the so fallible Bible

[xpastor]

Bible-believers seem to think that any loophole, however improbable, that gets the Bible off the hook has solved the problem.

Oh how I know. It seems the most common one I've seen is the "lost in translation" defense where they claim that this or that word or phrase had two definitions, but for some reason the common definition isn't the one intended, but the convoluted one which doesn't make the bible wrong or embarrassing.

For example, if someone brings up Jesus talking about slaves, I would claim "When the bible was translated, the word for 'slave' had two meanings, one being a person owned by another person, and the other meaning of 'employed worker.' So when Jesus was talking about how to treat your slaves, he was talking about how employers should treat their employees."

Of course there's never any evidence that there were two different definitions for a particular word, or why one is necessarily more correct than the other.

I've done a lot of translation, and as a general principle it is true that there may be occasions when it is appropriate to translate the same original word by two different words in the target language. However, when there is no evidence, no solid philological grounds for making a distinction, you know that the fundies are bullshitting you.

You also have to watch out for some Bible translations. Until recently I used the New International Version (NIV) because I assumed it was reasonably scholarly but it was committed to an inerrantist position, so the fundies could not accuse me to picking a liberal version. However, I started to notice little words that were not in the original languages.

As is well known, there are two incompatible creation stories in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Here is a snippet from Genesis 2 in the NIV.

18 The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” 19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

I have italicized the one verb because NIV puts it in the past perfect to imply that this is the creation which had taken place in the previous chapter. The animals were supposedly already there, and God brought them to Adam. However, all the verbs in this passage (except for the future "will make") are in the simple past. God is making the animals at this point and bringing them to Adam.

The Good News Version translates more accurately,

18 Then the Lord God said, It is not good for the man to live alone. I will make a suitable companion to help him.19 So he took some soil from the ground and formed all the animals and all the birds. Then he brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and that is how they all got their names.20 So the man named all the birds and all the animals; but not one of them was a suitable companion to help him.

Jeremiah, Chapter 7, states in the Good News Translation:

22 I gave your ancestors no commands about burnt offerings or any other kinds of sacrifices when I brought them out of Egypt.23 But I did command them to obey me, so that I would be their God and they would be my people. And I told them to live the way I had commanded them, so that things would go well for them.

Same thing in the KJV version.

However, NIV slips in one little word with no warrant in the Hebrew that literally reverses the meaning.

22 For when I brought your ancestors out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, 23 but I gave them this command: Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people.

Because the translators of the NIV know that the Pentateuch contains plenty of commands about burnt offerings, so they just know that Jeremiah meant to acknowledge this.

The three Synoptic Gospels place the crucifixion on the Day of Passover (which began the previous evening with the Passover Meal) but John places the crucifixion on the day before with Jesus' death at the hour when the paschal lambs would be slaughtered in the temple in preparation for the Passover Meal. NIV gives the following translation for John 19:14:

It was the day of Preparation of Passover Week, about the sixth hour.

The word "week" is nowhere to be found in the Greek. IMO NIV includes it to obfuscate the time difference.

[NoE]

[/quote]
God is perfect
God has a Will
(The rest of what you wrote is wrong.)

That will had God create Man perfectly.

Man fell from perfection.

[/quote]

Why would a perfect Man make a mistake?

[Rahul]

Why would a perfect Man make a mistake?

Elementary, my dear DoE.

[John V]

Why would a perfect Man make a mistake?

Elementary, my dear DoE.

Except...you don't need to understand right and wrong to understand the command not to eat a certain fruit.

[FallentoReason]

Except...you don't need to understand right and wrong to understand the command not to eat a certain fruit.

You're begging the question. What's stopping them from eating it? An *unattainable* guilty conscience? They don't have the concept of right and wrong to deter them from breaking the one command they were given. That's the whole point.

[Rahul]

Except...you don't need to understand right and wrong to understand the command not to eat a certain fruit.

Urhm. You do need to understand right and wrong in order to follow any command.

Why would they think it wrong to not follow a command if they don't know what right and wrong is?

[John V]

Urhm. You do need to understand right and wrong in order to follow any command.

No you don't. Don't eat this was well within their intellectual comprehension.

[Brakeman]

Urhm. You do need to understand right and wrong in order to follow any command.

No you don't. Don't eat this was well within their intellectual comprehension.

So you say you don't need a sense of right and wrong to know whether it is right to wrong to obey god's commands.

Hmm ...

[FallentoReason]

Urhm. You do need to understand right and wrong in order to follow any command.

No you don't. Don't eat this was well within their intellectual comprehension.

Motivate your reasoning. How do they comprehend *any* command if there's no moral framework telling their conscience to either follow or not follow a command? You're still begging the question.

[xpastor]

Time to scoop up the camel shit deposited by our pet fundamentalist.

My post denying the historical reliability of the Bible was based largely on a summary of the book by Finkelstein and Silberman The Bible Unearthed, which I made two years ago. Regrettably, in trying to condense a book of almost 400 pages into a 2-page precis I left out a qualifying phrase which should have been included, so that I stated incorrectly that the camel had not been domesticated until 1000 AD.

I have borrowed the book again, and here is everything that Finkestein and Silberman have to say on the subject with the words I should have included in italics.

The biblical text reveals some clear clues that can narrow down the time of its final composition. Take the mention of camels, for instance. The stories of the patriarchs are packed with camels, usually herds of camels; but as in the story of Joseph's sale by his brothers into slavery (Genesis 37:25), camels are also described as beasts of burden used in caravan trade. We now know through archaeological research that camels were not domesticated as beasts of burden earlier than the late second millennium and were not used in that capacity in the ancient Near East until well after 1000 BCE. And an even more telling detail—the camel caravan carrying "gum, balm and myrrh," in the Joseph story—reveals an obvious familiarity with the main products of the lucrative Arabian trade that flourished under the supervision of the Assyrian empire in the eighth-seventh centuries BCE.

Indeed, excavations at the site of Tell Jemmeh in the southern coastal plain of Israel—a particularly important entrepot on the main caravan route between Arabia and the Mediterranean—revealed a dramatic increase in the number of camel bones in the seventh century. The bones were almost exclusively of mature animals, suggesting that they were from traveling beasts of burden, not from locally raised herds (among which the bones of young animals would also be found). Indeed, precisely at this time, Assyrian sources describe camels being used as pack animals in caravans. It was only then that camels became a common enough feature of the landscape to be included as an incidental detail in a literary narrative.

I apologize for my lapse in accuracy. However, the qualifying phrase changes absolutely nothing about the evidence for my basic contention that the biblical narratives of the patriarchs contain unhistorical details. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were supposed to have lived ca. 2000-1800 BCE. Finkelstein and Silberman say that the camel was not domesticated as a beast of burden until late in the second millennium, ca. 1200 BCE, and was not used as such in the ancient Near East until well after 1000 BCE. The majority of other scholars cited in the discussion agree with them.

John V said absolutely nothing in support of biblical inerrancy; he only carped about the date that the camel was "domesticated." I willingly concede that the dromedary camel was domesticated as a meat animal in southern Arabia over 1000 miles from Palestine sometime in the third millennium, say 2500 BCE, and the Bactrian camel was likewise kept at the same time in Iran, again a long way off, but this furnishes absolutely no support for the historicity of the biblical narratives.

I am at a loss to understand the point of John V's argument. Does he think that if he shows an atheist is not infallible, he has proved the Bible is? He has made no attempt to refute any of the examples of biblical errors, and "elephant-hurling" (whatever that may be) is a pathetic cop-out.