Validity of differing eyewitness accounts in religious texts

I do not agree with your assessment of the situation, on some five points in your post. Sorry to be such a headache, however, but this is a relentlessly hostile environment and I deal with it as I can. If you have to ban me, that's just the way it will have to be. In any case I have to take a break for a while, so you can get a rest from having to police me.

Sorry I said anything. I won't do it again.

I gave facts about the Koran with reference to witness only, and very very few. You came on with a deluge of nasty irrelevant completely off-topic rejoinders. I am simply not having a discussion with you. Period.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-26-2005 03:11 PM

Sorry if I was merely being abrupt. The problem is that you have views that are SO completely somewhere else from mine, I don't even know where to begin to discuss them with you, and you do seem to have your mind made up, which makes my comments in the previous post useless, AND the topic of this thread is ONLY the validity of witness reports -- which I admit I transgressed with my post to you.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-26-2005 03:46 PM

Nobody ever said Peter was the ONLY one who understood Jesus to be the Messiah. All his disciples were following Him because that was their belief. It isn't a matter of "crediting" one over another. But Peter's confession at least as reported in Matthew, contained the further insight, not generally understood by the Jews of the time, that Jesus was not only the prophesied Anointed One of God, but the actual Son of the Living God.Anyone can pick any text apart and find contradictions of their own invention if they have a mind to. It's the easiest game in the world for a hostile reader, and with the Bible it is especially easy as you have no understanding of the theological context of the literal words you are finding fault with.I would also point out that the way you are approaching the topic of witness validity far exceeds the limits I understood to be the intent of this thread, which was to establish the validity of witness reports in relation to physical evidence and possibly other forms of authentication of religious claims, and discuss general ideas of what constitutes evidence.The Bible is involved exclusively with witness reports. The task to you is to show that the Koran has witness reports of any kind whatever. You conceded that it does not have witness reports. Then you must show some other kind of authentication for it.Then the task is to others to show that other religions are similarly based on witness reports or have some other kind of authentication. Apparently there are no representatives of these religions here. I would expect Mormons to have something to say on the subject as their Book of Mormon purports to be reports of a journey from Israel to South America and subsequent events there, but none have joined us.But you have wanted from the beginning to make this a general battle between the Koran and the Bible, which is far beyond the topic. If you are nominally using the validity OF witness reports as your takeoff point, that makes an enormous topic that involves arguing every verse of the Bible. I can see you are intent upon nitpicking every bit of it to death and wearing me out and I really have no interest in engaging you on that level. I may have no choice to some extent the way things are stacking up but I am here registering my complaint that this is beyond the limits of the topic.Very sorry, I do keep editing this post as I see a need to make statements clearer. I hope it isn't going to be a problem.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-26-2005 04:14 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 04-26-2005 04:16 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 04-26-2005 04:16 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 04-26-2005 04:17 PM

The ENTIRE Bible is not presented as witness accounts. I went through it in one post or other back there somewhere showing that Genesis, HALF of Exodus and BITS of the rest of the Pentateuch contain witness reports of historical EVENTS. From then on through Ezra and Nehemiah the Bible is nothing BUT historical accounts, and again the four Gospels and Acts are predominantly historical accounts as well.Then because others pointed out that of course Moses wasn't present at the Creation or the FLood I conceded that, although I believe his accounts have witness value in a sense, it is a different sense than direct witness accounts of historical events.I think it is becoming clear that this topic is hard to pin down after all. It came off my pointing out on other threads in endless arguments disputing the Bible on grounds that there is no PHYSICAL evidence for any of its claims, that the Bible does not appeal to physical evidence for its authentication at all, but that it DOES certainly appeal to evidence, as most of it is historical reports of actual events. This kind of evidence is witness evidence. Testimony. And the criteria for determing its validity is different than for physical evidence.This sets it apart from just about all other religions, which are mostly compilations of wisdom teachings by those most knowledgeable and revered in their practice. That being the case physical evidence is irrelevant to their claims to authenticity, and so is witness evidence. Some other criterion must pertain then. Of course, if they make claims to miracles as validating the truth of the religion then I suppose at least witness evidence would apply.In fact the only other religion that has a historical account at its center that I can think of is Mormonism with its saga of the journey of Jews to the Americas in 600 BC.But again, I am really not sure of the scope of this topic and I am really not interested in just another pick-the-Bible-apart-comma-by-semi-colon kind of discussion.

No of course not, and how does this follow from my statement you quote where I say it is NOT all presented as witness accounts? Some reports such as the one you are bringing up were obviously handed down from generation to generation, perhaps rehearsed orally from one generation to the next, or perhaps even written down in some form or other, until they were incorporated by Moses into the Pentateuch.This is not direct witness evidence, but it IS witness evidence, handed down over the generations. The same chain of witness testimony may have played a large part in the Flood accounts of Genesis. Perhaps even the Creation account was handed down from Adam. Nobody knows. But oral transmission was certainly practiced by many peoples. Jews and Christians for 3500 years attribute the Pentateuch to Moses, both in the sense of its being BY him and about him. That should carry a lot of weight. And there are many references to Moses' being told to write this or that down, and certainly references to his receiving the law from God; and the delineation of the Law is the substance of a great part of the Pentateuch. You demand a kind of authorship (literal pen to paper for every single word) and proof of authorship (a signed, witnessed and notarized signature or the like) that is unrealistic and ignores the limitations and cultural conventions of the times. If you don't trust the text as written then you will simply have to believe it or not believe it without further evidence because that's all the evidence there is. If you need extra evidence then simply don't believe it. But why then keep bugging people who do believe it, simply because we believe the text as written? It's enough to convince me. And since there isn't any more evidence to be had, just stop nagging the thing to death. The historical events are a major part of the preaching of the Bible in Christian churches and for all I know in Jewish synagogues to some extent, but that I don't know. It's too bad if you miss the lessons in them. They reveal how God deals with ALL human beings - and nations- by showing it happening in the example of His relationship with Israel.Paul said the Old Testament was given to us for examples, for our admonition, that is, for the purpose of learning about what God expects of us and the consequences of one's behavior and the behavior of nations as a whole too. That's why all the reports of what the leaders of the nation of Israel DID are so important: You can trace their behavior and the consequences of that behavior.All this is interconnected from one end to the other. The rules and the consequences are spelled out in God's law in the first place (as in "Forum Guidelines"), and then the prophets warn the people of coming judgment for specific transgressions (Admin warnings), and either the people repent as Nineveh did, or they don't, and the punishment comes after many years to the "fullness of time" -- executed upon the transgressors in various judgments, such as attacks by enemies, such as the captivity in Babylon and various other things (Admin only bans people).In other words, all these reports are ESSENTIAL to an understanding of how God operates in this world, how He deals with particular sins and righteous behavior both. If you don't grasp that the reason the Kingdom was split into two, and the reason the northern tribes were absorbed by the Assyrians, and the reason the southern tribes were sent to Babylon, are all a direct consequence of sins committed by the leaders of the people and the nation as a whole over the centuries, then you are missing a MAJOR teaching of the Bible.The prophets are the ones who teach us the cause and effect of these things. As my pastor teaches it, they are bringing God's legal indictments based on His Law against His people and various other nations. Isaiah starts out with a "legal brief" as it were, stating charges against God's people by God Himself, who calls on "heaven and earth" to WITNESS to the people's breaking of the Covenant they made with Him. Jeremiah continues the case against the people. Ezekiel and Daniel are already among the people during the judgment for those sins, and Daniel then understands the end of the transgression according to Jeremiah's prophecy.Throughout it all of course, God never completely abandons His people. The threats are tempered by frequent reminders of God's faithfulness and His future forgiveness and restoration of the people through the Savior Messiah He will send.All this is why the Bible is written as history. It shows the ACTUAL interventions of God in actual time and space. See above. You are missing the whole point of the histories and the interconnectedness between all the events. You fragment it and so will never see the meaning of it all. Neither do I. That's a long long discussion about why that book is bogus. I don't get your point. Yes the Bible includes wisdom literature as well as history. I said somewhere that the historical parts are 50 to 80% of it, not the whole of it. Agreed.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-26-2005 07:10 PM

fWell, if you were following what I said, the idea is that at the very least Lot's family would have passed the story down -- and Abraham and his family would certainly have known of it and passed it on. For whatever Moses didn't personally experience he had a lot of witness testimony that went before him to draw from. And the role divine revelation may have played in any of this in Moses' case is simply not known. He may in fact have received special revelations from God about events such as the Creation and the Flood. But we don't HAVE to assume this. It COULD have been passed down the generations. Dogma is simply the codification of knowledge. It is valid only insofar as the knowledge it codifies is valid. There are plenty of people who pronounce dogmatically on all kinds of things without the slightest knowledge to support it, such as those who like to pronounce that dogma is meaningless. Again, tradition, dogma, are only as valid as the knowledge they declare. There is nothing except modernist dogma, as a matter of fact, that opposes the tradition that Moses is the author of the Pentateuch.I don't take reform Judaism as a standard for anything of course. Like all liberal theology they simply throw out the supernatural because it doesn't sit well with their modernist preconceptions. And yes it may be that Catholics break the commandment against making images for the purpose of worship, but I'd reserve the judgment for those cases where they are known to get on their knees to a statue and pray to it. But you are being illogical. That some traditions / dogma are wrong doesn't make all traditions/dogma wrong. Of course. But I'm not sure I'm getting your point. Possibly scribes wrote it down from Moses' oral delivery. Perhaps he wrote it down himself later. Well, that's too bad, obviously very bad argument. So THEY have this way too literal notion of what must have happened. Well, then, I disagree with them. HOw about if it was literally written down by scribes more than by Moses himself, either from his direct dictation, or their memory of his oral teachings to the people that he then proofed after the writing, or he wrote a sketch of them and the scribes filled it out, or some of the elders of the people contributed parts of it, but Moses had authority over it all -- though others contributed the passages about his death and other things like that. The authenticity of Moses' authorship is usually questioned on the ground that other personalities appear to have written parts of it, but that's a silly objection to the tradition of his authorship. Even Paul 1500 years later had an amanuensis who wrote his letters for him -- most certainly by direct dictation and authorized by Paul himself in that case however. Now THAT does not follow at ALL! There is no reason whatever to suspect that it was not all written and assembled in Moses own time, at least within a short time after his death. It has been treated as such from the very beginning, by people who had the same fear of God Moses had, who would fear to tamper with such a writing. I certainly have never said God literally "wrote" the Bible, and that is really a silly idea. I hope no Christians have tried to defend that one. Moses however may very likely have written most of the Pentateuch personally -- this is very possible as Moses was raised in Pharoah's household where he would have learned all the arts and sciences of the day. Jesus is never said to have written anything. He supports His testimony by witnesses. That is what God did all through the Old Testament, appointed witnesses to His doings to write it all down and guided their writing by His Holy Spirit. That is how God "wrote" the Old Testament. In the same way we can say that Jesus/God "wrote" the New Testament though He did not literally pen a single word. He inspired His followers by the Holy Spirit to put it into words for posterity.There is absolutely NO reason to believe that "some stuff in there is bound to get distorted, changed, left out, added to, etc." The fact is that the scribes were scrupulous in copying the text. I know PaulK kept challenging me on this, but it seems pretty reasonable to me to believe that if the Old Testament books we have today are identical in meaning to those found in the Dead Sea Scrolls from a hundred or so years before Christ, that scribal accuracy is VERY reliable, and why shouldn't it have been as reliable BEFORE the DSS as after?{{{{PaulK claims there were changes to Isaiah made before the DSS. This kind of stuff is based on modern destructive fragmenting "scholarship" that thinks it can determine historical events from scholars' own subjective speculations about the appearance of the text no matter what kind of nasty motives it slimes the people with who believe in it, and it makes me sick to have to deal with that kind of thinking, but at some point I may have to study it well enough to try to answer it. I have no doubt whatever that Isaiah has been intact since it was put together by Isaiah himself or soon after his death by scribes, just as I KNOW that Daniel was written when it says it was written and not a few hundred years later, which is claimed only because of the prejudices of scholars who refuse to accept the reality of prophecy. But this is a digression by now. There is absolutely NO evidence whatever for these things , just prejudiced subjective speculations.}}} The problem with this thinking is that the records of the Israelites were written and compiled by men who had a deep reverence and fear of the God who had performed miracles for them and showed them His nature and powers and goodness, and those who had the responsibility for the scriptures treated them as sacred. You cannot just assume they would have met with the same fate of neglect as ordinary human records. In fact they WERE neglected for periods in Israel's history when the leaders had fallen away from God, but the scriptures remained in the temple in their same condition ready for the revival under Josiah for instance, when they were brought out and read to the people and national reformation was the result. Exactly right. As I've been saying over and over all we have is WITNESS evidence, the Hebrew text, probably written after years and years of oral rehearsal by the people and by Moses himself. And for all you know Moses did some writing during the wanderings. You don't know that he didn't. It is quite possible. Sorry, I don't follow. Well, if they didn't happen the lesson is useless because the lesson is how God acts in REAL time and space, how God's law and will actually affect all of us, so it is crucial to their meaning that they in fact happened. This is God acting in REAL history. If you don't get that you really don't get anything of importance out of the Bible. At the moment I'm focusing on the history of Israel though. Genesis is another kind of discussion. I'm already stretched way too thin, but maybe I'll at least take a look at it if you bump it.{TO BE CONTINUED}This message has been edited by Faith, 04-27-2005 11:32 AM

I've read some of the Koran.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-27-2005 05:22 AM

Just a couple more comments: You have no idea of the meaning of Esther and Ruth if you call them "secular." Esther is all about God's faithfulness in protecting His people even while they are in exile under pagan rulers. Ruth is a model of faithfulness to the LORD by a Gentile, giving a prophetic picture of God's future salvation of the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, as she leaves her homeland and attaches herself to the Israelites and their God. The picture is complete in her becoming an ancestress of Jesus Christ. Nothing "philosophical" about that. If you were following the actual history carefully you'd know that God had decreed Jerusalem for His temple, as He decreed everything to do with the forms of worship. In His Law He is the one who specifies every ingredient in the temple and everything pertaining to His worship. As the narrative history of Israel unfolds, people are punished who violate those rules: Nadab and Abihu were killed for making up their own form of worship; the bearer of the Ark of the Covenant who grabbed it with his hand to keep it from falling was also killed, because God had said it must never be touched by human flesh.Likewise, God had decreed Jerusalem to be the acceptable location of the temple --Mount Moriah to be exact, where Abraham had gone to sacrifice Isaac, 2 Chronicles 3:1, and which later was the threshing floor David bought from Araunah the Jebusite for the purpose of building the temple, 2 Samuel 24:18.In other words its location was of extreme importance, far from an elective matter. Here's one commentary on it: This message has been edited by Faith, 04-27-2005 12:19 PM

So explain why in English the word "Allah" is not translated as "God."Checkmate has made it clear. Allah is a NAME for God, although it is so often claimed that it is merely the Arabic term for God.As a NAME for God it contradicts the Name God gives for Himself in the Bible, YHWH. They are certainly not the same Being if they have two different names.

In English the word for God is "God." To continue to use the word "Allah" which to a Christian or Jew is not the name of God, is simply to be addressing an alien deity, not God. Which is fine, because that's what Allah is. There are many names that are titles for God in the OT, descriptions of His attributes, but He has only one Name, and it is His ONLY Name. Allah is not it. They try to claim that "Allah" is somehow related to the Hebrew "Elohim" which is a generic name for God in the Hebrew scriptures but there is no etymological connection. Muslims get outraged if you point out that Allah is the former name of a minor deity, the Moon God, one of hundreds represented at Mecca before Mohammed eliminated all the rest and promoted Allah, but it's the truth. The symbol of Islam is the Moon. That's no accident. If you have any interest in the truth, telling the difference is not at all hard, though it may take wrenching your mental set out of the prejudice that all religions are the same. The way you tell is by starting with the fact that the Hebrew scriptures predate the Koran by 2000 years, and that the Koran usurps many passages from those scriptures and from the NT scriptures as well, and changes them completely to say entirely different things, such as that Ishmael and not Isaac was the chosen heir of Abraham, all catering to Arab prejudices in direct falsification of the Hebrew scriptures. They do the same with the Christian scriptures about Jesus and Mary. Oh aren't you clever. The Muslims are deceived. God didn't ask your opinion -- or mine. He is the one who determines His own name, and it is not Allah.

Religious Jews regard the Name of God as so sacred they will not even pronounce it or write it but you don't mind making light of it.And I'm sure you're wrong that you wouldn't mind being called by a name that is not your own, especially one that demeans your character.{EDIT: Or let me put it this way, you can call on God by a false name all you like, but He isn't going to hear it because it isn't His name.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-27-2005 09:34 PM

Lev 20:3 And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name.Lev 22:2 Speak unto Aaron and to his sons, that they separate themselves from the holy things of the children of Israel, and that they profane not my holy name [in those things] which they hallow unto me: I [am] the LORD.Lev 22:32 Neither shall ye profane my holy name; but I will be hallowed among the children of Israel: I [am] the LORD which hallow you,1Ch 16:10 Glory ye in his holy name: let the heart of them rejoice that seek the LORD.1Ch 16:35 And say ye, Save us, O God of our salvation, and gather us together, and deliver us from the heathen, that we may give thanks to thy holy name, [and] glory in thy praise.1Ch 29:16 O LORD our God, all this store that we have prepared to build thee an house for thine holy name [cometh] of thine hand, and [is] all thine own.Psa 33:21 For our heart shall rejoice in him, because we have trusted in his holy name.Psa 103:1 [[[A Psalm] of David. Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, [bless] his holy name.Psa 105:3 Glory ye in his holy name: let the heart of them rejoice that seek the LORD.Psa 106:47 Save us, O LORD our God, and gather us from among the heathen, to give thanks unto thy holy name, [and] to triumph in thy praise.Psa 145:21 My mouth shall speak the praise of the LORD: and let all flesh bless his holy name for ever and ever.Eze 20:39 As for you, O house of Israel, thus saith the Lord GOD; Go ye, serve ye every one his idols, and hereafter [also], if ye will not hearken unto me: but pollute ye my holy name no more with your gifts, and with your idols.Eze 36:20 And when they entered unto the heathen, whither they went, they profaned my holy name, when they said to them, These [are] the people of the LORD, and are gone forth out of his land.Eze 36:21 But I had pity for mine holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the heathen, whither they went.and there's more at
Blue Letter Bible "holy name"

Got it. You know who God is. 3500 years of Jews and Biblebelieving Christians don't.