(December 7, 2011 at 7:57 pm)Barre Wrote:(December 7, 2011 at 7:42 pm)reverendjeremiah Wrote:(December 7, 2011 at 7:38 pm)Barre Wrote:(December 7, 2011 at 1:28 am)Chuck Wrote: What's the point of agonizing over the correct interpretation of a particular word in a piece of an out and out lie that has been purposedly edited to suit multiple unmentionable purposes and been intentionally and unintentionally transcribed a hundred times?
There is no agonizing, only an attempt to interpret a biblical text.
You seem unwilling for some reason to study something that you regard as a lie.
Will you have this much enthusiasm when presented with a native american religion, or how about the Norse?
Are you this passionate about Thor as you are with Jesus?
Do you think that I have correctly determined the nuance of Jesus' prediction about the appearance of the Messianic Age? If not, how would you render the text in question?
In a sense I do. What you are speaking of in the OP is the classic duality of a prophecy. How can you tell that it is an actual prophecy, or a self fullfilling prophecy?
An actual prophecy, in this context, would mean that God panned for something to happen and then let at least one person know in advance before his plans came to fruition....or, to be fair, that God predicted the future, and because of freewill he is unable or unwilling to change that future but still sends out warnings to at least one person.
Self fullfilling prophecy is a script. A fiction written by men in the hopes that those who like the story might make what the author wrote about into reality. Self fulfilling prophecies are also "in story" prophecy. The Dr. Strange comics have used this type of prophecy before. The beginning of the comic present a prophecy, and Dr.Strange tries as he can to prevent it. At the end, Dr. Strange finds out that the prophecy turned out much more different than he expected, yet the wording of the prophecy was 100% accurate.
In this situation I would say that this OP deals with the self fulfilling type prophecy, the fictional type prophecy used to make a story more magical and entertaining.
Also, I would like to point out, that the mistakes you have found if viewed under this concept shows that the bible is not a well thought out or well written peice of literature, as its story tends to clash with other stories. This can be expected from a book put together by several different authors put together by rival organizations who only slightly agreed to come together to gather strength in numbers. This is, in my mind, why we have 4 Gospels as opposed to one. There were more than likely many more written, but those who supported them were not numerous or powerful enough to get them included into cannon. So, in a sense, this is not the outcome of bad editing, because the rival majority factions would obviously not come together if they allowed others to edit their manuscripts for consistency. What you see, especially in the new testament, is a collection of what the majority factions voted should represent the newly formed orthodax Christianity from the broken gnostic type groups that they used to be.
In my mind, many of the screwups in the bible arent too much because of bad writing (although there is plenty of it in there), but more about political give and take of the early forming of orthodoxy.
...and it hasnt changed since.
