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Author Topic:   the new new testament???
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 21 of 226 (702455)
07-06-2013 11:11 PM
Reply to: Message 19 by RAZD
07-06-2013 8:42 PM


Re: not all need be believed --- but which is which?
This whole thread is terribly confused it seems to me, hard to know where to step in if anywhere. The OP presents a very standard perennial challenge to Christianity by claiming the books of our Bible aren't authoritative and that writings found more recently discredit them. The article cited treats Jews and yoga teachers as authorities on the subject, which ought by itself to show the claims to be bogus, certainly from a Christian point of view.
How do we know which interpretations are accurate? Dawn has done a good job of saying why Christians regard the existing canon as authoritative. The "new" writings have a lot in common with the old rejected writings, so why should they be taken to challenge the canon at all? Not just the bogus Gnostic "gospels" but also a great many of the Greek texts of the Bible itself that have been found are of a type that has already been rejected by the Church, and there is even some reason to believe that some of them are outright forgeries, done by people with a vested interest in undermining the Protestant Bible.
Dawn went into a long harangue about how previous people would have interpreted these new gospels, and essentially said that as they had rejected them as hoaxes that we must as well.
It hardly had the tone of a "harangue," but anyway, he's right, the canon was established by leaders of the many churches, hundreds of bishops, and not just in one council but in many councils. They arrived at a consensus on which books were authentic and which books were not. Such a consensus of the leaders rightly carries weight with Christians. Of course anyone is free to decide they were all liars or nincompoops if you want and prefer the writings they rejected to the canon they chose. Go ahead. Found your own gnostic church if you like. The Church will nevertheless continue to recognize the canon we have as the authentic one. There are clear contradictions between the rejected writings and the accepted ones, as Dawn also mentions, so trying to accept both should tie your head in a knot, unless you are used to glossing over contradictions.
And again, there doesn't seem to be anything in the more recently discovered writings that is of any importance in respect to the canon. They mostly reflect old gnostic stuff the Church already rejected years ago as far from the spirit of the gospel.
It seems to me that ...the Protestants must have made the very errors you are warning against here -- assuming that they knew better that those that compiled the original bible (catholics) when they made changes to it in creating their bible.
WHAT "original Bible?" You mean the determination of authentic writings, the canon? And what changes did the Protestants make, RAZD, are you up on that? Luther made his German translation from Erasmus' Greek manuscript. Erasmus was a Catholic and stayed a Catholic although he had some sympathies with the Reformation positions, principally the desire to have Bibles in the languages of the people. Erasmus changed some of the readings of the Latin Vulgate on the basis of the Greek manuscripts that had recently become available -- "penance" was replaced with "repentance" for instance, which does make a big difference in Christian practice. Did he "know better" than Jerome who had translated the Vulgate? Well, yes, he did, he had Greek manuscripts that had recently been brought from Byzantium. And again, he wasn't a Protestant, and it was his manuscript that Luther used for the German Bible.
You're very confused about the supposed "original Bible" as being "Catholic." The canon of the original Bible was compiled by hundreds of church leaders. The Bishop of Rome wasn't called Pope until 606 AD. Other Bishops in the early centuries had just as much authority as The Bishop of Rome, who later made himself bishop of bishops. The canon was established by a true consensus of Christian believers.
There are always questions about which manuscripts are the authentic ones and there are small differences even between the authentic ones. That's a whole discipline in itself but there are thousands of manuscripts for reference. What is happening these days is that a few "recently discovered" manuscripts such as Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are being allowed to eclipse the thousands on the basis of their being considered more ancient. But sober minds in the Church recognized these as corrupted, by early gnostics probably, and there is a lot of evidence for that. But now evidence is coming out that Sinaiticus may actually not be an old manuscript at all but a recent production being passed off as ancient. And Vaticanus is being shown to have been an outright forgery. There's a lot to this business of determining the authenticity of manuscripts, it isn't to be tossed off lightly.
Would not this argue that the Protestant bible should be discarded in favor of the Catholic bible if your argument is valid?
What "Catholic Bible" are you talking about? You want to go back to the Latin Vulgate and "penance" over "repentance" although the Greek word clearly means "repentance?" Or you want to have the Apocrypha taken as canon? What exactly are you talking about?
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 19 by RAZD, posted 07-06-2013 8:42 PM RAZD has replied

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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 24 of 226 (702516)
07-08-2013 2:00 PM
Reply to: Message 23 by ringo
07-08-2013 1:05 PM


Re: is it all interpretation/s?
The apostles were not illiterate, they wrote most of the NT and two of the writers of the NT, Paul and Luke, were highly educated. And the Church Fathers were not illiterate, nor were the bishops of the hundreds of churches that determined the canon.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 26 of 226 (702520)
07-08-2013 2:39 PM
Reply to: Message 25 by Rahvin
07-08-2013 2:12 PM


Re: is it all interpretation/s?
We're talking about determining the authenticity of manuscripts, not reporting on the multitudinous events in a war. We have a collection of manuscripts, we have hundreds of men educated in the gospels who can tell a true report from a false one. Not that it's that hard to distinguish the bogus fictional gnostic "gospels" from the real thing anyway.
As for eyewitnesses to the events of Jesus' life, the miracles He did and so on, we're talking about the events of one man's life, again not multitudinous events in a war. If you want to get into the witnesses of the miraculous events in the Old Testament, such as the red sea parting or the pillars of fire and smoke and other such things, you've got hundreds of thousands who witnessed those single events, again, single events, not multitudinous events such as in a war.

This message is a reply to:
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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 51 of 226 (703485)
07-22-2013 11:27 PM
Reply to: Message 50 by ramoss
07-22-2013 10:52 PM


Re: is it all interpretation/s?
It is generally acknowledged that Josephus was tampered with when it comes to the reference to Jesus. Let's see evidence that that passage was original to Josephus.
Let's see evidence that it wasn't. It's commonly SUPPOSED not to be original to Josephus, but not based on actual evidence, just the usual can't-believe-he'd-have-said-that which for some reason is taken as evidence by people who don't know what evidence is. Same way the Jesus Seminar's vaporings are so ridiculously taken seriously. Where's the historical evidence that Josephus was tampered with? Surely there must be some if it was.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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 Message 50 by ramoss, posted 07-22-2013 10:52 PM ramoss has replied

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 Message 52 by ramoss, posted 07-23-2013 12:07 AM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 56 of 226 (703516)
07-23-2013 9:34 PM
Reply to: Message 52 by ramoss
07-23-2013 12:07 AM


Re: is it all interpretation/s?
But all that IS just the very sort of speculation I said is all you have against the authenticity of the passage.
I agree that its inauthenticity is plausible but there are quite a few others from a time much closer to the original who disagree with that, which is no better or worse evidence than that on your side, people who know more than any of us do so many centuries removed from that time.
So again, all there is on either side is the usual subjective analyses and opinions, you don't have actual evidence.
Actual evidence would be something like having two different sources of copies of Josephus, one line with and one line without the questioned passage.
The existence of a Table of Contents without reference to the passage is actual evidence, simply very weak evidence.
Actual evidence would try to account for how it was that Christians (presumably the ones who would have added in such a passage) were the ones whose copies survived and the original line, without the passage, didn't.
Again, I agree that the arguments against its authenticity make more sense, at least to us today, but that doesn't PROVE anything one way or the other.
And the only reason this came up was that you demanded "evidence" that the original contained the passage. Well, if you don't have evidence that it was added later you can't rightly demand evidence for the other side either.
But as long as we're speculating, one question I have is how much Josephus was "spiritually" connected to his Jewish legacy, how far he himself was committed to the idea of the Messiah at all for instance. If he considered it all more or less the hooha side of his Jewish legacy, for instance. then he could have spoken highly of a Jewish man who went among the people doing such good that he deserved to be called "the Messiah," the title not meaning more than a good and wise man to Josephus anyway. Frankly, that's what the tone of the passage suggests to me, it certainly doesn't suggest a believer in any real sense. That is, I get the impression that Josephus was emotionally removed from what he is describing of this wise man, it really didn't mean much to him, so I could easily imagine him writing it on the basis of what he'd heard about Jesus. He might or might not have believed that Jesus appeared to his disciples after the resurrection; it sounds to me like he doesn't really appreciate what the resurrection means in any case, but perhaps put it on the level of the appearance of a ghost, a spirit, something easy for a lot of people to believe in those days anyway. So, to sum up, if he didn't take the spiritual side of Judaism seriously he could be reporting such events with personal detachment from them, as just an interesting part of his Jewish history. In that case it would work as evidence of the existence of Jesus but not as any kind of confirmation of the Christian view of Him.)
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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 Message 60 by caffeine, posted 07-24-2013 11:57 AM Faith has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 62 of 226 (703546)
07-24-2013 1:59 PM
Reply to: Message 60 by caffeine
07-24-2013 11:57 AM


Re: is it all interpretation/s?
You've made reference several times to the idea that, if there was controversy over a work, we would have access to all the books arguing this controversy, but we know for a certain fact that this is not the case.
I didn't mean or say anything about access to ALL the books, only specific copies needed for evidence. And I meant it to be hypothetical, sorry if that wasn't clear. I'm quite familiar with the issues involving the survival of manuscripts, deal with it all the time at my Bible blog. The point was that there would have been two separate lines of manuscripts if the passage was inserted later, the original without it and the tampered one with it, but that doesn't imply that any of them survived. If you have at least one copy of both then you have the actual evidence I was talking about. If you don't you don't.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 84 of 226 (703918)
07-30-2013 9:00 PM
Reply to: Message 82 by ramoss
07-30-2013 8:54 PM


Re: Subsets
From a Jewish perspective, Jesus did not qualify to be a messiah, much less "The Messiah. He did not perform the needed tasks for being "THe Messiah", and he did not qualify to be any 'anointed one'.
Odd then that it was precisely from a Jewish perspective that He was recognized to be the Messiah, by, you know, all those first generation Christians who happened to be Jewish, even including some leaders of the Pharisees.

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