no, i genuinely think it's hilarious that you so readily contradict yourself. you're on the one hand arguing that i can't see the forest for the trees, and on the other, arguing that this one particular leaf is the forest. this is where i am forced to again to question your reading comprehension. since my reading was that matthew horribly misrepresents the context of the prophecy. you obviously cannot agree with that reading and still think it does not affect matthew's claims. not relevant to the discussion. isaiah may have been divinely inspired, as he says, or he may not have been. it really doesn't matter. all that matters is that he does not fail the test for false prophets. matthew does, on both accounts. but even still, this is not the issue. we are comparing representation. do you agree that the verse i posted from the book of mormon misrepresents isaiah? and that you just misrepresented the book of isaiah? why does the NT get a pass? you sure haven't read much prophecy. some of it's apocalyptic, you know. and a lot of the messianic prophecy is aimed at the whole world. no, i'm assuming that god doesn't doublespeak. when he says something, he means it. i am, however, honestly surprised that you used "exegesis" correctly in a sentence. clearly, the messiah will come from abraham -- and the messiah we're talking about here is not just a specific little one, but the messiah that will bring about world peace.nobody is debating that there is messianic prophecy in the bible. certainly, there is. the problem is that much of the stuff the NT quotes as messianic isn't, and even if it is, can't have been about jesus. and you can tell, from the context.and sure, maybe they're all somehow symbolic of the messiah, but that does not mean that the NT is representing them in an honest way when it tries to make them apply specifically and directly to jesus.

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we're pretty certain that joseph smith was a real person. granted, the bible has about a half-dozen more people that are independently verified from sources that don't just cite the bible. but that's not particularly a significant difference. in any case, the book of mormon contains a great many characters from the bible -- it's very fond of quoting isaiah. don't be silly, dawn. i am. right now. this very instant. and you could be too, if you'd read some of it. i've actually been involved in several discussion on the topic, and would be interested in participating in a few more. but the fact is that this is a "creation v. evolution" board, and the most vocal and persistent creationists are all evangelical christians. we hear little from the other two of the big three, judaism and islam. indeed, instinctive knowledge is most definitively not the test for truth in inspiration. most of the OT prophets taught the truths that people didn't want to acknowledge, and little of it was touchy-feely stuff that we "know" in our hearts to be true. rather, it is the truth, cold and hard, and the word of god. however, if feeling is enough for, i challenge you to read the book of mormon, and take the test:

quote:

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And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. (Moroni 10:4)

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i promise you that every person that calls themselves a latter day saint thinks they have received this inspiration and confirmation from god. it's certainly enough for them. again, ask a mormon. they will give you the exact same speeches you have given me. that it's independently confirmed, that it expands the message of the bible and reveals the larger picture. that it's a question of faith, and whether you believe joseph smith was inspired. that you need a certain degree of inspiration yourself to read and understand it... everything you have claimed, i have heard from mormon missionaries. verbatim. agreed!on to the next question. why would god give a divinely inspired matthew a 200 BC greek septuagint, complete with a copyist error and a translation fail?

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well there's your problem! you seem to think that even false prophets speak the truth! that the things that bible calls lies and statements made by idiots and fools are also true.to which i refer you to my context post above. surely this logic would mean that the bible genuinely claims that there is no god. the bible said it, so it must be true! who cares if it's a fool speaking, he's actually right! if so, then he is also a false prophet that isaiah is condemning.

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on the contrary. because he does, we know he is not inspired. i continue to marvel at why you think inspiration of one scripture must apply to all scriptures. it is not a clear part of any context. perhaps some, but that has never been the point. off the top of my head, daniel 7 and perhaps zechariah 9, which reflect much more the kind of thing that is described in revelation, as opposed to in the gospels.certainly, zechariah 9 fits some specific historic context, but remains largely unfulfilled thanks to the everlasting world peace that never happened.

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hi dwise1, okay, so i have a confession to make. and i'm surprised that people haven't picked up on this before.sometimes, on throw-away points like that one, i'll come back with a one liner that isn't quite accurate, intentionally. i typically do this to give the other person an easy out, and see if they're paying attention. discussion's more interesting that way, and i like to read other points of view and challenge my own. i can't say i expected dawn to call me on it, because "word of god" is a pretty common phrase in modern christianity (and the gospel of john).but since dawn seems to lack any logical debate mechanisms (even the ability to read), i found it somewhat peculiar that he was arguing for logic. i was also genuinely surprised that he use (and spelled) "exegesis" correctly in a sentence. speaking of which, and i don't mean to be rude here, you've misspelled mine. so far, there's been exactly one instance where dawn posted something that i genuinely had no idea what he meant. i happen to be fluent in fool, have a lot of experience with fundamentalist churches (and rhetoric), and am prone to making many typing errors myself. i type in all lowercase here, so i try not to fault other peoples' poor posting habits. i frequently leave out negations (boy how a missing "not" can change a meaning), passive verbs, and endings on words, and this could mean that my posts sometimes become nonsense. personally, i think it's just that they wouldn't know what sense was if it bit them on ass. they're not just creating confusion, so much, they're also victims. see that dawn claims to agree with my exegesis of isaiah 7, yet can't grasp how that precludes it from having been about jesus in the way that matthew claims? you can't actually do both. we're really at a p=~p kind of logical point. if we assume that p=~p, all logic inherently breaks down.dawn is making that kind of assumption. and that is his problem. he can't tell claims from their own inverses. see the bit about "line upon line", a view that isaiah condemns, where he states that the false prophets were actually revealing a truth in their mockery. this is a claim i frequently run into when discussing job. those friends that god says were wrong? well, they were actually right. you know, in a broader sense.Edited by arachnophilia, : see, left out a passive verb again.

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i'm not normally one to confirm the jesus-freaks. i've been there, and i've done that. but this statement happens to be accurate. jar phrased it earlier as "a godly dope-slap".the thing is, the jesus-freaks were talking about stuff like "you're a sinner and you're going to hell!" not "your priests are liars and frauds" -- which is what isaiah 28, discussed above, is about. they were using it just as much as a control mechanism as the televangelists. they just more emphasis on the "breakdown of self" portion of the cult indoctrination. it's certainly easier. but it's not really what the bible is talking about.

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it's called "reading", dawn. i suggest you try it. go back, and read isaiah 7 again. read my post again. there is no "interpretation" going on. it's basic reading comprehension. isaiah says one thing, pretty clearly, and i'm just explaining what he said. even you said you agreed with that explanation. inspiration is irrelevant. "it was inspired by gawd!" is not the magic argument that makes everything go away. inspiration does not mean that there is a larger message (and, by "larger" i mean a small portion ripped out of context), or that that larger message is about jesus. neither of those arguments follow, like you seem to think that they do. says the man who quotes drunken false prophets condemned by the bible, as an example of how god operates. like those drunkards and fools that isaiah rails against, you make a mockery of god.no, the argument is not that there can be no other. it's that it clearly is not referring to jesus. perhaps i have a different, expanded view of inspiration that you haven't considered? in any case, it's not that i'm on the fence about it, its that it's irrelevant to this discussion. first of all, matthew is not a prophet. you may or may not have noticed that i've been using the term author for matthew. this is because he is simply a student, a follower of christ, who wrote down a hagiography of christ. he is not, and never claims "inspiration" in the way that prophets actively speak for god. there is precisely one prophetic book in the NT, and that's revelation. all of the other prophecy is told about by authors such as matthew.second, you are making the fatal mistake of assuming that all scripture is "precept after precept, line upon line, here a little there a little." the bible a large collection of books that happens to quite beautiful in its diversity. most is religious, but some is secular. some is poetry/song, some is history, some is prophetic, some is traditional, some is law.there is no particularly good reason why inspiration in one place should mean inspiration in all places.

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i promise you, it's not. i'm generally the only one who presents anything relating to judaism, and i'm not jewish. you've been lucky, ramoss dropped one message in this thread. he is probably our most prominent (only?) jewish forum member. we used to have amlodhi, but he doesn't seem to be active anymore.in my 6 years here, i've seen judaism discussed, outside of christian contexts, about as frequently as the book of mormon or quran, from LDS or islam sources. you're funny. clearly, that is a test. and if that kind of test is not good enough for you... well, then perhaps we should go back to my test: deuteronomy 18. you missed the point. it's okay, it was subtle, i know. i didn't spell it out for you, and hold your hand through it.the septuagint is a translation of the hebrew bible into koine greek. like any translation, it has its quirks. we know that matthew was copying from the septuagint, because where he quotes from the OT, it retains some of those quirks. one of them is the word "virgin". the verse in the septuagint is translated using parthenos to mean "young woman".similarly, luke, in copying down the genealogy of christ, also retains a copyist error, where the septuagint scribe duplicated a name accidentally. not of those details, they don't! they confirm that, overall, what we have of the bible is probably pretty close to the source. in the same way that matthew is a liar: he wrote down the words of his teacher. i don't see a gospel written down personally by jesus, ergo, the gospels must all be lies. right?oh, but the title. yeah, don't get too hung up on those. titles are traditional, and many of the titles you're familiar with don't appear in the hebrew bible. for instance, genesis is called "in the beginning", exodus "names", leviticus "called", numbers "in the desert", and deuteronomy "word", all after the first or second word in the book... because the books do not actually have titles. all titles, and chapter numbers, and verse numbers were added later, and are traditional. calling a book that comprises the prophecy of isaiah "isaiah" only makes sense. it doesn't mean that the author is a liar because you think it had to have been written by isaiah personally. your notion of how the scriptures are written is just wrong. this is not isaiah's fault. doesn't matter. again, this is not about the validity of isaiah. it's nice that his words were more or less accurate, sure, and if they were written after the fact, that's probably bad. whatever.the point is that matthew misrepresent the words of isaiah. well, it's a good thing i haven't done that then. perhaps you should re-read my post. there's nothing about what i like or dislike, or believe to valid or invalid. it's simply an examination of what isaiah says versus what matthew says.personally, i happen to like this jesus fellow. i think he expands on the positions of the law and the prophets, in his teachings. but it's really too bad that matthew can't faithfully read that law or those prophets. dawn, as i stated above, you can't seem to tell a claim from it's own contradiction. you agree with my reading of isaiah 7, but don't see how that contradicts matthew. you agree that the prophets and priests in isaiah 28 were false, but don't see how their teachings are also false.your claims are meaningless and gibberish -- mutter after mutter -- because you do not have even the most basic foundation in logic. you seem to think that claim "p" and claim "not p" are indistinguishable, and so all your logic breaks down because then nothing can ever be refuted. we can never hope to follow a premise to a conclusion, because we can't even get past the premise.so, your claims about logic are truly funny, dawn. please, keep it up.

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it is, however, the part that matthew quotes. and the context shows that that part could not have related to jesus. you are more than welcome to post anything else from isaiah you feel is about jesus, especially if its quoted by a NT author. but so far, all you've proven is that you don't know how to read. i know! how silly of me to read the bible! indeed, "critical thinking" and "commitment to the scriptures" (in the way that you almost certainly mean) are polar opposites. rather, i am thinking critically about the scriptures. i recognize that this is anathema to you, but i suggest you try it. otherwise, you come away with thinking it's a big book of "precept after precept", and fail to see the true beauty of the text. again, it is wholly irrelevant to the question of whether matthew faithfully represents his sources. he could have been talking about a complete work of fiction -- intellectually dishonest quotemining is still intellectually dishonest quotemining. it doesn't matter what that source is, only how matthew relates it. i'm sorry, i was unaware that christianity has no basis in the old testament. if this is your argument, i formally withdraw my point.

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"it's all inspired, because i said so, and you have to inspired to see it" is not really a good rebuttal to any of my points, as i have detailed. pot, meet kettle.you have yet to demonstrate that you can read the bible, and understand what it means. your quotes are continually out of context, and frequently rebut your own points. perhaps this is simply endemic of christianity; i don't know.

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yes, that is pretty funny. actually, i have a more interesting interpretation of just who imanuel was. i found a really interesting doctoral thesis on isaiah 7:14, and i'm going to post a link to it in the prophecy thread.i'll give you a hint, though. "imanuel" meant that god was on the side of judah during the assyrian invasion: adonai was the strength that repelled assyria at the walls of jerusalem.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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yes, it is. you just have to read it even you said you agreed. *facepalm*i did not interpret the text in that post. i simply explained the straightforward, literal reading, based in context. isaiah does not identify the child. but it does give a number of details in the text that can disqualify pretty much anyone born after 720 BC.there are several legitimate interpretations of who the imanuel child was, and all are based in parsing the grammar of the sentence: the woman is referred to with a definite article, and the "is pregnant" is present tense. she would have been known to both ahaz and isaiah, and would have been pregnant at the time. this means the child has to be:

1. isaiah's son, who is born in the very next chapter, as ramoss interprets
2. ahaz's son, probably king hezekiah who becomes very important later in the book and relates directly to the theme of the assyrian invasions
3. representative of all children born at that time, but i feel this betrays the specificity of the grammar

so, those are your options. a child born 700 years later, that has nothing to do with either ahaz, isaiah, or assyria is simply not an interpretation allowed by the text. ramoss and i can disagree about who the child is without making the whole debate "interpretative". we both agree about who the child is not. no, dawn, the problem is that your misrepresentations don't make even the slightest lick of sense; whereas any sane, rational person reading isaiah 7 would come to precisely the same conclusion i have: it can't be aboue jesus. the fact that my approach is simply reading the text, and seeing what it has to say, speaks volumes about your claims relating to rationality.further, you have misrepresented the bible at every turn, even in off-hand quotes. you have even spoken in favour of false prophets. dawn, this is as simple as comparing two texts, and what they say. use your head. no. you have a brain. use it. further, you have given no particular standard about how we determine whether or not inspiration is present in a text. you have simply and arbitrarily assumed it for the bible, nut denied it for other similar texts. do you even read what you write? good. so were the leaders of the church of latter day saints. you might be interested to note, however, that matthew is not listed among the apostles in the gospel of john. in fact, his name isn't mentioned anywhere in the book. and even if it was, there's no particularly good reason to assume the book we have come to call matthew was written by that same matthew the apostle from the synoptic gospels. the titles of the books, as explained above, are traditional. the gospels were named much later, and do not actually claim authorship, except for perhaps luke/acts. you've never even been to sunday school, have you? no, and as i keep saying, it is not relevant to this discussion. the question is, why do you blindly accept every book of the bible, simply because they are published together? you might be interested to know that the history of canonization is a long and complicated one, and even today, there is a lot of disagreement about what should be, and should not be in the bible. for instance, the catholics have about another half-dozen books in their bibles. son, you wouldn't know what facts or logic even are. please feel free to critique me when you learn to read, and think. all of what? which canon are we talking about?this is really the kind of thing that tells me that you haven't been exposed to much actual bible study. i have one bible, called a chumash, that is just the torah, with commentary and excerpts from the haftorot (in hebrew and english). i have another that is the entire tanakh (or "old testament"). i have another that is just the new (in koine greek and english). i have several more that are both and old and new testaments. i can easily find a septuagint online, which contains books not in your bible. which canon, and why?the bible simple is not the monolith you think it is. it's a collection of texts, and different groups disagree on what should go in it. would you feel better if i did claim inspiration? of course, matthew does not, but that is beside the point. you simply have no mechanism for telling the difference. i don't know why you think this rebuts anything i've said, or what you're even trying to claim. you're somehow offended that i chose to defend isaiah against your accusations of him being a liar simply because someone else wrote down his words? i don't get it. what do you have against the bible, dawn?i have never claimed that isaiah wasn't divinely inspired. just that matthew's interpretation is not founded in what isaiah wrote -- thus, dishonest. do, the bible cannot make god's plans known? ok. i'll follow you for a second here. so, the inspired matthew reveals isaiah's true meaning. but... who reveals matthew's true meaning? ...and who reveal's that person's meaning? the argument, dawn, is so simple it barely needs stating. but since you can't understand obvious implications -- or even direct statements that i've spelled out before -- i'll spell it out again for you.you have two options, either:

1. god is honest, and matthew is not divinely inspired, or
2. god is a liar, and all bets are off

if god is a liar, why should we believe any of the bible? agreed! why, then, does matthew misrepresent isaiah? that post was a concession that the validity of isaiah's prophecy is subjective, depending on when you think the book was actually written. personally, i think it's largely irrelevant, because the power of prophecy is not in prediction. prophets are not fortune-tellers. they are the mouthpieces of god. note that leviticus 20 commands the deaths of people who presume to tell the future. sure. but the inspiration of isaiah doesn't affect the fact that matthew misrepresents the prophecy. sure, god can lie if he wants to. i agree. but if you start assuming that god does lie in his inspiration of the texts, well, as i said, all bets are off. how do we then know that anything is truthful? sure. there is absolutely no reason that god couldn't have an ancient prophecy refer to something that happens 1000 years later, or even today. but if he did, it would be obvious and speak to the power of god. it wouldn't be through shrewd manipulation and removing context and changing words. it wouldn't be sneaky, or obscured. it would be right there, plain as day -- just like all of the prophecy in the bible. er, no, that's simplistic and short-sighted.you might as well say hamlet is "about a guy" or romeo and juliet is "about these two kids." yeah, uh, thanks for that brilliant analysis. i'll stick with reading it, thanks. in that case, i suggest you start proof-reading your posts! okay, so, try and follow me here.

1. god inspired isaiah
2. god can't misrepresent his own inspiration
3. matthew misrepresent isaiah

your conclusion: "matthew must not have misrepresented isaiah". the proper logical conclusion, given those three premises, is that god didn't inspire matthew. not that one of the premises is wrong. to do that, you'd have to add another premise -- that god did inspire matthew. but this is simply an assumption that you are drawing from nowhere.in fact, as i keep mentioning, the inspiration of isaiah isn't actually relevant. it works just as well like this:

1. god can't misrepresent his own inspiration
2. matthew misrepresent isaiah

conclusion, god didn't inspired matthew. which continues to confirm my belief that you really haven't read the bible at all. or if you have, you haven't understood much. after all, to you the text is simply "precept upon precept, line upon line", like it is to the drunkards, and false prophets isaiah was condemning. the problem is that it has to be about what the bible says first, otherwise we might as well just make shit up. the only way to we have to know what god said to isaiah and perhaps matthew is what is recorded in the bible. and if one of them is lying about what the other said, well, it sort of throws credibility out the window. fine. but claims to not always equal reality. clearly, the book of mormon and the quran both claim inspiration from god, and they're both about god's purposes. why do you reject those claims? they're clearly pretty important too. ah! you've started reading that verse correctly! i have taught you something. which, kind of makes the rest of that statement a little silly, if you think about it. ha!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

haha. ha. ha.okay, i'm done now. the issue, as i keep explaining, is that you have a mush of the text. you do not differentiate one text from another. to you, it's all gibberish, precept upon precept. you do not see that isaiah is one book, with a point, and matthew is another book, with another point. perhaps there is some symbolic relationship between those points, sure. isaiah is primarily about god and his kingly servant protecting jerusalem through the assyrian onslaught of ~720 BC. matthew is about the salvation of the world through god's son. clearly, one is invoking the other for a reason. but this does not mean that those points are indistinguishable, or that matthew's invocation of isaiah is accurate in its specifics. jesus does not fulfill those prophecies, because those prophecies were never about jesus and were all fulfilled well before he was born.i know you don't see the difference. but your vision is dim and clouded. yes, you have. your reading comprehension is clearly not your best skill. i have never "spoken confidently" about inspiration in this thread. rather, i have continually noted that it's irrelevant.

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comma placement fail.

quote:

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The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. (Mark 1:3)

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quote:

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As it is written in the book of the words of Esaias the prophet, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. (Luke 3:4)

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isaiah 40:3 says,

quote:

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קוֹל קוֹרֵא--בַּמִּדְבָּר, פַּנּוּ דֶּרֶךְ יְהוָה; יַשְּׁרוּ, בָּעֲרָבָה, מְסִלָּה, לֵאלֹהֵינוּ
a voice rings out, "clear in the desert a road for the LORD! level in the wilderness a highway for our god!"

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if it had wanted to say "a voice in the wilderness" it would have said בַּמִּדְבָּר קוֹל קוֹרֵא and not the reverse. the verse is directed at jerusalem (v2) decimated from the assyrian war, and the highway is likely for the jews returning from exile. the voice itself is perhaps that of the prophet, or god speaking through the prophet.

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stick around a bit, dawn. that's more or less the topic of the rest of this board. what dwise1 says is true: when kids raised as creationists go off to college and are confronted with real science, the lies their parents told them are extremely damaging do their christian faith.as i mentioned very early in either this thread or your other thread, this principle is not limited to biology or geology. it also applies to theology. there's a fairly high drop out rate from seminary, too.

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dawn, are you really this thick?please go back, and read those posts again. i did state that there are several legitimate interpretations of who the imanuel child was -- but did i go into that in the original post? no, i did not. because that post did not interpret anything. it was simply explaining how to read, the basest level of biblical exegesis. there is quite a difference between interpreting and simply reading a passage.you should know better. feel free to respond in a way that doesn't simply repeat the same nonsense you've been saying all thread. have a happy new year, dawn.

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