(December 14, 2008 at 1:11 pm)EvidenceVsFaith Wrote: How do you know the bible is absolute truth? How do you know that what it is saying is true?
It seems like circular reasoning to me.
"The bible is true because its the bible and the bible is holy! So how do we know that what the bible says is indeed true? Because its the bible that says it and the bible is holy. The bible is true because the bible is the word of God. How do we know its the word of God? Because the bible says so and the bible is the holy word of God. "
There's no evidence here. Its circular nonsense. So where's your evidence outside of the bible?
We have been here so many times I have decided that I am going to start contributing something meaningful each time you bring it up.
There is actually a logical answer, and I think that I gave it before but you couldn't understand it because you already see things the way you want to see them.
Here is the meaningful bit. Most Atheists are familiar with Dan Barker's Easter challenge . . . He is an ex minister Xian turned atheist. He raised these two points which I responded to as such. They are an example how to debunk the myopic atheist Bible skeptics and as such, an example of how the Bible is
more truthful than that criticism. The Bible rises above your ability to criticize it because your criticism is unfounded, baseless and uninformed.
1. Matthew was the only one to mention dead people emerging from their graves upon Jesus' death. It is assumed that these resurrected dead were walking around. The omission of the dead people emerging from the graves by the other writers does not, of course, mean anything. Matthew was the first gospel to be written. In De viris inlustribus (Concerning Illustrious Men), chapter III, Jerome says: "Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an apostle, first of all composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed." So this (Matthew having been the first gospel) might be a reason for the others having not included the dead people emerging from their graves.
Any serious scholar of the Bible could tell you that at Matthew 27:52-53 the Greek egeiro means simply raised up rather than resurrected back to life, and in addition to this "they" (meaning the bodies that were walking around) is a pronoun, and in Greek all pronouns have gender and "they" is masculine whereas bodies" (the bodies that were lifted up) is in the neuter. They are not the same.
Adam Clarke: "It is difficult to account for the transaction mentioned in verses 52 and 53. Some have thought that these two verses have been introduced into the text of Matthew from the gospel of the Nazarenes, others think the simple meaning is this: - by the earthquake several bodies that had been buried were thrown up and exposed to view, and continued above ground till after Christ's resurrection, and were seen by many persons in the city."
Theobald Daechsel's translation: "And tombs opened up, and many corpses of saints laying at rest were lifted up."
Johannes Greber's translation: "Tombs were laid open, and many bodies of those buried there were tossed upright. In this posture they projected from the graves and were seen by many who passed by the place on their way back to the city."
2. At Matthew 28:2 there was an "earthquake" and an angel rolled back the stone slab that closed the tomb off. The other gospel writers don't mention this. Some Bible defenders suggest past perfect, but as the author points out the passage is in the aorist (past) tense.
The Greek word seismos means quaking, shaking or trembling. (Matthew 27:51, 54; 28:4; Revelation 6:13) The earth quaking from the moving of a rather large stone, for example, might have been trivial enough for some not to mention it.
A Grammar of New Testament Greek, by James H. Moulton, Vol. I, 1908, p. 109, "the Aorist has a 'punctiliar' action, that is, it regards action as a point: it represents the point of entrance . . . or that of completion . . . or it looks at a whole action simply as having occurred, without distinguishing any steps in its progress."
Aorist is a peculiar tense in the koiné Greek which means "not bounded" as to time. Verbs in the aorist tense can be rendered in a variety of ways depending upon the context. They could mark a definite occurrence of something at an unstated time in the past, such as with Matthew 28:2. An example of a similar case would be in Matthew 17:3 where the voice announced that the son had been approved. Many translations often miss the exact meaning of texts where the aorist tense is used. Matthew, understood correctly, indicates that the stone had been rolled back before the women arrived, he only mentioned that the stone had been moved and how it was moved whereas the other gospel writers do not.
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