Here is a question. What is your response?

[gman]

And Matthew 3 cites Hosea 11 as a prophecy predicting the flight of Jesus to Egypt – except the original context of Hosea is clearly talking about Israel's exodus, not Jesus.

I won't deal with all your points, because I'm not that motivated. You believe that Hosea is referring to the exodus. Not all scholars agree. A quick search can find plenty of articles and scholars fleshing out Hosea as futuristic, pointing to Christ, and using the exodus as a picture of the messiah to come.
As for Paul, I would advise against reading any of his letters, because they are filled with verses about his comings and goings.
As for Luke not mentioning any of Paul's letters in the book of Acts, I don't see that mattering one way or another.

[knotodiswrld]

And Matthew 3 cites Hosea 11 as a prophecy predicting the flight of Jesus to Egypt – except the original context of Hosea is clearly talking about Israel's exodus, not Jesus.

I won't deal with all your points, because I'm not that motivated. You believe that Hosea is referring to the exodus. Not all scholars agree. A quick search can find plenty of articles and scholars fleshing out Hosea as futuristic, pointing to Christ, and using the exodus as a picture of the messiah to come.

Exactly. The Exodus itself was a type and a shadow of the Messiah coming out of Egypt. Much of what happened to the Hebrews in the Torah was a type and shadow of what would later happen to the church. Paul alludes to this in 1 Corinthians 10:11 "These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come."

Yes, Hosea refers to the Exodus, and therefore by extension to Christ's sojourn and return from Egypt.

Remember, Matthew himself was a Hebrew and wrote his gospel specifically for the Hebrew people. They would have known the portion of Hosea to which he referred, and would have known that it referenced the Exodus. But they would have also seen what Matthew was doing here, even if the rejected the truth. They would have seen that he was making the entire Exodus a prophecy of the Messiah coming out of Egypt.

As for the question of Two Jeremiahs this article covers it fairly nicely with a nice explanation:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... 10076.html

Look for the sections beginning "The Composition of the Book".


The differences are hardly an argument against Biblical Infallibility as it is quite possible that both texts were penned by Jeremiah's scribe Baruch, possibly for different audiences.

We don't actually have any of the "original autographs" of any book of the Bible, so appealing to that as the standard of infallibility isn't particularly convincing. Those original autographs could theoretically say anything.

That has already been covered twice under the discipline of "Textual Criticism".

Further, at one point do you go so far back that you're looking at rough drafts or unfinished documents? Arguably, the "original" could be something the author never intended for use.

That is a standard you would never apply to any other work of literature. When we refer to the "original" text of Shakespear's MacBeth, no one would ask, "Do you mean the rough drafts he wrote?" That would be a silly question. We all know that by "The original MacBeth", we mean the one that Shakespear originally delivered to the public.

We thought we knew how Mark ended, but the oldest manuscripts we now have don't include the last two-thirds of the final chapter.

We've known this for centuries! However, the oldest manuscripts aren't necessarily the most reliable. There is much more that goes into the discipline of textual criticism than merely asking, "Which texts are the oldest?" There isn't room or time to go into it here, but the mere fact that neither the Codex Sinaticus nor Codex Vaticanus have the last chapter of Mark in its entirety is by no means proof that it doesn't belong there.

Finally, if our argument is, "The true Bible is infallible, but we don't have it," then we are essentially agreeing that the Bible we hold in our hands is not infallible.

Again, the discipline of Textual Criticism covers that.

But the problem is that Genesis does say "seeds." At least, the Hebrew word for "seed" is plural when it's used in the original promise to Abraham. Paul, a Pharisee, surely knows this. He has changed the words of the OT text to suit his purposes, even though the text says the exact opposite of what he argues it says.

That's not how it looks to me. To me, it seems very clearly to say "seed" and not "seeds". And yes, I looked it up in the Hebrew. Plus, I suspect Paul was more fluent in Hebrew than either of us. You are basically accusing Paul of lying. If Paul was a liar, it basically invalidates NT Christianity.

I'm tired now. I may or may not address more of these later.

[CatNamedManny]

That's not how it looks to me. To me, it seems very clearly to say "seed" and not "seeds". And yes, I looked it up in the Hebrew. Plus, I suspect Paul was more fluent in Hebrew than either of us. You are basically accusing Paul of lying. If Paul was a liar, it basically invalidates NT Christianity.

This was exactly my point. I'm not accusing Paul of doing anything more than a typical first-century Jewish rabbi would have done. To us, with our modern-day notions of accuracy and objectivity, it looks shady. We would criticize any preacher who used the Bible that way. But that's how Jews of Paul's day used the scriptures they had.

It just means that the problem when we see contradictions or inconsistencies in the Bible, it's because we are seeing what happens when hundreds of people compile a group of texts over the course of hundreds of years. In no other setting on earth has God chosen to limit the imperfections of the people he's used to do his will. Why do we think he has done so with the Bible?

[CatNamedManny]

I'd also note that the two people who defended Matthew's use of Hosea used two different reasons for doing so. One says, "Hosea was futuristic," the other says, "It's clearly referring to the exodus, but the exodus itself is futuristic."

I completely agree that we see shadows of Christ in the exodus story. But when we look back at Hosea and see Christ, are we doing so because that's what Hosea saw, or because that's what we know Matthew wrote? In the context in which Matthew and Hosea wrote, there is no reason to believe Hos 11 refers to anything but the exodus. The author of Matthew was indeed writing to Jewish Christians – in fact, he's a downright apologist for Christianity as juxtaposed with Judaism – so it's clearly understandable why he made that connection, given the importance of the exodus, but we should recognize that at the time he wrote, tying Hosea to the recently crucified Christ was a huge hermeneutical leap. Looking back after 2,000 years of church teaching, based at least partly on Matthew and Luke's decisions to connect Jesus to the Jewish traditions, it seems obvious. But we would not accept a preacher doing to our scriptures what Matthew does to his.

Which is why I'm arguing we need to allow context and culture to play a much bigger role in how we read and understand these texts.

I highly recommend, fwiw, Peter Enns' book Inspiration and Incarnation on this topic. His blog is also worth perusing, as he deals a lot with traditional standards of inerrancy.

[Preacherman777]

I think perhaps you are forgetting the events of Luke 24:36-35 when Jesus opened the minds of the apostles so that they could understand the scriptures and how they were about him. We are not talking about what any common preacher of our modern day might do, we are talking about people who were blessed with divine revelation from Jesus himself and what they wrote from that inspiration.

[CatNamedManny]

That's a good point, but the problem is that non-Christian first-century Jewish writers did the same thing with Old Testament texts on other subjects. Matthew and Paul were indeed inspired in some way, we know that, but their methods were not unusual for first-century Jews. So, on the one hand, what they did with the Old Testament is a big departure from what we would consider fair or accurate exegesis, and if we want to argue God inspired them to take these passages out of context and twist them into a messianic storyline, then we should acknowledge that uninspired writers of the same era did the same thing on different subjects, presumably without divine assistance.

We've gotten a bit off track, so I'm going to backtrack to a more general argument and rely here on Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible, which talks about "biblicism," a term he defines using the 10 general assumptions below. Not all biblicists believe all 10, but if you find yourself agreeing with most of these, then Smith would say you use a biblicist approach to scripture:

1. Divine writing – The Bible "consists of and is identical with God's very own words written inerrantly in human language."
2. Total representation – The Bible contains everything God has to say to humans and is the exclusive mode of divine communication.
3. Complete coverage – "The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible."
4. Democratic perspicuity – "Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text."
5. Commonsense hermeneutics – The best way to read the Bible is in its "explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense."
6. Solo Scriptura – Not to be confused with sola scriptura, this means the Bible can be understood without reliance on creeds, tradition or other hermeneutical frameworks. In other words, "theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch."
7. Internal harmony – On any given subject, all the relevant passages of the Bible are unified and consistent.
8. Universal applicability – The teachings of the Bible are "universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by a subsequent teaching."
9. Inductive method – "All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear 'biblical' truths it teaches."
10. Handbook model – The affirmations of the Bible "comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects – including science, economics, health, politics and romance."

His argument is that this cannot be true because, if it were, Christians would be able to agree a whole lot more on what the Bible actually says. He calls it "pervasive interpretive pluralism." Essentially, if it were so easy to figure out the teachings of the Bible through relying on the literal text, how come no one can agree on what those teachings are? The failure of more than relatively small numbers of Christians – including evangelical Christians who subscribe to biblicist doctrines – to agree on any significant point in the Bible (how we should worship, the nature of justification and atonement, the relationship of Christians to the world, the existence and use of charismatic gifts, etc.) is a prima facie nullification of the idea that the Bible is internally consistent, easy to understand or meant to be a handbook for Christian living.

Why and how, we might ask, would the Bible be so easily misread by so many believers if, as biblicism believes, it is divine, inerrant, internally harmonious, perspicuous [clearly expressed and easily understood] and intent on revealing infallible truth to humankind? ... If the truth of the Bible is really sufficiently understandable to the ordinary reader, then why do so many of them – and countless biblically and theologically trained scholars besides – find it impossible to agree on what the truth is? This response [that a small number of us have it right and the rest are biased, deceived or dishonest] places a huge burden on the bad intentions, biased interests or poor scholarly skills of Christian Bible readers across two millennia – a burden the evidence cannot sustain.

Regarding the "original autographs are infallible" argument, he says – much better than I managed (bold added, italics original):

What good does that do the actual Christian believers who do not possess the original documents – that is, nearly all Christians in church history – who want and need to understand Christian truth? Nothing. All that actually does is formally build a logically protective, unfalsifiable wall around a theory. But that proves completely unhelpful for the more pressing task of actually knowing what is true, real, wise and good. People standing on a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean are not helped one bit by the in-fact-totally-correct observation that if they were on another ship they would not be sinking. Neither are Christians reading the actual Bible that they possess helped in any way by the idea that they would have greater clarity of understanding if they could only read the original autographs of the original manuscripts of the first scriptural writings. The lost-original-autographs explanation is not necessarily false. It is simply useless and irrelevant. It does not address and explain the present problem in a satisfying or constructive way.

Like Smith and Peter Enns, who has focused more on the increasing incompatibility of literal biblicism with scientific discovery, I think the church needs a better way to read the Bible. It doesn't mean we strip it of divine authority, but it does mean we stop transporting modernist sensibilities onto premodern texts and use the culture and context in which those texts were produced to lead us into a deeper understanding of what God is doing in this world and a better sense of how we should respond to that.

Just my $.02 anyway.

[Edited way too many times for clarity and typos.]

[gman]

Time doesn't permit me to read through all of that, but one thing that sticks out to me is the point in the Biblicist list that basically says that anyone can understand scripture. The Bible teaches that apart from Christ, apart from having the illumination of the Spirit, scripture is foreign.
For whatever reason, God doesn't give everyone full, complete understanding of scripture when they come to him. He gives us illumination and allows to reason through the sscriptures on our own. He also doesn't always give us the inclination to take the scriptures literally. That is something learned men have worked through and arrived at. There are plenty of denominations that don't take all, or any of the bible literally. For those that do, often question arise as to what is the literal meaning? A study of hebrew and greek may reveal more than one possible meaning. God doesn't always sort that out for us. He allows us to work through it and come to a conclusion. Often, we congregate with like minded people who have reached the same conclusions because we believe scripture says it is wise to do so.
My personal belief is that scripture is the ultimate source of truth. God gives us the ability to reason and understand, and discover truth, but reasoning doesn't trump scripture. We must be careful not to let our experience shape our interpretation.
This is a lousy example, but I'll give it anyway. I used to live in an area with a lot of water and bridges. It was a common activity for some to go bridge jumping into the bay. Let's say that signs had been posted indicating that it was unwise to jump into the bay, and that the sign was absolute truth. Let's say that I went out day after day in my boat and observed people jumping into the bay and swimming safely to shore. They did that several times without incident and then got in their car and drove home. After several days of observation, I might surmise that their is nothing wrong with jumping from the bridge; that it's an okay thing to do, despite what the signs say. If the signs represent truth and I go around saying that the signs are wrong, that I've discovered, or a reasoned my way to, a different truth, I've gone too far. I've allowed my experience to trump the truth.
Again, that's a poor example, and you can pick it apart all day long, but I think it illustrates my point of view.

GMan

[CatNamedManny]

This is a lousy example, but I'll give it anyway. I used to live in an area with a lot of water and bridges. It was a common activity for some to go bridge jumping into the bay. Let's say that signs had been posted indicating that it was unwise to jump into the bay, and that the sign was absolute truth. Let's say that I went out day after day in my boat and observed people jumping into the bay and swimming safely to shore. They did that several times without incident and then got in their car and drove home. After several days of observation, I might surmise that their is nothing wrong with jumping from the bridge; that it's an okay thing to do, despite what the signs say. If the signs represent truth and I go around saying that the signs are wrong, that I've discovered, or a reasoned my way to, a different truth, I've gone too far. I've allowed my experience to trump the truth.
Again, that's a poor example, and you can pick it apart all day long, but I think it illustrates my point of view.

Or perhaps you've misread the signs, taken them out of their original context or placed upon them an interpretation that was never intended. That's my argument. If God's own creation contains evidence about how it came to be but a passage of scripture reads as if he used a completely different method of creating, incompatible with the evidence his creation has given us, we can dismiss the evidence or reconsider our method of interpretation. Many Christians have tried the former for 150 years now, but the evidence isn't going away (it's actually gotten stronger and more persuasive); perhaps it's time for a different approach.

I don't see that as prioritizing reason over God's word. I see that as accepting that God's revelation about himself and his actions is not confined to the Bible, but also is seen throughout nature and in the continual working of his Spirit in the lives of his people, including those who are scientists and historians. We can still love and accept the Bible, which I completely accept as "God-breathed" and "useful" (2 Tim 3:16), but it seems the time has come to back away from the bibliolatry of strictly literal interpretation.

[gman]

Ok, the science is settled. Thanks for stopping by Al Gore. Goodnight.

[Preacherman777]

I don't see that as prioritizing reason over God's word. I see that as accepting that God's revelation about himself and his actions is not confined to the Bible, but also is seen throughout nature and in the continual working of his Spirit in the lives of his people, including those who are scientists and historians. We can still love and accept the Bible, which I completely accept as "God-breathed" and "useful" (2 Tim 3:16), but it seems the time has come to back away from the bibliolatry of strictly literal interpretation.

Ok, I would have huge issues with this. There are so many assumptions made my science, so many leaps of faith and so many instances of flat out ignoring huge problems with their theories, that when it comes to cosmology and evolution, in the purest sense, most of it can be held to be little more than junk science. True science is suppose to be observable, testable and repeatable and so much of what today's science community accepts as truth, totally fails that test and much of it is actually based on some pretty far out theories (with little or no evidence) that make accepting what the Bible says, look like the most reasonable thing a man could do. Now, don't get me wrong, I think that some of what the creation science people come up with can be a real stretch as well, but I honestly don't see mainstream science as having much of a leg up on them due to their own careless methodology, so before we go deciding that what the Bible says is wrong or at least not being understood correctly in it's own plain statements, then the world is going to have to show me something much more factual from the field of science, in these areas, then what it's done so far.

[p-freak]

Ok, I would have huge issues with this. There are so many assumptions made my science, so many leaps of faith and so many instances of flat out ignoring huge problems with their theories, that when it comes to cosmology and evolution, in the purest sense, most of it can be held to be little more than junk science. True science is suppose to be observable, testable and repeatable and so much of what today's science community accepts as truth, totally fails that test and much of it is actually based on some pretty far out theories (with little or no evidence) that make accepting what the Bible says, look like the most reasonable thing a man could do. Now, don't get me wrong, I think that some of what the creation science people come up with can be a real stretch as well, but I honestly don't see mainstream science as having much of a leg up on them due to their own careless methodology, so before we go deciding that what the Bible says is wrong or at least not being understood correctly in it's own plain statements, then the world is going to have to show me something much more factual from the field of science, in these areas, then what it's done so far.

This is what the anti-evolution propaganda wants you to believe. In the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theology creation/evolution isn't even an issue, because they don't read the Bible as a scientific or natural history book. It's neither. It's a book in which God reveals himself to man in ways that were appropriate at the time. The evangelistic, modernistic propaganda against evolution and science is so strong and smothering that Christians everywhere get a bad name as narrow-minded, stupid unscientific losers. To be honest, most of the time evangelicals would be worthy of this bad name. They are so caught up in their modernistic, legalistic, I'm-right-you're-wrong type of thinking that there's not even space to even investigate science unprejudiced. I do remember one song from Don Franscisco that always is exactly to the point: "Everybody else but me. Everybody else but me. He was talking to the hypocrites and Pharisees. Everybody else but me." Most of the time evangelic propagandistic thinking can be the closest thing to what we call Phariseism than anything else.

[CatNamedManny]

I'm not a scientist, but I trust fully those Christians who are scientists and have studied these issues for themselves. I highly recommend BioLogos.org, which tackled in detail many of the questions Christians have about evolution.

I will say that, based on what I've read, evolution being untestable fails the smell test, as scientists have used evolution to accurately predict the location of transitional fossils and inactive genetic material in the genomes of various animals, including humans.

It's one thing to throw out a whole bunch of rhetoric about all the flaws with evolutionary theory; it's quite another to detail those flaws.

I'll admit I get a little frustrated when I post something fairly lengthy because I know someone will hammer me for not citing the source or otherwise being clear about the intent, and then get a response like gman's – "I don't have time to read that. You're Al Gore, and I'm hilarious!" – while those who do take the time to respond simply post a series of unsupported statements with no attempt whatsoever to back them up. (Although I do thank you, Mike, for actually taking the time to read and respond.)

So this is my challenge: Let's lay all the cards on the table. Show exactly where the flaws are with evolutionary theory, why you don't find it credible, and we can talk about those like adults. But if your opposition to evolution is grounded solely on the basis of biblicism, and no amount of counterfactual evidence about the merits of biological evolution is going to change your mind, then let's acknowledge that and move on.

[Preacherman777]

Fair enough. Let's start with the Cambrian explosion. This alone creates a huge problem for me. Prior to it, you had simple single celled organisms and then suddenly you have the fully formed animal phyla that we see today. I will also say that there are plenty of Christian scientists out there who do not accept marco evolution and I'm not talking about people like Dr. Dino, I'm talking about legit scientists and accepting the majority as proof of being right is meaningless because let's not forget that the majority once thought the world was flat. If there is one thing we surely know evolves, it is scientific thought. They used to think the universe was eternal, now they know it's not. Guess what, the Bible always said it wasn't. No, the Bible is not a science book. In some ways it is a history book and I do believe and accept that the history it does relays is accurate. I also accept that the statements it makes about things of a scientific nature that are not hyperbole are also accurate. The problem here, for me, is that secular science has failed to convince me of it's case. I am a rather skeptical person by nature and I ain't buying what they are selling, because I find it to be very lacking. In the same sense, and as I have said, I find the cases made by many creation science people to be lacking as well. I check out the scientific claims no matter who makes them and when I see BS, I call it what it is.

[gman]

It was a joke. Al Gore is famous for saying the science is settled. My belief in this is that it is not. Allowing evolution into the Creation account poses some problems with a literal interpretation of scripture, but that (the literal interpretation) has already been done away with.

[brent]

Evolution is for fools who wish to deny God. Even if the truth debunking evolution WERE to be in front of the scientists and politicians who want evolution to be true, they would not see it, much like they can understand Jesus Christ and the Word of God, unless the Holy Spirit regenerate their souls and awaken them to new understanding. There are more than a few former atheists and evolutionists in the science and medical community that have jumped ship. It is all because of God.

Jesus said that the Torah was true and the very Word of God. One means "one" and "day" is what we know as a day today.