … that I am a stranger to all that ye have said; seeing that I am man, born of a mortal woman, subject to the judgment of God, suffering the miseries of eating and sleeping, of cold and heat, like other men,. Whereupon when God shall come to judge, my words like a sword shall pierce each one (of them) that believe me to be more than man,”
Gospel of Barnabas: 93

For the record the site that I got the two above quotes from seems to be arguing about another interesting problem that Barnabas brings up:

"Those who have studied the scrolls have noticed a common theme prevalent throughout these manuscripts, that is, most of the pesher texts prophesise the coming of a “Teacher of Righteousness” who will be sent by God to the Jews. This “Teacher of Righteousness” will be opposed by the “Teacher of Lies” and the “Wicked Priest.” These scrolls also predict the coming of TWO messiahs. "

Now the site later goes on to say that Christ was the was the teacher of righteousness and Muhammed was the wicked priest. It uses a few note worthy assumptions to draw this hypothesis and a justification to the two passages I listed above (Barnabas: 93 and Barnabas:17). Which is fine and dandy but once again it is a major assumption to make. My point is that this brings further speculation to the topic at hand as you can see by the very quotes listed above. I’m sure Muslims would support the notion that Muhammid was the teacher of righteousness while Christ was the wicked priest.

For reference the site is : http://www.wings.buffalo.edu/sa/muslim/library/jesus-say/ch7.html
(I recommend reading it- just for input. It’s not like the atheist site mentioned earlier.)

At the beginning of this thread I asked “Why should I believe in the Bible” and “Why do you believe in the Bible”. The first part is rhetorical. The second second one seems to be answered by intuition or rather a “feeling” or tradition. I accept that you have a feeling, but my question is what makes that feeling different then those who believe that Nostramous was correct? Or those who believe that they’ve seen a ghost? If it’s a feeling why doesn’t everyone have it?

Minor nitpick: I doubt that. Muslims hold Jesus to have been a prophet and messenger from God (while not being the Jewish messiah or the son of God). As such, it is highly doubtful that Muslims would consider Jesus to be a “wicked priest.”

Zev Steinhardt

So then would they assume that Muhammed is the wicked priest?

I doubt that even more. Mohammed was, in the Muslim faith, the final and greatest prophet.

Why would you assume that the Muslims hold that the Gospel of Barnabas is authoritative at all that they have to have a “wicked priest?”

Zev Steinhardt

I don’t make that assumption at all. But why isn’t Barnabas (as an example) included in the KJV? I don’t know. Was it “inspired” by God? Once again I don’t know. And that’s my point. How do we know that any of these books were inspired by God?

My point is better explained in this paragraph below (taken from this site: http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/muslim/library/jesus-say/ch2.4.html )

(Oh, and this site seems to be arguing why Islam is the one true religion, which may or may not add a bias, but nonetheless the point’s he/she make are still valid.)

“After the departure of Jesus (pbuh), the apostles and many other people began to write “gospels.” Each one of these authors would travel to other lands and be followed by a number of people who would adopt this man’s gospel as his “Bible.” Now, even the unscrupulous began to write “gospels” and to claim they were from a given apostle or that they themselves were receiving divine inspiration. Many new and innovative teachings began now to be introduced into the religion of Jesus (pbuh). Enmity, hatred and war began to break out between these groups. Each person claimed that they alone held the “true” Gospel of Jesus (pbuh) and no one else. Their beliefs now ran the gamut, from those who believed Jesus (pbuh) to be a mortal messenger of God and nothing more, to those who claimed partial divinity for Jesus (pbuh), to those who claimed Jesus (pbuh) to be a true god, but independent of God himself, to those who called for a “Trinity,” to those who claimed that Mary (pbuh) too was a god, to those who believed in two gods, one good and the other evil. This is when the war of the gospels began.”

The quote illustrates what is accepted to be true may not necessarily be.

The same author goes on to say,

"Whenever a scholar of Christianity would stumble upon the truth and begin to write about it his works would invariably be destroyed (e.g. Sir Isaac Newton, the 16th century Spaniard Michael Servetus, etc.). In all cases, it was recognized that there was no need to disprove the author’s evidence or refute it, rather, it was sufficient to muzzle the opposition, burn their books, extract a confession from them under duress, and expel them from society or kill them.

Even the Popes themselves would sometimes recognize the falsehood of the “Trinity” and the fact that it was a later fabrication of mankind. One of these popes, Honorius, was officially cursed forty eight years after his death by the Synod which was held in Istanbul in 680 C.E."

If he is indeed correct I think there is enough evidence to show that there is reasonable doubt as to the validity of the bible. If a Pope, the top of the holy ladder, finds difficulty in sections of the bible then how can anyone be sure about anything written in it?

But that is slightly askew from what I’m really asking. Why do people believe in the Bible? Why doesn’t everyone have that “feeling” (or epiphany?) that a selected few seem to get? If that feeling ensures salvation then how can a fair and just God not provide it to all?

People do not necessarily need a reason to believe in something: they just might. It might just be part of what they believe, and there’s nothing much you or they can do about it.

As for biblical inerrancy, it’s important to realize that even this minority opinion has many subsets, from god inspiring things word for word to god ensuring the fidelity of the message to the text being written by honest men (ensured honest by god) but in their own words relating what god supposedly related to them (sometimes years later). All these views have subtle implications, and you can’t examine them all as if they were exactly the same.

As for Bible contradictions: there is really no way to convince someone that doesn’t want to be convinced that there is any contradiction. Why? Because by presenting the contradiction, you are dealing with a reversed burden of proof: trying to prove that there is no way that two passages could be anything but a contradiction. But there is simply no way to cover all the bases, and all an inerrantist need do is suggest some additional facts, even ad hoc, that account for the apparent contradiction with extended context. Put plainly: what we have is a negative proof, which is nigh impossible to nail down in practice.

Cliff Walker has examined this extensively with the fig tree example. The basic question is: Why does Jesus curse the fig tree for not bearing fruit when the text of Mark itself says that it was not the season for fruit.

In response to this challenge there is often first the objection that fig trees flowered early that year, and when challenged about this, there are tons of complex accounts attempting to show that the fig tree species was different than we modern people expect, and bore fruit earlier, that it was unseasonably warm, etc. etc. All this, of course, is totally beside the point: no matter what account of fig trees is given, it doesn’t change the fact that the text of Mark, the inerrant text, says explicitly that it was not the time for figs. So while these explanations are totally off-the-wall (and perhaps unecessary, since it isn’t a contradiction per se anyway), the example does demonstrate the sort of complex MO people often undertake in seeking to resolve contradictions.

Further, it demonstrates how backwards challengers have the situation. Namely, to resolve the contradiction, all that needs to be made is a mere suggestion of sitaution that could exist that resolves the contradiction, no matter how convoluted. No attempt even needs to be made (though attempts often are, as with the fig tree) to demonstrate that this possibility is really the case, or that it too doesn’t cause an additional contradiction.

The real problem is not specific elements of contradictions, but why the account should be accepted in the first place as, apriori, free of the normal sorts of contradictions found in texts of all sorts, especially those that are giant compilations of millenia of writing. There is, of course, no real answer to this outside of simply presuming it to be so, by faith. Seen this way, what we are left with is a text, like most others of its kind, which contains ambiguous passages that may or may not be contradictions, with no real way to demonstrate the fact for certain one way or the other. One can read them either way. The question then is WHY should we read them as necessarily all one way or the other, and indeed why should the account be believed in its entirety at all?

So, in the face of a claim of inerrancy, it will not do to simply drum up claimed contradictions (some of the most common of which are indeed, misreads, but others are clear examples of potential contradictions that can only be resolved with additional hypothetical arguments that are not present in the actual text), because that will quickly devolve. The important matter is the claim of inerrancy itself: why SHOULD anyone think that the ambiguities are not, and never can be, contradictions?

Well, you’ve answered your question. The gospel of Barnabas isn’t in the KJV, or any Christian bible because there was a consensus at some synod that fixed the canon that it was not inspired by G-d.

Houston! We have a problem.

The Gospel of Barnabas (purported to be the work of Paul’s assistant) could not be connected to the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which were written before Jesus was born. If you have a source linking them, that source is in serious error.

In addition, the Gospel of Barnabas appears to have been a work written in Moorish Spain that attempted to reconcile Islam and Christianity (with a heavy leaning toward the “correctness” of Islam). The earliest fragments are written in Spanish and the oldest complete copy is in Italian. (I know that some of the web sites have “citations” pointing back earlier, but you will note that they are generally Muslim sites. While the early Christians speak of a Letter of Barnabas and I have seen brief allusions to an Acts of Barnabas (neither of which was selected for inclusion in the canon), there are no references that I can find to a Gospel of Barnbas.


The issue of the “Teacher of Righteousness” is a little more pertinent–but not much.

When it was first discovered that the Qumran scrolls were linked to the Essenes, there were three groups of people who showed immediate interet: historians and scripture scholars who were delighted to find primary documents from the last two centuries of the previous era, interested laypersons hoping that we would discover new information about Jesus, and New Age and related flakes who wanted to tie Jesus to their own private philosophies.

Among the scrolls were two documents who described the “Teacher of Righteousness,” including allusions to passages in Isaiah regarding the innocent man who would suffer unfair judgement and references to conflict with (and condemnations of) the priestly class in Judaism. Since the gospels had alluded to some of the same passages from Isaiah and Jesus was portrayed in conflict with the leaders of Judaism, there was some initial excitement that there was a connection between Jesus and the “Teacher of Righteousness.” However, as more information was developed about the Essenes, it became clear that the references to the Teacher were directed toward a member of the Essenes many years prior to the birth of Jesus. The allusions to Isaiah were coincidence (much as admirers of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton claimed the mantle of FDR’s leadership when promoting their favorites)–it was easy to use a well-known passage of scripture to “justify” the opposition they encountered.

As complaints that the group studying the Qumran Scrolls was being slow in releasing materials leaked into the public awareness, some of the New Age types seized on the “cover-up” potential that such information could seem to support and there have been many claims that direct connections between Jesus and the Teacher have been found and suppressed.

With the facsimile distribution of all the Scrolls from Huntington Library a few years ago, such tales can now be dismissed (although the true conspiracy believers continue to cherish them).

LiquidLobotomy:

Could have fooled me - please re-read your very first statement in this thread.

Oh? Please do show me the “early, unchanged version” of the Bible (I’m talking Old Testament here). Until you - or anybody - can produce that, it is wrong of you to make that statement as fact. (and don’t tell me “E” version and “J” version…unless you can produce a copy of either as a separate document.)

I maintain that the huge number of scholars involved in studying it maintained the integrity of the text - anyone attempts to change it, there are enough people who know the original to put the lie to it.

Well, challenging religious believers as to whether or not they’ve ever actually read the Bible and quoting a few Biblical contradictions as if you’ve sprung a “gotcha” on them certainly implies it. And you don’t know much about “atheists.org”? How wise of you to quote from them…but I’ll lay off that. Suffice it to say that their website and similar ones have a nice little canned “list” of such “gotchas” and those lists weren’t compiled for the sake of inspiring belief or respect for believers.

Be that as it may, your OP was addressed to any people who believe in the Bible - which I took to mean not limited to the Christian Bible.

Well, that’s a different issue; your OP, which I was responding to, was asking about (what you assumed to be) believers’ ignorance of their own source material.

Chaim Mattis Keller

Well first of all, in the absence of any positive evidence to that effect, I think that resorting to such conspiracy theories isn’t very fruitful.

Moreover, this would have required a monumental effort on the part of the church. Given the severity of such an undertaking, I think the burden of proof must reside on those who postulate such an elaborate scheme.

And finally, Biblical manuscripts (and quotations from such) have been discovered long after the 700’s. Consider the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example. Should we postulate that the church deliberately modified the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then hid them anew with no evidence of tampering, so that they would someday be rediscovered? That seems mighty implausible to me.

Feelings do not ensure salvation. Salvation comes through a relationship with Jesus. This is available to all who seek it. There are some who for their own reasons reject salvation. You seem to have many misconceptions about the Bible, what version are you reading?