Which Version of the Bible is the Word of God?

Peg, I know for a fact that we have discussed Mosaic authorship before and that I have mentioned the multiple authorship of the Pentateuch to you before. Look here. You know perfectly well that Mosaic authorship is disputed.Ask yourself, what could have made you conveniently forget this fact? Could it possibly be because it does not fit well with your beliefs? It is very disappointing to see you repeating falsehoods when you already know them to be false.Mutate and Survive

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

i dont have any doubt that these 'disputes' are the falsehoods. The authoriship of the old testament writers were never questioned by the jews...the people who actually know...higher skeptics of the 19th century do not make for valuable reading in my books and i dont fall for their baseless claims.

You have no idea whether the claims are baseless or not. You know nothing about any of it.Basically, like many other things, you have no right to an opinion. You have to earn that right with hard work.

im sure you are aware that the way genesis, or any other bible 'book' was written, was not in the form of a novel such as what we have todayit is made up of many hundreds of manuscripts. Chapter 1 and Chapter 5 of genesis for instance would be contained in two separate scrolls. therefore it is not a chronological novel as many seem to think.it is a collection of many different scrolls. When the early collators put them together, they made them into book form. they decided where a verse and chapter begins and ends.

Come off it Peg,

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i dont have any doubt that these 'disputes' are the falsehoods.

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Not the point. You said; I have shown that you know perfectly well that it is questioned. Whether you believe it or not is a separate issue.

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The authoriship of the old testament writers were never questioned by the jews......

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I think you'll find that Jewish theologians have a rich history of questioning their own texts. The tradition of crediting Joshua with the passages describing Moses' death, for example, goes back to the Talmud. Note that questioning Mosaic authorship need not necessarily mean denying it.I am also intrigued by your comment about Jews being "the people who actually know". I wonder, why are you so keen to believe them with regards to Moses, but so quick to differ when it comes to the claim that Jesus was/was not the Messiah?

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higher skeptics of the 19th century do not make for valuable reading in my books and i dont fall for their baseless claims.

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I'm sorry, but that is a statement born of total ignorance. Do you really imagine that Biblical criticism stopped in 1900? You are hand-waving away a century of scholarship, much of it done by Christians and, yes, Jews.Ah well. feel free to delude yourself, but don't expect anyone else to fall for it.Mutate and Survive.

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

Well at least you got something somewhat correct. Except this was done several times. The P (Priestly) added to the creation story with the 2d story of creation. They added the geneology between Adam & Noah, they added the seven pairs of the clean animals to the Noah narritive, whereas the 1st story of creation is much older and is J (Jahwist) in nature as is most of the Noah narritive.

Did you watch the documentary Peg? There is a Jew in there who says the Pentateuch was not written by Moses. So, the ones who actually have supporting evidence for their view are wrong, yet the ones who hand wave all evidence away are right? Strange system of determining the truth you have there.

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I hunt for the truth

You really do not seem to tire of simply making things up Peg, honestly where do you keep digging up all this misinformation from? How do you know this? Utter bullshit Peg.The Bible was not divided up into chapter and verse until about 750 years ago, more than 2000 years after Genesis was supposed to be written. You should check out Cardinal de Sancto Caro and Stephen Langton.So, there was no chapter one or chapter five or chapter anything, you are just making up crap again. In fact, check out DSS IQISa, it contains the entire book of Isaiah. As I said, if you are going to make things up you should make sure that the person you are discussing these things with is as ignorant of the Bible as you are.Will you please stop posting things that you pull out your butt?

Interesting point you raise here, Peg. Now, if by 'book', you mean codex, afaik, they didn`t start being assembled until the 2nd. century, C.E. Or thereabouts. All texts up till that time were written on papyrus or skin scrolls. The Qumran Scrolls confirm this. So you can only fit so much text on to a scroll. Usually the bigger scrolls are about thirty feet long. This would limit the text length.In 11Kings 22:8, the KJV Bible refers to a 'book', but I think this is a bad translation. (where`s Arach when you need him?). If it is just a scroll, then it couldn`t contain the entire Torah. Scholars say it was the Book of Deuteromony from the text quoted (Book of the Law, etc.). If this was the only scroll found (Deut.), where did the rest of the Torah come from? Written later? Found in unknown and unrecorded repairs? The mystery continues.

not according to josephus who argued the superior reliability of the written history of the jews over the histories of the Greeks of his day. He was a pharisee, a scholar, a diplomat and historian. According to him, the holy books were not in question by the jews of his day.

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Those Antiquities contain the history of five thousand years, and are taken out of our sacred books, but are translated by me into the Greek tongue. But what is the strongest argument of our exact management in this matter is what I am now going to say, that we have the names of our high priests from father to son set down in our records for the interval of two thousand years.

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8. For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life... and how firmly we have given credit to these books of our own nation is evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add any thing to them, to take any thing from them, or to make any change in them; but it is become natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be willingly to die for them...Let us now put the case, therefore, that we made use of this argument concerning the Grecians, in order to prove that their nation was not ancient, because nothing is said of them in our records: would not they laugh at us all, and probably give the same reasons for our silence that I have now alleged, and would produce their neighbor nations as witnesses to their own antiquity? Now the very same thing will I endeavor to do; for I will bring the Egyptians and the Phoenicians as my principal witnesses, because nobody can complain Of their testimony as false

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Hi nighttrain,i do mean codex...the christian copiest were at the forefront of this technology i would suspect that the torah was written on a number of scrolls, not just one. so perhaps they had one of them and not the others??

how do i know that the bible was written on many scrolls???just look at the dead sea scrolls if you need to know how the bible was originally transmitted.Many of these scrolls and fragments are over 2,000 years old, they contain several lengthy manuscripts, other scrolls and thousands of scroll fragments were found.When all the scrolls and fragments were sorted out, they amounted to around 800 manuscripts. And 200 of them are copies of portions of the Hebrew Bible text.I dont need to make it up brian, perhaps you need to take a chill pill.Edited by Peg, : No reason given.

Josephus MAY have had access to the Temple texts captured by Titus at the fall of Jerusalem, but we don`t know which strand they followed. Couldn`t have been the Septuagint (LXX) since Orthodox (?) Jews probably wouldn`t allow Greek texts in their Holy Place.Can`t have been the Masoretic texts since they weren`t fixed for a few more centuries.Can`t have been the Samaritan strand since they were regarded as apostates.Can`t have been the texts cleaned up at the Academy at Jamnia since that happened after Josephus wrote his history.Can`t have been the strands found at Qumran (DSS) since they covered a range of versions.So which WAS the OT strand that we have today, Peg? Please don`t say Masoretic.

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not according to josephus...

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History does not stop at Josephus. There are Jewish scholars who deny Mosaic authorship, you have already had this pointed out to you. If all you are going to do is attempt to nit-pick at a single sentence from my post you are wasting your time and mine.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : Fixed dBcodes.

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"The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say." -- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

nor does it start at the mouths of modern scholars