Challenge to atheists: I find your lack of faith disturbing!

[xpastor]

Not at all. I think much of what they [the Church Fathers] recorded is valuable. Especially so when writing about contemporary matters. They record the history of the early church as best as they can, however there is certainly room for error.

So why is there no room for error in the books now comprising the Bible? How could you possibly prove this to anyone?

That's easy enough to explain. There were forgeries, people writing under the name of a long-dead authority.

Then what was it's purpose? It didn't introduce a heresy or any new theology, so why did somebody write a false epistle that had no purpose?

The purpose is quite obviously stated. People were doubting the second coming of Christ would ever occur because it had been so long delayed, evidently delayed past the generation Peter belonged to as they say, “He promised to come, didn't he? Where is he? Our ancestors have already died, but everything is still the same as it was since the creation of the world!”

In any case it [Jesus' prophecy of the manner of Peter's death in John] clearly shows that Jesus doesn't believe that the world will end in his lifetime. ... I don't know why you think John is unreliable.

First, the vast differences in style and content between John and the synoptic gospels preclude any possibility that they are both reasonably accurate records of the same person's life and teachings. Virtually all biblical scholars believe that the synoptics present the more authentic account.

Second, I did not quite say that Jesus believed the world would end in his lifetime. In Matthew 24:34 he says: "Remember that all these things will happen before the people now living have all died." People now living presumably includes Peter. This passage does not refer to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE as it speaks of the signs in the heavens (the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, stars will fall, and people will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds.) C.S. Lewis called it the most embarrassing verse in the Bible with good reason. It places Jesus in the long line of people from the author of Daniel to Harold Camping who predicted the end of the world and nothing happened. Mark and Luke give the same pronouncement in the parallel passages. If you want another example, there is Luke 9:27 where he says: "Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God." When I was in seminary, we were told that this prophecy referred to the Transfiguration of Jesus (he glows like he's gone radioactive) which is the next event narrated. With all the respect I can muster now, I would say this explanation is utter bullshit. What would be the point of saying that some of the people here will not taste death before something happens 8 days hence?

As far as I can see, you base that solely upon a belief that Luke cannot make mistakes since his writing was bound up in THE BIBLE™ centuries after his death.

No, it was bound up just decades after his death, here's proof:

The date given for this papyrus is 175 - 225 CE, which is an awful lot of decades after the death of someone who you claim was producing his magnum opus ca 50 CE. In any case, finding Luke and John bound together does nothing to establish the infallibility of either.

You never attempted to answer my earlier post about the birth narratives for Jesus. Specifically, Luke says that Mary, Joseph and Jesus headed back to Nazareth 41 days after the birth. No time there for the excursion to Egypt which Matthew tells us happened. Not unless God furnished them with a flying horse as Allah did several centuries later for Mohammed. You remember he flew from Mecca to Jerusalem in a single night, so the trip to Egypt and back would be no problem. After all, Bethlehem to Alexandria is a shorter trip as the Pegasus flies.

Because you've used a deceptive technique to try and discredit the scripture. Luke says that the baby is cleansed in the temple 41 days after he is born (according to the law). Then there is a 2-year gap which he doesn't attempt to fill in between that and the return to Nazareth. Just because he left out a detail doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Get real. Luke says nothing about a two-year gap. His words are, "When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth." That is right after the purification rites mentioned above, they go back to Nazareth. The next event mentioned in the life of Jesus is 12 years later when he goes to the Temple as a boy.

I do not think there is much point in pursuing this discussion further. The sticking point is biblical inerrancy. I can understand how you came to believe in it; I once did myself. However, my eyes were opened as I studied the Bible intensively. It is riddled with inconsistencies which get explained away only by the most laughable arguments. I will make only two points about this.

The Bible is filled with stories of events which violate natural law, events which we never see, such as raising the dead or changing water into wine. In our society the Bible is the only book with these unbelievable stories which is taught as credible. When we learn a bit more, we find that it was written in a credulous age and hundreds of other books retail the same kind of "miracles" such as virgin births (Alexander the Great) and God-men (Alexander and Caesar) and raising the dead (Apollonius of Tyana). There is no reason to give the Bible greater credence than the other superstitious productions of that age.

People like to claim as you do that the authors of the Bible are too near the events to be mistaken or lying. Sadly, that is not the case. There is a genre of writing which I call Lying for Jesus. I discuss it at length in a thread on the Friendly Atheist. I won't repeat all the examples I give there. To name just a few, I have received an email narrating the story of a university student defending his Christian faith against an atheistic professor and concluding, "That student's name was Albert Einstein." Well, Albert was raised as a non-observant Jew, and later in life, when he was a famous scientist, he specifically repudiated any belief in a personal God. Another example. Colonel Robert Ingersoll was the most prominent freethinker in 19th century America. Someone sent him a copy of a small British newspaper in which it was reported that he, along with 5000 other atheists, had been converted by the preaching of an obscure British evangelist, whose name Ingersoll had never heard before. Ingersoll also mentions prior published stories that his daughter had converted to the Presbyterian church (utterly false) and even more remarkably that a son he never had went mad and died in an asylum as a consequence of being raised in an infidel home. Then there is Lady Hope's story of Darwin's deathbed conversion, which somehow escaped the notice of his children who were present with him at the end. I think we can confidently place all those Pentecostal stories of miraculous healings in the category of lying for Jesus. So if people are so ready to lie for Jesus in our sophisticated, scientifically-knowledgeable age, why would it not happen in that credulous era when the New Testament was written?