Well, I've got roughly two pages worth of posts to look at, so I might as well respond to all that I can in this one post.
This is a couple days old, but I just remembered it and realized I forgot to respond. It reminds me of my religion teacher. We read the scene where the women discover Jesus' empty tomb and tell everyone. He said that it was evidence the Bible was true because people would believe women less, and if the authors were telling a lie that they wanted people to believe they'd have used different witnesses. This ignores all of Jesus' teachings though - the authors were just being consistent. People would be suspicious if the guy who said "Blessed are the meek" suddenly had these authoritative important dudes witness the really big miracles.
Certainly not the best argument even delivered for the Holy Scriptures. I think what he was
trying to say was that the writers of the Gospels risked losing readers by having Jesus appear to a woman, and that it would have been a dumb idea to include such an appearance if it was their invention; they could have just as easily used more shepherds. Anyway, still doesn't make it a particularly inspiring argument.
I'm surprised he wasn't discovered by lepers.
He wasn't discovered by lepers simply because He wasn't discovered by lepers. That's all there is to it.
If the Bible were written by people, it would have ridiculous misinterpretations of animals the author had never seen (see above posts).
The interpretation of the Leviathan in the Book of Job being a crocodile is one with which I am inclined to disagree. This section of the book has Job snap and criticize God, to which God Himself retorts and shows Job that he doesn't really know what he's talking about. To prove His point, God speaks of the Leviathan, a monster—real or symbolic—with which Job could never hope to contend. God, however, has the power to defeat such monsters.
In short, the mention of such a creature as the Leviathan in Job is to demonstrate the power of God in contrast to the nature of Man; it is not about a crocodile.
It would glorify the authors' race and justify the slaughter and enslavement of their enemies.
In the Old Testament, God entered into a covenant with the Israelites, His original chosen people. He was forced to protect this group from all its enemies. Hence, the Old Testament contains many instances of violence and warfare; all was for the preservation of the Jewish people.
It would write about mistakes for a variety of reasons - mainly teaching (Peter denying Jesus three times is a lesson on how everyone sins) or the fact that mistakes make good stories.
You got this one correct; Man made mistakes—recorded in the Bible—which teach us lessons.
It would contain contradictions - weird that an omniscient God captured Jesus' life from four different perspectives that disagree on many facts instead of giving us one really accurate account.
The Gospels were given unto Man in different areas, for different communities, and at different times. The four Gospels are different because it was necessary in the early days to deliver different parts of the story of Jesus in such a way that more people would enter into the new Church. Matthew includes the Magi and their visit to Jesus and excludes the shepherds because it appealed to a particular group, and by contrast Luke does the exact opposite; the point of the Gospels is to attract
everyone to Christ. Once the Church was united, unification of the Gospels, and the rest of Scripture became necessary.
As for your "contradictions," if you have anything pressing, feel welcome to post them; I will see what I can do with them.
It would also definitely claim it was written by God.
Just as the true author of the Bible does.
There's inconsistencies I'm not sure how translation errors would explain. Hell, genesis 1 and genesis 2 have different orders for the order of creation, and the second outright contradicts the first by separating the creation of man and woman, which were created together in gen 1.
Despite the allegations of liberal theologians, the first two chapters do not represent two separate accounts of Creation, but rather two different perspectives. Genesis chapter 1 lists the order of the days as the following: Day and night, separation of the waters, formation of land and plants, the heavens, birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the creatures of the land, Man. Genesis chapter 2 begins "in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground." It was at this point that Adam was created as the first man by God; this happened at some point on the third or fourth day. After the creation of Adam, God created the animals for Adam's own use, in accordance to the fifth and sixth days. Following this, Eve was created along with, indirectly, the entirety of Mankind; this ends the sixth day.
And that's, like. The first book. Inconsistent reports of time regarding the same incident (X years in one gospel, Y years in another) seem to pop up pretty often -- number mismatch in general, really -- as well, among... well, just a bunch of stuff.
This, dredged up by something like two seconds of google searching, provides a fairly interesting list involving various degrees of contradiction. Some could be explained by translation error (and some aren't so much biblical self-contradiction so much as contradiction between the bible and reality), but others... less so.
This is also pretty neat. What it's sourced from is arguably questionable (for the annotations, if not necessarily the translation in itself), especially considering it's a single translation and, well, we're talking about the problems with that right now, but it's neat none the less.
If you have anything in particular in mind, please bring it to the thread; it is good to discuss these sorts of things. As appears to have been mentioned, I would not consider several of what has been called a contradiction and actual contradiction, but I'm not in the good to sort through the entirety of the lists to post my thoughts on each one to this thread in one big post—not now, at least.
I wouldn't recommend using the
Skeptic's Annotated Bible for discussion, though. Whoever annotated it has a pretty minimal and sometimes rather immature understanding of Christian scripture.
I wonder where I could learn latin
Like how to speak it
That would be awesome if it weren't dead
If you're going to learn a language to better understand biblical translation, it would probably be most effective to learn Greek and Hebrew as well. It would take time, yes, but the rewards would be great.
Apparently they live in the same town? That's kinda neat.
Or creepy.
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