Christian Fundamentalism/Taking the Bible Literally

[BeBMan]

I think at poly the babble should not be taken literally

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by Elok
How does this have four views and thirteen posts from eleven different people? Hands up if you posted in this thread without looking at it!

Just noticed it too. Replied to aneeshm's Palin thread, and the viewer still stands at zero. I feel the forum doesn't accept me as a real person

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by BeBro
I feel the forum doesn't accept me as a real person

You aren't! You're imaginary!

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
People need to read the Bible (both the OT and the NT) with their mind open and thinking about what was going on at the time, and what was going on in the overall narrative.

Isolating one text or one word (or a sampling of texts or words) is mistreating the Bible.

JM

You and I agree on something!!

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Nikolai
It's clear Agathon haven't studied religion. It's no doubt among scholars that Jesus existed.

That's not true. Many people think that Christian writers interpolated text into copies of earlier writings to bolster their case. Unfortunately, all the people who seem to write about him (like Tacitus) are writing 70 years after his death, which is well after the composition of the early gospels, which themselves were written at least 30 years after his supposed death.

That evidence is very thin.

You can compare it to the means people like me use to determine the autobiographies of ancient philosophers, particularly the pre-socratic philosophers. Parmenides is perhaps the most important pre-socratic, but we know almost nothing about him because the doxographical tradition (for example Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers) tends to be filled with invented stories and massive inaccuracies.

This is quite normal. Ancient people simply did not have the standards of evidence or academic honesty that we take for granted. Plagiarism was rife and not really a big deal. People would write pretending to be some famous person. Historical writing was mostly biased and intended as polemic in support of some view or other. Most importantly, people didn't have a strong sense of the distinction between reported fact and traditional myth. The Trojan War is the prime example.

The difference with Parmenides is that he wrote a poem, of which the most important parts remain with us. Similarly, for other pre-socratics, there exist fragments of writing that form more or less coherent views. Jesus wrote nothing.

However, Thales of Miletus, the earliest philosopher is someone we know almost nothing about. He probably existed, due to being mentioned in diverse sources and because nothing really stands or falls if he exists or doesn't. However, the views and stories attributed to him are unverifiable and probably made up.

Pythagoras is even closer to the kind of figure Jesus is, and we know jack **** about him. Again, the testimonia are often stories that illustrate precepts of the Pythagorean creed.

Even Plato, all of whose writings we possess, has fake stuff attributed to him and a bunch of sayings which are likely not authentic. And Plato lived in an extremely literate culture, whereas Jesus did not.

Let's be rational. When people like me talk about Pythagoras or Parmenides we mean "the founder of the Pythagorean School to whom (probably falsely) all its discoveries are attributed" or "the author of the poem about being, teacher of Melissus and supposed founder of the Eleatic school".

If we are going to apply the same standard to Jesus then he turns out to be "the supposed founder figure of a religion, about whom almost nothing is known, including whether he really existed, and to whom many sayings and deeds are attributed years after the supposed events occurred, by members of the religion once it was fairly well established".

He's even shadier than Pythagoras or Thales.

The main reason people believe in his authenticity is that they really want to believe.