Scott1
Well-Known Member
What are you trying to "restore"?
Who is God's living prophet today?-------- Are you a member of the LDS?
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The Bible Perfect
- Thread starter Sola'lor
- Start date
crystalonyx
Well-Known Member
The bible is basically a work of fiction, the stories collected together in the Council of Nicea to counter Arianism. The stories themselves were rehashes of previous religious myths, along with other supporting texts.
Phasmid
Mr Invisible
Or we all need a Church that has been around for 2,000 years and actually decided which books were going in the Bible and has continued to be guided by the Holy Spirit even today.
Hmmm... I wonder which one that is.
The same one, which brought about the Inquisition under the authority of the Pope right?
I am in one of my strange moods today where the GadFly has the absolute truth about the Bible. This absolute truth, however, is only my opinion, but it will do you no good to try to change my mind as a fly is set in his ways.
The Bible was written by God through his profits but this was before He wrote it. It was like a famous politician who voted for it before he voted against it. God did not always want you to know everything because you would not know how to use it. Romans:1:20: For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
What the profits wrote about when they wrote the Bible (although they did not know they were writing the Bible) was the WORD of God, which is only perfect WORD of God (John 1:1-6). Now, everybody, if you don't understand this after you have read John's opinion, you are not going to understand much of what is said here about the truth of the Bible. If you can not understand this, you might be doomed to a lifetime of net picking and rejecting the truth of the Bible like the skeptics and atheist.
Directly after the resurrection, all the Christians had to go by or be guided by, were the words Jesus had spoken while he preached the WORD and taught to the disciples. It would be years after the disciples and Apostles died before the New Testament was compiled but the followers of Christ lived by the WORD dating back to Christ, His death, and His resurrection. That is what the true Christians live by today, still do, that's right. The purpose of the New Testament was to confirm the Christian faith, not to create a new religion. Now, if you want to understand the Bible, pay close attention to the following verses.
John:4:24: God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
Christ was not speaking about the Bible but this was a complete new doctrine as it will be for some Christians today. But it ought not to be.
Mark:1:27: And they were all amazed, insomuch that they questioned among themselves, saying, What thing is this? what new doctrine is this? for with authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him.
Interestingly enough, only the people who discovered God through natural theology in the Old Testament, which indeed is what Christ taught, are the only ones to make full use of the Spirit of God.
Romans:8:14: For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.
Both the written word (Bible) and natural theology (spirit - rational thought and logic) must be used carefully together. I believe the Bible was given to Christians to keep them from going off on crazy mental tangents of crazy beliefs. That certainly has been true in my life as I highly value natural theology as that is where God is to be found and where God is indisputable. :clap
You make a good point and Christians especially need to give some serious thought to what you say, which I have; therefore, here it is. Most of us from youth are given the Bible as the truth about God. We are very young and that is what young people do, accept things at face value. Ask us a question about what we believe in adulthood and we still believe what we were taught about the Bible during our face value stage of development. People are conditioned to answer questions using the Bible, because we have been taught the Bible is true. That, however, is not a big problem for me. It has been fun discovering how much of what I thought was true really is not true. But in the meantime, I also have learned many new things about my holy book that I never knew existed. A person who does not examine his beliefs will be doomed to blindness for a long time. Self examination is not a threat, not war, not mental illness, but a simple search for truth that will help us all.
2Cor:13:5: Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?
GadFly
Or we all need a Church that has been around for 2,000 years and actually decided which books were going in the Bible and has continued to be guided by the Holy Spirit even today.
Hmmm... I wonder which one that is.
In history would that be the Greek Orthodox Church?
Would that be the Eastern Orthodox Church?That without the "organizational structure and doctrines" of the early Church there would have been no Bible... no Trinity/divinity of Christ etc. (or at least they would be one of hundreds along with the Arians and others)... and you and modern Protestants like you would have no Bible at all to quote from.... but yet all of you seem to spit in the face of the organization that allowed the early Church to flourish in the face of tremendous persecution and doctrinal divisions and over several centuries came to some limited agreement on the canon of Scripture. These things stayed the same for the most part for 1500 YEARS..... but now most Protestants believe divine revelation has been trapped inside their personal bibles for 2,000 years which waited for them and them alone to decipher the truth!
I'm not saying everyone should convert to one of the ancient faiths, but come on, study some history and give credit where credit is due.
Dunemeister
Well-Known Member
The transmission of the bible has been remarkably good. The texts have been transmitted with 99.5% agreement. That is, when you hold all the Greek and Syriac copies of the New Testament in front of you, they will agree 99.5% of the time. Given the amount of time and number of copyists involved, that's quite an impressive feat.
Translation is a trickier monkey because languages use different concepts and not all the concepts match exactly. To take a modern example, the English word "friend" and the Korean word "chingu" mean roughly the same thing but there are important differences. At times, the equivalence is straightforward and at other times stretched. But they're the only words we've got, so despite the problems, I have to use "friend" to translate "chingu." The same problems attend translations of the Greek to Latin and thence to other languages.
These problems have been largely overcome by the availability in English of direct translations from the Greek. We are doubly blessed by the fact that there are some 70 English translations of the bible. Thus we can see how different scholarly groups render passages. This is important for some controversial passages. But the point is that it doesn't matter which bible you read (New World Translation bracketed), you get the same message. If there were a great deal of corruption through the centuries, you wouldn't expect that.
For Christians, Jesus is our ultimate authority. Jesus' authority is mediated through the scriptures, which themselves were inspired by God Himself. They are "perfect" in the sense that they are "sufficient". Given the degree of success of transmission, this sufficiency has been retained. However, they are not perfect in the sense of inerrancy. The bible makes occasional mistakes, and there are historical details that are difficult to reconcile (e.g., did Jesus drink the sour wine offered him on the cross or not). These are problems we just have to deal with. Significantly, failure to resolve these problematic passages doesn't obscure the overall message of the texts.
No! That's not right. I think most of us understood well what Dunemeister just said. You should read more of his theology. He's really good in giving explanations and you might disagree with him but losing you, that is different. You only get lost when you want to get lost. I think you said the Bible was full of outright lies and deceit because of your unwillingness to refute Dunemeister's intellectual statements. You reacted emotionally, didn't you? You enjoyed saying what you said. Felt good, didn't it? But it is in great error to speak that way.
jeremiah 8:7-9 tells us the torah (part of the bible) is NOT the word of God. he says the "lying pens of the scribes has handled it falsely" "it" referring to the torah/law.
"Even the stork in the sky
knows her appointed seasons,
and the dove, the swift and the thrush
observe the time of their migration.
But my people do not know
the requirements of the Lord.
How can you say, We are wise,
for we have the law of the Lord,
when actually the lying pen of the scribes
has handled it falsely?
The wise will be put to shame;
they will be dismayed and trapped.
Since they have rejected the word of the Lord,
what kind of wisdom do they have?"
peace
Sola'lor
LDSUJC
FOr me it's Thomas S. Monson. Yes I am LDS.
EtuMalku
Abn Iblis ابن إبليس
I am sure Dunemeister can make a good argument for his beliefs, I have read other posts and they are intelligent and well thought out.
I don't usually get lost in discussion, it was a figure of speech.
I could refute his statements but I'm sure all that has been done a million times by now and would go nowhere.
I didn't react emotionally, more out of disgust and disbelief . . . as you may be aware of, I am not proponent of the Testaments.
Lastly, I do not speak in err.
EtuMalku
Abn Iblis ابن إبليس
Far from perfect. It can't be perfect because God is not perfect.
God evolves as does everything else. If God were perfect than there would be no need to evolve.
Christianity's original Gnostic doctrines and it's true origins in the Pagan Mysteries had been ruthlessly suppressed by the mass destruction of evidence and the creation of a false history to suit the political purposes of the Roman Church.
I have nothing against the teachings of Yeshua, but I don't think they are in the Testaments.
I think I was carried away in the spirit of debate and did not realize how firm I was in my rebuff of what you said. It was really none of my business. Please forgive me for barging in where I did not belong. I am in the wrong even if I thought I was being truthful at the time. My apologies.
GadFly
idea
Question Everything
I agree - I do not think that the Bible is perfect. It was written by men inspired by God, then mistranslated, and purposefully edited... Then again, even if we had the original unaltered text - as the scribes and Pharisees did - we would still be no better off than the scribes and Pharisees without a modern day prophet. I have gained my testimony through experience and the Holy Spirit - not from any book.
PS - for those of you who think the Bible is complete...
Lost scriptures: There are many sacred writings mentioned in the scriptures that we do not have today, among which are these books and writers:
book of:
the covenant (Ex. 24:7),
the wars of the Lord (Num. 21:14),
Jasher (Josh. 10:13; 2 Sam. 1:18),
the acts of Solomon (1 Kgs. 11:41),
Samuel the seer (1 Chr. 29:29),
Nathan the prophet (2 Chr. 9:29),
Shemaiah the prophet (2 Chr. 12:15),
Iddo the prophet (2 Chr. 13:22),
Jehu (2 Chr. 20:34),
the sayings of the seers (2 Chr. 33:19),
Enoch (Jude 1:14),
and the words of Zenock, Neum, and Zenos (1 Ne. 19:10),
Zenos (Jacob 5:1),
Zenock and Ezias (Hel. 8:20),
and a book of remembrance (Moses 6:5);
and epistles to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 5:9),
to the Ephesians (Eph. 3:3),
and from Laodicea (Col. 4:16).
these are books written by prophets and seers - they are scripture.
LDS articles of faith:
8 We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.
9 We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
My, but we're a bunch of Moderns and Post-Moderns, aren't we?
We read the Bible for factual information, in order to inform "correct" faith. We need to remember that those who wrote the scriptures and told the stories weren't Moderns, or Post-Moderns -- they were ... Ancients.
The Bible isn't a textbook of facts, from which we formulate faith. The Bible is a written testament to our faith, produced in order to preserve the stories and the Tradition.
We read the Bible for factual information, in order to inform "correct" faith. We need to remember that those who wrote the scriptures and told the stories weren't Moderns, or Post-Moderns -- they were ... Ancients.
The Bible isn't a textbook of facts, from which we formulate faith. The Bible is a written testament to our faith, produced in order to preserve the stories and the Tradition.
EtuMalku
Abn Iblis ابن إبليس
Some of us read the Bible for factual information (again I assume the Christian Bible, there are other ones you know?) in order to "correct" the misinformed of faith!
How are they ancients?
As far as preserving any stories and tradition, the NT has done a good job of hiding the Truth from even it's own followers.
A book of allegories and Pagan GodMan myths. The true gnosis of Yeshua's teachings are hidden, erased, forgotten . . . all in all, ruined.
Just my two pence worth.
idea
Question Everything
hidden, erased, forgetten....
I think the scriptures are purposefully written to confuse readers so that we would be forced to pray, ask, and find out first hand from the Holy spirit rather than from a book. The book is a means to an end, it is not the end.
EtuMalku
Abn Iblis ابن إبليس
I would have to disagree somewhat with your statement.
The Gnostic Gospels guided the Initiate to Spiritual Ascension
The 'scriptures' (again, there are other scriptures you do know?) covered this gnosis up for political and monetary gain.
The ones that suffer are actually their own followers.
I don't see the Holy Spirit as you do. I see it as our Earthly conscience, in other words our inner selves. The true Primordial Trinity was GOD, MAN, WOMAN. Another atrocity of the Roman Christian Church was destroying the woman, the Pagan Woman, Mother, Crone.