Please explain this clear Bible error.

I just don't believe this is so, Terry. There's a century and a half of solid biblical scholarship which frankly disproves or calls into question much of the Bible. It's not done for the purpose of trampling anyone's religious beliefs. If some people see Biblical fiction as a reason to cast the Bible aside it's a direct result of the loud insistence that it is inerrant. The Vedas are older and the I Ching is nearly as old, plus there are Egyptian and Babylonian works, eg, which have survived without being directly in the care of a single religious or ethnic group. Confucianism, Taoism, and Mohism predate the New Testament by several centuries, and the oldest Buddhist texts are roughly contemporaneous with the earliest Gospels. The Bible doesn't need superlatives heaped on it, particularly spurious ones. Uh, no, unless you mean scraps the size of your thumbnail. The Vatican Codex is a couple hundred years later. And the difficulties with the NT histories begins at Matthew 1, proceeding through an entirely fictitious nativity in Bethlehem designed to fulfill a misreading of prophecy in Isiah.I don't mean to sound harsh, Terry, I truly don't. But facts are stubborn things, and there are plenty of articulate people like truthlover who can face them and find spiritual value in the texts.

Nor would I. Terry spoke of people "pointing out a couple of problems" and then discarding the Bible. That simply trivializes the body of evidence which might lead one to dismiss claims of inerrancy, evidence which includes outright fiction. I'm sorry but you've lost me here. Terry suggests that some people toss the Bible aiside over questions of accuracy; I respond that if so it's because they have listened to the arguments that the Bible's authority stems from its literal truth. If no one claimed the Bible was inerrant, Biblical fiction would be immaterial.On edit: Nice guitar. Yours? A Les Paul (it's little hard to make out for me)?[This message has been edited by Riley, 03-17-2004]

Hi truthlover,It's easy for a newbie to forget how tough you guys are. I meant to cite Micah, not Isaiah.My use of the term "misread" was intended as gentle euphemism.

Again, Terry, this is just not so. The earliest copies of the Gospels are 4th century. The earliest extant scraps of papyrus are c. 180. The "church fathers" (e.g. Papias, whose work is lost, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus) wrote 60-100 years or more after the earliest gospels. They are not testimonials as to authorship or accuracy of the texts we now have.

I think it safe to assume he meant the same thing he meant when I objected the last time...that there are no errors in the NT because our source material is so good. Oops, missed a spot. "Extant scraps" withdrawn, to be replaced by "reasonable fragment", in which case I'm giving the most generous date. But the point is, indeed, a technicality. What I mean is that the Church fathers are not primary, they cannot be held as independent verification of what the Gospels say, nor can the tell us who the authors are.