Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

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Difflugia
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Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #1

Post by Difflugia »

Eloi and I have derailed otseng's post about inerrancy and its relation to biblical authority by debating once again whether the Bible is inerrant in fact.

The question I asked of Eloi and will consider the debate topic for this thread is this:

Does denying the possibility of biblical error and instead harmonizing (apparent?) contradiction preclude understanding the text?
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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #11

Post by Eloi »

You can be relaxed and in control even if we disagree in our way of looking at the Bible. I think the saying is: 'agree to disagree' or something like that. It is a good method to accept human diversity and maintain peace in our social relationships ... in this case foriles (not even know if that is an English word).

As you can see, at least three ways of looking at Scripture have been exposed:

1) the infallible word of Jehovah, like we Witnesses see it;
2) a guide with some errors, like Otseng seems to believe,
3) a book not at all serious, as you think.

Obviously, depending on how we view the Bible in the first place, it will be our trust on it. There are many good reasons to consider it the infallible Word of God, but that would be another topic.

If you consider that no one will make you change your mind about the Bible, or you do not even consider that God exists ... obviously trying to make you understand our position does not make any sense.

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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #12

Post by benchwarmer »

Eloi wrote: Sun Oct 03, 2021 11:18 am You can be relaxed and in control even if we disagree in our way of looking at the Bible. I think the saying is: 'agree to disagree' or something like that. It is a good method to accept human diversity and maintain peace in our social relationships ... in this case foriles (not even know if that is an English word).

As you can see, at least three ways of looking at Scripture have been exposed:

1) the infallible word of Jehovah, like we Witnesses see it;
Are you sure JWs see it that way? After all, they have released their own translation of the Bible that many other Christians have issue with. In other words, it seems JWs have 'translated' the Bible to suit there preconceived notion of what it's supposed to say, not what it actually says.

See the following link. I have tried to format it a little here to look similar, but please see the source in case I bumbled it up.

https://www.blueletterbible.org/study/c ... ajwd24.cfm
Mistranslations

The Current Teaching Of The Watchtower Society:

The Jehovah's Witness Bible is known as the New World Translation. The Society believes that this version is a most accurate translation of the Bible and is the one they use in their teaching and Bible reading, and they consistently quote it in their literature.

Many scholars refer to the New World Translation as a commentary on the Bible instead of a translation in light of the way the text has been altered to fit the various Society doctrines. These changes are particularly evident when the subjects of hell, the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul are discussed. The following is a representative list of passages altered in the Society's Bible:

Hbr 1:8 Luk 23:43 1Jo 5:20
1Cr 11:30 Phl 2:5 1Cr 14:14
Jhn 1:1 2Cr 5:1 Col 1:15-18
Gal 5:15 Tts 2:13 Gal 6:18
Act 2:17 Hbr 10:39 1Pe 3:18, 19
Hbr 12:9 Jude 1:19 Hbr 12:28
1Jo 4:1-6 Rev 5:10 Rev 8:9
Act 20:7 Mar 1:4 Col 2:12

Observations, Evaluations, And Criticisms of the NEW WORLD TRANSLATION By Noted Greek And New Testament Scholars:
...
[see link for details]

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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #13

Post by TRANSPONDER »

Eloi wrote: Sat Oct 02, 2021 10:42 am [Replying to Difflugia in post #2]
Maybe you didn't understand the event. Jesus had left one of the two Jericho and was entering the other.

An inspired writer remembers the event from the perspective of leaving the Jericho where they were, others from the perspective of the Jericho where they were going to enter.

There is no contradiction and nothing has to be harmonized. The ancient readers of the stories knew what each one meant, or in any other case they asked "coming from / going to which Jericho?" ... Modern readers have to trust the writers who make the account of the event and investigate to understand the difference of both cases.
I have never heard of two Jerichos. Can you enlighten me an show there were two different Jerichos in Judea in Jesus time (or any other time)? And why, if Jesus had overnighted in one Jericho, would he enter another? Surely he'd just continue his journey to Jerusalem. Your argument doesn't seem to stack up.

Quite apart from which the duplicated text of the synoptics shows that the writers worked from a common text. Thus the entering/leaving Jericho was written from the same point of view. Thus any alteration is just that.

As I recall you may be talking about Luke saying that Jesus entered and Mark and Matthew say that he left (when Bar -Timaeus was healed). Luke alters a lot and reason might be that doing the miracle when entering looks less like a put -up job. But if you were arguing something else, please correct me.

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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #14

Post by Difflugia »

Eloi wrote: Sun Oct 03, 2021 11:18 amIf you consider that no one will make you change your mind about the Bible, or you do not even consider that God exists ... obviously trying to make you understand our position does not make any sense.
I understand your position just fine. What I'm trying to gently point out to you is that you're telling me one thing, but doing another. You're stubbornly trying to fit the square peg into the round hole while loudly proclaiming that you're just trying to figure out which hole is the best one. I've shown you how well it fits the square hole, but you insist that I don't understand pegs and holes.

Whether God exists or not won't change what the Bible says now or how many Jerichos there were. The verse you picked shows a pattern that's repeated throughout the Synoptic Gospels. Over and over, Mark wrote something in a particular style with a particular theology, then Matthew and Luke changed what Mark wrote, sometimes in ways that contradict. That's true whether or not God exists. The question before us is why.

In that vein, I'd like to discuss a different kind of contradiction. John 7:41-42 contains two rhetorical questions about Jesus that imply contradictions with both Matthew and Luke:
But some said, “What, does the Christ come out of Galilee? Hasn’t the Scripture said that the Christ comes of the offspring of David, and from Bethlehem, the village where David was?”
John's implication is that Jesus was neither descended from David nor born in Bethlehem, with the larger implication that these details were unimportant to Jesus' messiahship and divinity. John here uses the classical Greek form of rhetorical question in such a way that particular answers are implied. The first question grammatically uses the Greek μή to imply that the answer is "no" and the second οὐχ to imply that the answer is "yes." The implication is that the Christ must not be from Galilee, but Jesus is, and the Christ must be a descendant of David from Bethlehem, but Jesus is not. John never challenges those implied answers, leaving us with the understanding that, though the crowd was wrong about Jesus being Messiah, it was right about those specific details.

Of course, this is far easier to harmonize with Matthew and Luke than two Jerichos. By claiming that the questions weren't really rhetorical or the crowd was wrong about their assumptions, or something like that, we can pretend that John shared Matthew's and Luke's understanding of the qualifications for Messiah. To use some rhetorical questions of my own, does that really help us understand John's Gospel? If John's telling us that Jesus wasn't "son of David" or from Bethlehem, isn't that important to understand, even if theologically inconvenient? Obviously, only one can be correct in a literal sense (assuming Jesus was real in the first place), but perhaps Matthew and Luke were writing allegorical stories about Jesus ancestry to provide the same truth that John was sharing with his rhetorical questions, namely that Jesus was the legitimate Messiah despite not being literally descended from David. Is preserving the illusion of verbal inerrancy worth damaging the message of John's Gospel and a potentially deeper understanding of what Jesus was and was not?
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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #15

Post by TRANSPONDER »

Eloi wrote: Sun Oct 03, 2021 11:18 am You can be relaxed and in control even if we disagree in our way of looking at the Bible. I think the saying is: 'agree to disagree' or something like that. It is a good method to accept human diversity and maintain peace in our social relationships ... in this case foriles (not even know if that is an English word).

As you can see, at least three ways of looking at Scripture have been exposed:

1) the infallible word of Jehovah, like we Witnesses see it;
2) a guide with some errors, like Otseng seems to believe,
3) a book not at all serious, as you think.

Obviously, depending on how we view the Bible in the first place, it will be our trust on it. There are many good reasons to consider it the infallible Word of God, but that would be another topic.

If you consider that no one will make you change your mind about the Bible, or you do not even consider that God exists ... obviously trying to make you understand our position does not make any sense.
'Agreeing to differ' (trying to scrape a draw) is familiar to us, just as is avoiding discussion with the 'no point in arguing with the closed mind of an atheist' is familiar to us.

I trust that we can give our reasons why the Bible is NOT to be trusted as a reliable record of men, never mind something inspired by God. Whether you contest such arguments is up to yourself, of course.

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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #16

Post by Difflugia »

TRANSPONDER wrote: Sun Oct 03, 2021 3:56 pmI have never heard of two Jerichos. Can you enlighten me an show there were two different Jerichos in Judea in Jesus time (or any other time)?
Most apologetic arguments that Jehovah's Witnesses use are buried somewhere in a Watch Tower publication. The easy way to check is to search their library. The Watchtower Online Library is at wol.jw.org and an offline version for Windows can be downloaded as a DVD image and installed. They're mostly the same, but the offline version includes older issues of the Watchtower and its search seems to work better.

Searching for "blind Jericho" gets several hits, but it looks like it first appeared in a 1956 Watchtower "Questions From Readers" article. It's also repeated in the "Bartimaeus" entry in their Insight on the Scriptures, which is a sort of combination Bible dictionary and commentary. It's available in both of the libraries above and can also be downloaded as a PDF.

From there, it wasn't too hard to look up the book and then the original source, which is unfortunately unavailable. In the process, though, the search found the BAR article and, as luck would have it, I bought a back-issue DVD a few years ago before the BAS gutted its online store.
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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #17

Post by TRANSPONDER »

Thank you, that's very helpful. Especially my supposition it was the bar -Timaeus episode - whether it was when they arrived or when they left. At the risk of repeating myself, Luke 18.35 has Jesus approaching Jericho coming from the Jordan and runs into the blind man. In Mark 10 46, they are leaving when the event happens. Matthew also has it when they leave. It simply has to be the same event and I suggest the explanation is that Luke altered it as it looks (uncannily like John saying the donkey at Bethany was tied ready for them to collect first thing after breakfast) like the whole miracle was set up overnight. If it is true at all.

It simply is ludicrous to suggest that Jesus stayed in Jericho overnight, healed Bar -timaeus when he left, then approached another Jericho (which I have never heard of) down the road where he does the same thing to another blind man. Not even Matthew with his penchant for two where there was one mentions both events. I can only assume that the apologists hope this 'Explanation' will do for those (like myself :P ) who haven't looked it up.

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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #18

Post by TRANSPONDER »

I just had a quick look, and the argument is that one event was in Jericho as it existed in Jesus' time and the old Jericho destroyed by Joshua (archaeology tells us that it wasn't) and it may have been in ruins though the apologetics site I looked at suggests that it might have been rebuilt. Nowhere serious even hints that there were two functioning Jerichos at the time. There is also a suggestion that the two beggars were different persons. There are problems with this, but I can think up the excuses myself. But it's like so much of the gospels - the same apparent events get altered and the apologists have to claim that they were two different events with Nobody ever mentioning both events in their gospel.

Anyone who swallows these excuses either hasn't thought about it or doesn't want to.

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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #19

Post by benchwarmer »

TRANSPONDER wrote: Mon Oct 04, 2021 10:40 am Anyone who swallows these excuses either hasn't thought about it or doesn't want to.
This.

Given the apologetics we find on display, it seems there is no actual contradiction that could ever be shown to be a contradiction. People just invent multiple of the same event in different spots, expect the same person had multiple names, puts God as the one doing or not doing (depending on the obvious moral problem), hand wave tales with different orders into one massive ridiculous tale, etc. etc.

If the Bible said "Jesus was a Jew" and "Jesus was a Hindu" apologists who hold inerrancy would just claim "Well, since Jesus's great great grandmother on her father's sisters side lived in India, technically Jesus was a Hindu, but he claimed himself He was Jew. No contradiction".

As has already been pointed out, those who ditch inerrancy have the freedom to really discover the riches in the Bible. Understanding that some authors may have been disagreeing with previous authors and trying to mold theology gives a great picture of what was actually happening and perhaps a better understanding of the 'real' story. Holding to inerrancy just leaves one with a tattered mess that's obviously broken.

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Re: Inerrancy, harmonization, and understanding

Post #20

Post by TRANSPONDER »

I couldn't have put it better myself. Yes, any explanation will do and (I suggest) the main idea is for them to avoid having to face the prospect of the gospels Not being reliable; open to question. We are never going to convince these people to be reasonable - they can only convince themselves and quite a lot do, so it isn't hopeless.

But the real purpose is to put the other and better case to those people who otherwise might just get one side, and that can be fiddled to look very convincing.

One nice example is the spear -thrust in John. There is NO spear thrust in the synoptics and Luke mentions only hands and feet; not a wound in the side, which supports that doubt - never mind that Matthew has no evening appearance at all and Mark has no resurrection appearances.

To me it's asking a lot to expect people to believe the spear thrust was known to the synoptics (they must have known if they were eyewitnesses or talked to those who were) and just ALL left it out. More likely John added it. Also the more these discrepancies (serious ones) crop, up the thinner the excuse becomes that they didn't bother to mention it or there were two separate events - especially as the 'separate' events are never recorded together.

Reasonable people and even the unreasonable, in time, ought to come to the conclusion that the gospels are not reliable. I know it's not what believers want to hear but - a light on the horizon folks O:) people love to feel that they know the truth that 'most people' don't. And in this case, the evidence is behind it, not against it. And it's a lot less stressful to go with the evidence, not have to explain it away with some cockamamie tale and then try to believe it on Faith.

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