It is not more childish to believe that she is on television, it is more childish to interpret what you are told in the most literal-minded concrete way, i.e., as if “Oh guess what honey, your favorite person Anna Nicole Smith is here again” just has to mean Anna Nicole Smith is alive and breathing and right there in the room in defiance of her own death and whatnot, because that’s what “here” means.
OK, look: when you’re in 2nd grade, your teacher has the reading class turn to page 19 in Jack and Janet Visit Their Cousins and she has Suzanne read out loud the phrase “Janet was so happy she was walking on air”.
And the teacher explains that this is a simile, and that the author means that Janet is very happy, and feels like she has so much energy she doesn’t weight anything. And that it doesn’t mean Janet is literally walking around in mid-air or anything.
And the reason the teacher finds it necessary and useful to explain this is that young kids tend to be very literal-minded about things. If the book says Jack got hit by a baseball and he was seeing stars, the kids believe Jack was indeed actually seeing stars. No, not Sirius or Rigel or Betelgeuse, but, you know, stars. Gee, if the author meant that when people get hit hard in the head they tend to experience it like little flashes of light, why the heck do they say stars? Stars have points on 'em. And they show it that way in the cartoons, too.
Now run along to your next class or you’ll be late.
It kind of depends on exactly what you’re looking for. For a good overview of Historical Jesus scholarship and various viewpoints, tryThe Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide by Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz.
If you’d like a suggestion for what to read first, I’d suggest the Ehrman book. It’s a slimmer (cheaper) volume than the others and written in a less academic style than most of the others. Ehrman has a very accessible, breezy, humorous writing style, reads quickly and is good at imparting a lot of information with an economy of words. If you find Ehrman’s book holds your interest, then try some of th others. if he doesn’t hold your interest then you’re only out a few bucks (and all of Ehrman’s books are worthwhile, by the way, not just this one).
DtC, I know I balked at this years ago, but can you also say what translation of bible you use and what greek (or whatever language) to english translation book you use is?
I use the Oxford Annotated Bible for my preferred translation (largely because that tends to be what gets used academically and is the version I was required to use in college). I also have a Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament and I use Liddell and Scott for my Lexicon (although the BDAG is really better for Koine, my college Greek was Attic, so I bought the L&S, which is adequate for Koine and a BDAG is expensive as hell). I sometimes use Strong’s Concordance online if I’m looking for occurrences or variant uses of a certain word, but Strong’s isn’t really a lexicon, it’s an index of how Greek words are specifically translated in the KJV.
Other than that, I still have a few textbooks lying around, both for Attic and Koine. I’ve got Mounce for Koine.
If you really want to learn Koine, get Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek. It comes with a helpful CD-ROM. You should probably get the workbook too. You don’t need an expensive lexicon yet. A simple pocket dictionary like this one should do you fine.
If you’re ambitious enough to want to take a stab at reading a Greek NT, get a Nestle-Aland.
Thanks again, I can’t say that I want to learn to read Greek, I just want to be able to look a few passages up on an as needed bases. Does that change your recomendation at all?
If that’s all you want to do, go to the Blue Letter Bible online. Find the verse you want, and click on the “C” (for “Concordance”). that will give you the passage in Greek (or Hebrew for the OT) and a word by word breakdown of the translations. This only gives you the Strong’s concodences, though.That is, it tells you how each word is translated in the KJV. It won’t necessarily tell you every possibility for each word and it can be a little tendentious. I would suggest using it as a convenient, online starting point, but then getting an actual lexicon (or pocket lexicon) to get the full info on the word you’re looking for.
I should warn you that you kind of have to at least learn the alphabet and the phonetics or else it will all just look like gibberish to you. You can’t just rely on transliterations (changing the Greek letters into English ones) or you’ll never be able to look anything up in a lexicon.
The laws of physics are a theoretical model which explain a set of empirical observations. I don’t find it implausible that the Law-maker could bend them or break them as He sees fit.
Sure, if it’s impossible for physical laws to be broken, then He can’t do that. But why should I believe that these empirical generalizations hold under fantastic circumstances?
Separately:
Surely the Roman army could have conceivably botched an execution, especially during a politically volatile weekend. As for the three days on the slab: well, the timeline isn’t exactly based on eyewitness testimony, is it?
Exactly. It’s sloppy usage which describes as “laws” those things that dictate how physics, chemistry and biology have been observed to operate, since ordinarily by “laws” we mean “statements which have been deliberately made in order to stipulate how things shall be”. Scientific laws cannot, do not, and should not be construed to, stipulate that no agency exists which is able to operate counter to them. They weren’t written down in some big book of How The Universe Shall Work. (Or if they were, then the Writer was at liberty to include an exception clause concerning Himself.)
The statement “Miracles are impossible” cannot be derived from scientific law; it is an axiom. The statement “Miracles, if possible, are certainly vanishingly rare, and I for one regard them with extreme scepticism”, on the other hand, is perfectly well justifiable from ordinary observations, and serves most of us very well as a defence against quacks and charlatans.
/aside. Diogenes, a short while ago you made much of the statement that the account of Thomas’s famous Doubting is found in only one Gospel. Why should that matter to you? The Resurrection itself is attested to in all four; and so, for that matter, is the Feeding of the 5000 (uniquely among all the miracles). Yet I doubt that you consider either to be any the truer simply because they are mentioned more than once.
No, theories are models which explain observed laws. Laws don’t explain anything, they just are what always happens without exception.
“Law-maker?” Physical laws are not “made.” They arise from the inherent properties of matter and energy.
What are “fantastical circumstances” but the silliest kind of special pleading?
Yes it can. Miracles, by definition, are events which violate physical laws. The violation of physical laws is, by dfinition, impossible. Therefore miracles are scientifically impossible. Full stop.
What observation would lead you to believe they are even possible?
The more independent attestations exist for a pericope, the more likely it is to have some authenticity as an oral tradition preceding the Gospels. Some things (like the empty tomb) may appear in all four canonicals but they do not count as multiple attestations since it appeared first in Mark and the others all got it from Mark.
The Doubting Thomas story skips the synoptics and only appears in the latest Gospel written (70 years after the crucifixion by non-witnesses). The absence of the pericope in Mark, Q, Thomas or the Pauline corpus would mitigate against it arising from any pre-Johannine oral tradition. Does this mean it’s impossible that such a tradition existed? No, but I didn’t say that. I just asked BobLibDem if it bothered him that the pericope was so weakly attested.
Still rests on the unproven assumption “All that can happen is governed by physical laws.” You can say “Nothing has been well attested to violate physical law”, but you cannot get from that to “Therefore, nothing can”.
I begin by conceding the peculiar possibility that an entity G could exist such that G behaves in a manner that cannot be reproduced in the laboratory. Should such an entity exist it is therefore plain that the scientific method can neither prove nor refute its existence, nor can scientific laws account for it. That’ll get me as far as possible.
Up pericope. But in words of one syllable, do you or don’t you consider an event more likely to have occurred if it is mentioned in many Gospels rather than one?
Quite. But your proof-by-definition (which I admit I am incompetent to distinguish from question-begging) would, I presume, have to allow for the possibility that if some entity G caused five loaves and two small fishes to feed a hungry multitude, there existed some law L of which we were hitherto unaware?
