Scriptures New And Old

[vbnautilus 48]

there's a hindu guru claiming that right now, and literally millions of followers that believe him

You mean Sai Baba? What an awesome phenomenon he is. But I know 5th graders who do better slight of hand.

[Balloon guy 158]

So I was at my sister-in-law's family's house for christmas eve, and in between dinner and dessert a bunch of them went to church. When they got back one of them was all annoyed about the sermon (or whatever you call it), which was about Caesar's virgin birth and comparing it to that of JC himself. Does the bible say that Augustus Caesar (I assume that's the one they were referring to) was born to a virgin mother? What's the deal there?

Never heard that.Maybe it's in the new and revised Bible that SB has been trying to get passed through.Man let her publish one book and she's completely changing the literary world.I bet Hamlet is about to get a make over...

[speedz99 145]

Yeah, I looked around, she must have been referring to his own claims of virgin birth, nothing from the bible.

[speedz99 145]

Maybe it's in the new and revised Bible that SB has been trying to get passed through.

Silly woman, what with the reading of books that aren't the bible and the taking of classes that aren't held in a church basement. What a crazy bitch!

[Randy Reed 0]

Silly woman, what with the reading of books that aren't the bible and the taking of classes that aren't held in a church basement. What a crazy bitch!

Well, domesticating women was one of the greatest achievments ever.http://www.theonion.com/content/news/woman_domesticated

[Spademan 94]

Well, I swallow, so I will always have that. Fag.

Well.You win this round, I have no response.

[speedz99 145]

First time for everything.

[vbnautilus 48]

Sweet Dee doesn't seem so sweet any more.

[speedz99 145]

I disagree. The sweetest girls swallow.

[Spademan 94]

I disagree. The sweetest girls swallow.

I was under the impression sweet dee was a dude.If it's a chick I'd have had a great number of responses. Most of them physical and involving fluids.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

Never heard that.Maybe it's in the new and revised Bible that SB has been trying to get passed through.Man let her publish one book and she's completely changing the literary world.I bet Hamlet is about to get a make over...

Silly woman, what with the reading of books that aren't the bible and the taking of classes that aren't held in a church basement. What a crazy bitch!

Well, domesticating women was one of the greatest achievments ever.http://www.theonion.com/content/news/woman_domesticated

Delightful!

[Southern Buddhist 1]

Latest book read on this topic: Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels. One interesting thing that came out in my reading: early congregations were more radically mixed than we can imagine. Any one random Christian congregation circa 250 AD would have had in it:people who believed Jesus was fully human and only possessed by the Holy Spirit from his baptism to his death (when it left him, prompting the cry, "Why hast thou forsaken me?");people who believed Jesus was fully divine and that his bodily appearance was merely an illusion;NOBODY who believed he was both fully human and fully divine, which is today the orthodox interpretation (this two-butts-and-no-head mishmash of irreconcilables hadn't yet been developed as theology);people who believed that to follow Christ one had to live according to all Jewish law;people who believed that to follow Christ meant hating Jews, or at best ignoring them;people who believed in the trinity; people who didn't;and people we would now call gnostics.So not only did your own fellow congregants often hold beliefs diametrically opposed to your own, but this made the act of chasing heretics out of the emerging (Catholic) church deeply personal. It didn't mean saying, that group down in Egypt is heretical. It meant saying, "You and you and you are heretics," to your neighbors and co-worshippers.

[Randy Reed 0]

Latest book read on this topic: Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels. One interesting thing that came out in my reading: early congregations were more radically mixed than we can imagine. Any one random Christian congregation circa 250 AD would have had in it:people who believed Jesus was fully human and only possessed by the Holy Spirit from his baptism to his death (when it left him, prompting the cry, "Why hast thou forsaken me?");people who believed Jesus was fully divine and that his bodily appearance was merely an illusion;NOBODY who believed he was both fully human and fully divine, which is today the orthodox interpretation (this two-butts-and-no-head mishmash of irreconcilables hadn't yet been developed as theology);people who believed that to follow Christ one had to live according to all Jewish law;people who believed that to follow Christ meant hating Jews, or at best ignoring them;people who believed in the trinity; people who didn't;and people we would now call gnostics.So not only did your own fellow congregants often hold beliefs diametrically opposed to your own, but this made the act of chasing heretics out of the emerging (Catholic) church deeply personal. It didn't mean saying, that group down in Egypt is heretical. It meant saying, "You and you and you are heretics," to your neighbors and co-worshippers.

I am actually on the waiting list, (couldn't believe it was in demand) at the local library for this. Sounds good.

[SweetDee 0]

I disagree. The sweetest girls swallow.

This.

[SweetDee 0]

I was under the impression sweet dee was a dude.If it's a chick I'd have had a great number of responses. Most of them physical and involving fluids.

And, this.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

I am actually on the waiting list, (couldn't believe it was in demand) at the local library for this. Sounds good.

It is very good, but I think the bit about mixed congregations might have come from Bart Ehrman's books.

[colonel Feathers 5]

Well, domesticating women was one of the greatest achievments ever.http://www.theonion.com/content/news/woman_domesticated

Finally, a scholarly discourse without the usual partisan bickering.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

From the Onion article:

The corset, along with the many other yokes and straps that followed, provided a physical reminder of who was boss.

Ooh, baby.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

I read hard so you don't have toooooo....Here are some select quotes and paraphrases from Karen Armstrong's "biography" of the Bible (i.e., a short layperson's history of how people have read and interpreted Judeo-Christian scripture through the ages). I'm taking select sentences and compressing ten pages or so to get the thrust of the argument, so don't think it's written as choppily as it will sound here.

The ethos of the Enlightenment had inspired more scholars to study the Bible critically ... the distinguished classicist Richard Bentley (1662-1742) mounted a scholarly campaign in the Bible's defense. Using the critical techniques applied to Greco-Roman literature, he showed that it was possible to reconstruct the original manuscripts by collating and analyzing the variants.In Germany the Pietists, who wanted to get beyond doctrinal arguments of the competing sects, ... printed 80,000 complete Bibles and 100,000 New Testaments between 1711 and 1719. Five different translations were printed side-by-side, so that Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholics, and others could read the version of their choice but could consult the wording in another column if they encountered a difficulty.

I think that's a fantastic idea, one that would still be useful today.

By the end of the eighteenth century, scholars agreed that Moses had certainly not written the entire Pentateuch [as tradition held -- for one thing, it includes an account of his death and part of it also begins inside the promised land, which Moses did not enter], but that the Pentateuch had a number of different authors who wrote in distinctive styles. One used the divine title "Elohim," while another preferred "Yahweh"; there were duplicate narratives, such as the two different creation stories in Genesis. ... Scripture was therefore essential to Christian life because it provides the only access to Jesus. But because its authors were conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they lived, it was legitmate to subject their testimony to critical scrutiny. The life of Jesus had been a divine revelation, but the writers who recorded it were ordinary human beings, subject to sin and error.

This school of thought was known at the time as Higher Criticism, which was carried out almost entirely by theologians within the Protestant Church's various sects and entirely by devout believers. Far from being an attack on belief from skeptics, this was the work of earnest, learned believers to better understand their scripture so that they could explain it to their flocks and extend its reach.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which marked a new phase in the history of science. ... Darwin did not intend to attack religion and at first the religious response was muted. There was far greater outcry when seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews (1861), which made Higher Criticism accessible to the general reader. ... The authors of Essays and Reviews argued that the Bible should not be given special treatment but should be approached with the same critical rigor as any other ancient text.

More to come!

[Southern Buddhist 1]

More from Armstrong:

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Higher Criticism rather than Darwinism was the main bone of contention between liberal and conservative Christians. Liberals believed that in the long term the critical method would lead to a deeper, richer understanding of the Bible. But for conservatives Higher Criticism symbolized everything that was wrong with the post-Enlightenment world that was sweeping old certainties away.The new rational bias of the modern world made it difficult -- if not impossible -- for many Christians to appreciate the role and value of mythology in culture. There was, therefore, a growing sense that the truths of religion needed to be factual. ... Clergymen blamed Higher Criticism for widespread drunkenness, infidelity, and the rising crime and divorce rates. ... There was a widespread hunger for certainty. People now expected something entirely new from the Bible -- something it had never pretended to offer in all the centuries and millennia hitherto -- absolute factual proof.

She goes on to refer to something called "literal sense". This doesn't mean literal truth. Rahter it was an earlier (circa 1500) response to a interpretation that claimed every single sentence in the Bible was symbolic, that not one bit of it was written to be literally understood, and that it required special knowledge to read this coded symbilism. This was a viewpoint dangerously close to gnosticism, and scholars responded by saying that the Bible's "literal sense" was quite readable by anyone who was literate and that no special knowledge was needed. That definition will come up in a moment.

In 1881, Archibald Hodge published a defense of the literal truth of the Bible with his colleague Benjamin Warfield. It became a classic. 'The scriptures not only contain but ARE the Word of God, and hence all their elements are absolutely errorless and binding,' they wrote. Every biblical statement -- on any subject -- was absolute 'truth to the facts.'The nature of faith was changing. It was no longer "trust" (the literal meaning of the Greek word for faith), but intellectual submission to a set of beliefs.This was an entirely new departure. In the past some interpreters had favored the study of the literal sense of the Bible but they had never believed that every single word of scripture was factually true. The belief in biblical inerrancy, pioneered by Hodge and Warfield, would however become crucial to Christian fundamentalism.The same was true of a new apocalyptic vision that was the creation of John Nelson Darby. He was convinced, based on his literal reading of Revelatioin, that God would shortly end the world. The attraction of this theory was that true believers would be spared. On the basis of a passing comment by Paul that at the Second Coming Christians would be "taken up in the clouds" to meet Jesus, Darby maintained that there would be a "rapture," a "snatching up" of Christians (an idea that is found nowhere in the bible other than obliquely in that one line of Paul).Darby's theory was in line with nineteenth-century scientific thought. He spoke of historical eras or "dispensations," each of which had ended in destruction; this was not dissimilar to the successive epochs that geologists had found in the strata of fossils in rocks -- each one of which, some thought, had ended in catastrophe.Darby's theory was literal. A millennium meant ten centuries; "Israel" meant Jews, not a "new Israel" of Christians; if Revelation prophesied a battle outside Jerusalem, there would be a battle outside Jerusalem. This reading of scripture became even eaasier after the publication of The Scofield Reference Bible (1909). Cyrus I. Scofield explained Darby's rapture theory in detailed notes -- a gloss which for many Christian fundamentalists has become almost as authoritative as the Bible itself.

This is not to argue against any of this, at least not for me. For me, it is to show the historical context in which ideas developed and grew. Every new idea, I think, builds on and reacts to ideas before it, so unless we understand a clear timeline of interpretation, understanding, scholarship, and ideas, we cannot truly understand where we are and what we believe today. That's why history is so important to me, and why I am so interested in what Christianity was like in the first and second centuries and how it continued to develop into the Catholic Church, the Protestant schism, and so on to witch burnings and West Virginia snake handling.Anyway, then Armstrong goes back to talking about Darwin.

Evolution might never have replaced Higher Criticism [as the key issue of fundamentalists] had it not been for a dramatic development in Tennessee. The southern states had hitherto taken little part in the fundamentalist movement [which was largely centered in the midwest] but they were worried about the teaching of evolution. Blah, blah, blah, Scopes. [she summarizes the law, the arrest, and the trial.]The press gleefully denounced the fundamentalists as hopeless anachronisms, unfit to take part in the modern world. This had an effect that is instructive to us today. When fundamentalist movements are attacked they usually become more extreme. Before Dayton, the conservatives were wary of evolution, but few had espoused 'creation science.' After Scopes, however, they became more vehemently literal in their interpretation of scripture, and creation science became the flagship of their movement.

The questions raised for me are these: do fundamentalists see themselves as the only true Christians, or do they see themselves as one viewpoint neither more or less correct than any other Christian viewpoint and part of a large, varied family including Catholics, liberation theologists, and others?How do fundamentalists feel regarding the timing of revelations? Was the Christianity practiced in the first century more authentic (i.e., more correct) than that practiced today, even though those Christians held beliefs no sect holds today? Or did Darby get a new revelation from God, making an interpretation barely a hundred years old the most authentic one? Do authenticity and age have anything at all to do with each other? If a hundred-year-old revelation is truth, then isn't it entirely possible for new interpretations today to supplant it? Or is a new revelation suspect because it's new? Is the ongoing talk in Christian circles about original (i.e., first-century) beliefs really a willingness or a desire to go back to those beliefs, no matter how different they may be, or did more recent revelations/interpretations improve on those ideas?I hope you don't mind my poking and prodding. I'm very interested in mapping the outlines of belief, not the centers that everyone agrees on, but the outer borders where edges become blurred.

[Randy Reed 0]

Good stuff and thanks for the re-cap. I wish we had a fundamentalist to answer some of the questions.

[Balloon guy 158]

Good stuff and thanks for the re-cap. I wish we had a fundamentalist to answer some of the questions.

What questions?These are a singularly myopic view of fundamentalism. They naively said that the rapture is only in one verse, which is true if you try to pigeon hole a verse to say it in the phrase you want, and false if you read the the Bible and see it has many different locations for end times, including Daniel, Revelations, Matthew and scattered throughout many NT books. End times discussions would be pretty sad if they all hinged on one remote verse in only one book.Today's Christians in the west are much more heavily leaning towards a pre-tribulation rapture, some hold a post-tribulation rapture, and the smart ones like me hold to a mid-tribulation rapture. But we all believe in the rapture, and the time difference can be spread over a 7 year time frame. But Christians from day one have been looking for the return of Christ, so how has that changed.?Pretending that one particular branch of Christianity was 'making' the beliefs up and the following generations were adapting it to outside influences is about as silly as possible and requires you to approach the subject with a pre-conceived notion that Christianity is a man made religion.Especially when you consider that we have the same Bible, Word for Word. So pretending that the early Christians didn't believe in the same things we believe in now shows two things;1; you guys don't have a decent understanding of what the Bible says and 2; you will allow anyone to tell you anything and you will believe it.Now the mormon faith, there you can make this case. They have evolved their religion by actually changing their doctrines AND making outright changes to their book of mormon. ( these changes were required because of 'accidents' where the supposed letter by letter translation done by Joey Smith quoted Bible chapters and verses in references 1600 years before the Bible was ever given chapters and verses ) And their doctrine was dramatically changed after the 1970's hiring of a New York ad agency to 'improve their image' which was coincidentally followed by their 'prophet' having a talk with God and changing their doctrine that when a black man becomes a mormon, he will slowly become white. Oh and no longer would slitting the throats of a mormon who converted to Christianity be the correct method to 'save them from hell'But Christianity, you might as well claim that the thinking of the middle age church in the south of France with their regionally transcribed Latin Vulgate translations was the only belief that existed for the scriptures while you ignore the entire eastern orthodox who were using more accurate Greek translations while living in Constantinople.However should you change this line of thought to the theory of evolution, you would be much more accurate, the changes from Darwin to Scopes to today are so great that you might as well join the mormon church.

[speedz99 145]

However should you change this line of thought to the theory of evolution, you would be much more accurate, the changes from Darwin to Scopes to today are so great that you might as well join the mormon church.

I thought that when you lost Evolutionary Jeopardy you'd stop pretending to understand it. Whatever happened to that?Also, SB quoted and wrote a lot of stuff. I'm not saying I know she's right and you're wrong, but to be at all convincing you'd have to refute each point separately, as opposed to an overarching defense against the conclusion. You know, if you care to try and have a serious debate about it.

[loogie 115]

I'm a big fan of new scriptures. You'll find me waiting outside the church well before it opens on days they come out.

[Balloon guy 158]

I thought that when you lost Evolutionary Jeopardy you'd stop pretending to understand it. Whatever happened to that?Also, SB quoted and wrote a lot of stuff. I'm not saying I know she's right and you're wrong, but to be at all convincing you'd have to refute each point separately, as opposed to an overarching defense against the conclusion. You know, if you care to try and have a serious debate about it.

Actually I was willing to continue the game, quitting while I was behind on my definitions is hardly a way to claim victory.And I am not required to address each and every point SB made just because she quoted some books with bad premises ( premisi?)In fact I am not required to do anything.You are not the boss of me.But feel free to bullet point those 'questions' that Sb brought up with her post that I failed to answer to your satisfaction.