• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Inerrancy of the Bible and other Religious Texts

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
Ryan2065 said:
Here are my two...
John 3:13-15 Says that no one has ascended into heaven before Jesus except for Jesus himself. 2 Ki 2:11 States that Elijah ascended into heaven.
and
2 Chr 21:20 and 2 Chr 22:1-2 Here Jehoram is 32 when he comes to power and he reigns for 8 years. So he is 40 when he dies. Then his "oldest" son comes to power. As it says his oldest son is 42 when he comes to power. So his son is 2 years older than him.

Please let me know how these are not errors.
I'm not ignoring you, Ryan. I'll get back with you on those. They're toughies! They really are.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
So far, I've not seen anything in this thread that leads me to suppose the bible is inerrant. Does anyone have any stronger arguments for inerrancy than those which have already been proposed?
 

Ceridwen018

Well-Known Member
My very first post is a classical example. I stated that God embedded age in His creation. To prove it from the Bible, I showed how the Earth has only been here for 6000 years.
If the Bible was inerrant, then your reasoning would hold more water. Unfortunately, you have not been able to provide outside examples or evidence of any kind to support your claim of inerrency. Do you realize that the Bible itself does not even claim to be inerrant? What say you to that?
 

Feathers in Hair

World's Tallest Hobbit
AV1611 said:
Au contrere, Ceridwen. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY is debated more that my Saviour, and the Book He wrote. I love it! Almost every Athiest, Agnostic, Buddhist, Jainist, Confusian, and all the other Heinz 57 varities know Him and His cross.
Unless you're willing to include Christianity in the Heinz 57, please retract that statement. It's incredibly offensive.
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
FeathersinHair said:
Unless you're willing to include Christianity in the Heinz 57, please retract that statement. It's incredibly offensive.
I respectfully decline. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. I'm also willing to take the consequences of being locked out. Why are YOU the only one complaining?
 

Katzpur

Not your average Mormon
AV1611 said:
INTERNAL EXAMPLE: God is the Author of the Bible. God doesn't make mistakes. The Bible has no mistakes.
Was God also the translator? If so, why are there so many translations? Why not just one? Don't say they're all the same; that's obviously not the case. For instance, try having a discussion with a Roman Catholic about the meaning of the word "saint." Mention the fact that the KJV uses the word some 62 times in the New Testament alone and that the word clearly refers to as a disciple of Christ, as one of those who chose to follow Him. Your Catholic counterpart will deny that the word is even found in the Bible. (I know; I've had this discussion before.) Well, he'd be right. The word is not found in the Catholic Bible. See what I'm saying?

I suppose you're also convinced that it's complete. If so, perhaps you could tell me where to find the book of Samuel the Seer, the book of Jehu, or Paul's epistle to the Laodiceans. They were left out of the table of contents in my bible (the KJV).
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
Katzpur said:
Was God also the translator? If so, why are there so many translations? Why not just one? Don't say they're all the same; that's obviously not the case. For instance, try having a discussion with a Roman Catholic about the meaning of the word "saint." Mention the fact that the KJV uses the word some 62 times in the New Testament alone and that the word clearly refers to as a disciple of Christ, as one of those who chose to follow Him. Your Catholic counterpart will deny that the word is even found in the Bible. (I know; I've had this discussion before.) Well, he'd be right. The word is not found in the Catholic Bible. See what I'm saying?

I suppose you're also convinced that it's complete. If so, perhaps you could tell me where to find the book of Samuel the Seer, the book of Jehu, or Paul's epistle to the Laodiceans. They were left out of the table of contents in my bible (the KJV).
Hi, Katzpur!

Good questions.

God, in a sense, translated the King James Bible. The reason I say that, is because He said in Psalm 12:7 that He would preserve His word. So if He did preserve it, then where is it? Well, it exists today in the form of the 1611 KJV bible. The reason I believe THAT is because the Greek language was extremely corrupted - thanks to Plato and friends.

They helped institute a new line of Greek language called Classical Greek, whereas the common people spoke Koine Greek. The Classical Greek is where all these NIV, NASB, TEC, etc come from ... as well as Strong's Concordance (which I like to call Wrong's Concordance).

Anyway the KJV comes to us via the Gothic Language, not the Greek Language, and God superintended it's transmission to us as He promised in Psalm 12:7.

I hope this clarifies!

p.s. As far as the other books you mentioned: that's my point. God made sure they weren't included in the KJV, because evidentally they were not inspired by Him to be written in the first place. (In other words, someone wrote them w/o the aid of the Holy Spirit).

I hope this makes sense!
 

Feathers in Hair

World's Tallest Hobbit
AV1611 said:
I respectfully decline. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. I'm also willing to take the consequences of being locked out. Why are YOU the only one complaining?
I'm not sure if I was the only one complaining. You would never be locked out simply for stating your beliefs. I simply feel that it is offensive to other religions.
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
FeathersinHair said:
I'm not sure if I was the only one complaining. You would never be locked out simply for stating your beliefs. I simply feel that it is offensive to other religions.
I'll admit I'm a little 'militant' in my defense of my Saviour.

I certaing didn't mean to offend anyone, and I won't say it again.

Fair enough?
 

Feathers in Hair

World's Tallest Hobbit
AV1611 said:
I'll admit I'm a little 'militant' in my defense of my Saviour.

I certaing didn't mean to offend anyone, and I won't say it again.

Fair enough?
More than fair. (And I'll admit, probably the reason why I was complaining was because I tend to be thin-skinned.) For me, it means a lot that you didn't mean to offend anyone. That was really all I was concerned about.

(Okay, now I'll try to leave this thread alone again! Really, I'll try!)
 

Jayhawker Soule

-- untitled --
Premium Member
AV1611 said:
Anyway the KJV comes to us via the Gothic Language, not the Greek Language, and God superintended it's transmission to us as He promised in Psalm 12:7.
Psalm 12:7 is evidence of nothing other than sloppy translation by the KJV.
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
Deut. 32.8 said:
Psalm 12:7 is evidence of nothing other than sloppy translation by the KJV.
Well as the old saying goes: when life hands you slop, make sloppy joes! LOLOL

(Or is it lemonade? Oh well)
 

Ceridwen018

Well-Known Member
Anyway the KJV comes to us via the Gothic Language, not the Greek Language,
This doesn't make any sense to me. The original writers of the stories found in the Bible wrote in Greek and Hebrew. Why would translation from the "Gothic Language" be more accurate than a translation from the original Greek?
 

Scuba Pete

Le plongeur avec attitude...
An ineresting read about the KJV and it's origin of the Textus Receptus can be found HERE and is pasted below:

Authorized in 1604 and published in 1611, the King James version naturally is based on the TR. When it was created, there was no demand for critical editions. (Though in fact the original KJV contains some textual notes. These, like the preface, are usually suppressed in modern versions, making the version that much worse than it is. In addition, editions of the KJV do not print precisely the same text. But this is another issue.)

Even accepting that the KJV derives from the TR, and has most of its faults, it is reasonable to ask which TR it is based on. The usual simplistic answer is Stephanus's or Beza's. F.H.A. Scrivener, however, who studied the matter in detail, concluded that it was none of these. Rather, it is a mixed text, closest to Beza, with Stephanus in second place, but not clearly affiliated with any edition. (No doubt the influence of the Vulgate, and of early English translations, is also felt here.) Scrivener reconstructed the text of the KJV in 1894, finding some 250 differences from Stephanus. Jay P. Green, however, states that even this edition does not agree entirely with the KJV, listing differences at Matt. 12:24, 27; John 8:21, 10:16 (? -- this may be translational); 1 Cor. 14:10, 16:1; compare also Mark 8:14, 9:42; John 8:6; Acts 1:4; 1 John 3:16, where Scrivener includes words found in the KJV in italics as missing from their primary text.

Since there are people who still, for some benighted reason, use the King James Bible for Bible study, we perhaps need to add a few words about its defects (defects conceded by all legitimate textual critics, plus most people who know anything about translations). This is not to deny that it is a brilliant work of English prose; it is a brilliant work of English prose. But it is not an adequate English Bible.

The first reason is the obvious textual one: It is translated from the Textus Receptus. There was no good alternative at the time, but we know now that it is simply a bad text. This is true event if one accepts the Byzantine text as original; the TR is not a good representative of that text-form, and is even worse if one accepts any other text form, or if one is eclectic.

The Old Testament suffers the same problem -- in some ways, worse. The Hebrew text had hardly been edited at all when the KJV was translated. Today, with more Hebrew manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, various translations, more ancient commentaries, and a better grasp of textual criticism, we can establish a much better Hebrew text.

The lack of Hebrew scholarship at the time contributed to an even greater problem with the Old Testament: The translators didn't know what it meant. Textual damage caused some of the cruxes; others arose from ignorance of classical Hebrew. The translators often had to turn to the translations in LXX or the Vulgate -- which often were just as messed up as the Hebrew. Today, we have more samples of ancient Hebrew to give us references for words; we have knowledge of cognate languages such as Ugaritic and Akkadian, and we have the tools of linguistics. There are still unsolved problems in the Old Testament -- but they are far fewer.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the New Testament. Greek never entirely vanished from the knowledge of scholars, as Hebrew did, but the language evolved. At the time the KJV was translated, classical Greek -- the Greek of Homer and the tragic playwrights -- was considered the standard. Koine Greek -- the Greek of the New Testament -- was forgotten; the Byzantine empire had undergone a sort of Classic Revival. People referred to the Greek of the New Testament as "the Language of the Holy Spirit" -- and then sneered at its uncouth forms. Over the past century and a half, the koine has been rediscovered, and we know that the New Testament was written in a living, active language. This doesn't affect our understanding of the meaning of the New Testament as much as our increased knowledge of Hebrew affects our understanding of the Old -- but it does affect it somewhat.

In addition, there is the translation style. The KJV was created by six separate committees, with relatively little joint effort and a relatively small body of prior work (this was 1604, after all; the committee from Cambridge couldn't just buzz down to Westminster for the afternoon, e.g.). This meant that there wasn't much standardization of vocabulary; a word might be translated two or three or even half a dozen different ways. Sometimes, of course, this was necessary (as, e.g. with [font=SYMBOL,GreekAccents,KOINE,KoineRegular,SPIonic]ANWQEN[/font], "again," "from above" in John 3:3, 7, 31 -- a case where the KJV translators seem, ironically, to have missed the multivalued meaning). But it is generally agreed that that KJV used various renderings for solely stylistic reasons; their translation was meant to be read aloud. They produced a version that was excellent for these purposes -- but, in consequence, much less suitable for detailed study, especially, e.g., of Synoptic parallels, which can look completely different when the KJV renditions are set side by side.

Plus the committee was under instructions to stay as close as possible to the previous standard, the so-called Bishop's Bible, which in turn had been created based on the Great Bible. And even it was derived largely from Tyndale's work. The Great Bible had been created some 75 years earlier, and Tyndale in the decades before that -- not long in ordinary terms, but this was a time when English was evolving fast. This heritage means that a number of the features -- e.g. the use of you/ye/thou/thee/thy/thine -- was actually incorrect even by the standards of the time, and its influence came to produce a truly curious effect: "Thou," initially the second person singular pronoun, (as opposed to "ye," the plural form, loosely equivalent to the American Southernism "y'all") was briefly a form used to address a social inferior, and then, under the influence of the KJV itself, treated as a form of address to one deserving of high dignity. This is genuinely confusing at best.

Finally, the KJV does not print the text in paragraphs, but rather verse by verse. Readers can see this, but it's one thing to know it and another to really read the text in that light.

To be fair, the translators were aware of most of these problems. The preface, in fact, urges "the Reader... not to conclude or dogmatize upon this or that peremptorily." The Old Testament, according to Alister McGrath, contained 6,637 marginal notes, most of them variant readings (more notes than many modern translations, we should observe). But I have yet to find a recent printing of the KJV which includes its marginal notes, let alone its preface. (I'm told there is one -- or at least a reprint of an allegedly-exact nineteenth century repring -- but it's an expensive edition you won't find in ordinary bookstores.)

And, of course, since the time of publication, the language of the KJV -- already somewhat antiquated in its time, based as it was largely upon Tyndale's translation -- has become entirely archaic.

In an aside, we might note that, at the time of its publication, the KJV was greeted with something less than enthusiasm, and for the first few decades of its life, the Geneva Bible remained the more popular work; the Geneva edition (unlike the other pre-KJV translations) remained in print for more than thirty years after the KJV was published. During the Commonwealth period (1649-1660), there was talk of commissioning another new translation. It wasn't until the KJV became quite venerable that it somehow assumed an aura of special value -- even of independent canonicity. Quite simply, while the King James Bible was a brilliant work, and a beautiful monument of sixteenth century English, it is not fit to be used as a Bible in today's world.
 

Scuba Pete

Le plongeur avec attitude...
So the KJV is not Gothic in origin, but is from the TR with a HEAVY Vulgate influence.

Not to just be disagreeable Deut, but the translation was anything but sloppy. It was brilliant for it's time and I wish that any of the text that I have ever translated from Russian to English would have been even a quarter as clear. Unfortunately, the language of the KJV was archaic at the time it was written and hopelessly so today.
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
Ceridwen018 said:
This doesn't make any sense to me. The original writers of the stories found in the Bible wrote in Greek and Hebrew. Why would translation from the "Gothic Language" be more accurate than a translation from the original Greek?
Sorry about that, Ceridwen. I failed to mention that the NT was written in Koine Greek. My point was that the KJV bypasses Classical Greek.

Luke, for instance, wrote in Koine Greek, which was translated into Gothic, which was translated into English. But Luke was also mis-translated into Classical Greek, which was translated into English.

That stuff they say about Mark 16:9-20 missing, is missing in the Classical Greek texts, not the Koine Greek or Byzantine (Gothic) texts - or the King James Bible.
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
NetDoc said:
An ineresting read about the KJV and it's origin of the Textus Receptus can be found HERE and is pasted below:


Even accepting that the KJV derives from the TR, and has most of its faults, it is reasonable to ask which TR it is based on. The usual simplistic answer is Stephanus's or Beza's. F.H.A. Scrivener, however, who studied the matter in detail, concluded that it was none of these. Rather, it is a mixed text, closest to Beza, with Stephanus in second place, but not clearly affiliated with any edition.
None of the above, it was Erasmus' Textus Receptus.
 

Jayhawker Soule

-- untitled --
Premium Member
NetDoc said:
Not to just be disagreeable Deut, but the translation was anything but sloppy. It was brilliant for it's time and I wish that any of the text that I have ever translated from Russian to English would have been even a quarter as clear. Unfortunately, the language of the KJV was archaic at the time it was written and hopelessly so today.
Good point. I stand corrected. I would still suggest that the KJV's Psalm 12:7 is flawed.
 

michel

Administrator Emeritus
Staff member
Deut. 32.8 said:
Good point. I stand corrected. I would still suggest that the KJV's Psalm 12:7 is flawed.
If you see flaws, then how should it read?
 
Top