How can we trust the Bible if it's not inerrant?

[otseng]

From the On the Bible being inerrant thread:

How can you trust something that's written about god that contradictory, contains errors and just plain wrong at times? Is there a logical way to do so, or do you just want it to be god's word so much that you overlook these things like happens so often through the history of christianity?

The Bible can still be God's word, inspired, authoritative, and trustworthy without the need to believe in inerrancy.

For debate:
How can the Bible be considered authoritative and inspired without the need to believe in the doctrine of inerrancy?

While debating, do not simply state verses to say the Bible is inspired or trustworthy.

----------

Thread Milestones

• Case study of Hezekiah
• Start discussing global flood / Flood Model summary
• Recap arguments of authority of the Bible
• Start discussing Tower of Babel / Tower of Babel summary
• Start discussing archaeology / Philosophy of science / Origin of alphabet / End of discussion on archaeology
• Start discussing cosmology / Concluding cosmology
• Start discussing Shroud of Turin / Summary top TS imaging theories / Created DefendingChristianity.com and TS subforums / Shroud of Turin summary
• Start discussing Bible and resurrection
• Start discussing the Messiahship of Jesus / Messiahship of Jesus wrap up
• Start discussing Old Testament ethics
• Summary argument of atheism and morality / God basis for objective morality
• Start discussing genocide / Genocide summary argument
• Start discussing slavery / Slavery summary argument
• Start discussing homosexuality / Homosexuality summary argument
• Old Testament ethics summary argument
• Start discussing philosophy / Summary argument on philosophy
• Start discussing creation of universe / Summary argument universe was created

[otseng]

Early Christianity was a minority group. Up until the fourth century, it was not considered a mainstream view and was commonly persecuted. They were not really accepted by any group, including the Romans and Jews. So, they often did things secretly and communicated in code. We see this in the number of symbols used by Christians to communicate with each other.

After the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, giving Christians the right to worship Christ, Christian symbols started to appear openly on many objects. Until the Edict, Christians had worshipped in secret and displayed their symbols in the underground Catacombs.

https://earlychurchhistory.org/christia ... t-objects/

Back in the early stages of Christianity, within the first three centuries after Christ in 30 CE, the Romans were persecuting the Christians and killing them by the hundreds. To keep themselves safe, Christians developed secret symbols to allow other Christians to know about their faith without exposing themselves to the Romans for their own safety. An example of this would be to draw half of a symbol on the ground for the other person to see. If the second person completed the symbol, the first person knew that they were also a Christian.

https://medium.com/@cdietzler/hidden-symbols-of-christianity-1e5fc9e36c0a

What was early Christianity like? We the archaeology of the Roman catacombs in the second and third centuries AD, give us clues, where the graves of hundreds of thousands of Christians give clues, especially with a number of symbols that reflect the earliest period of the Christian era.

Most of these represent Christian visual art prior to 313 A.D., when Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity. During this time, the cross is seldom seen, except disguised in some way as an anchor, a trident, or the mast of a ship. Instead, Christians identified their tombs in the catacombs by other symbols alongside of funerary inscriptions.

https://www.jesuswalk.com/christian-symbols/

[otseng]

I've created a sister website to this forum at DefendingChristianity.com. Primarily it will be used to organize my posts that I've made on this forum in a more readable manner. The first major section on that site will be things I've posted here in this thread on the TS.

I've also created a Shroud of Turin subforum:
viewforum.php?f=98

[JoeyKnothead]

That's why I asked you - "If you don't believe it's authentic or a fake, then what else can it be?" You must have some third option if you don't accept either of these. The shroud is sitting in a box in Turin, Italy and has been studied by many scientists. It is not some mythical object. There's got to be some explanation to its origin.

My personal, amateur opinion on the shroud is that it's a cloth strikingly similar in age and origin to its era, and presents a fine example of artistic technology from the day.

I'm told though, that the male product of a virgin birth, who's y chromosome is "irrelevant", and ain't I proud to see me a picture of Jesus. Look Joey, that's genuine Jesus blood right there, you can't fake Jesus blood.

And the guy most vociferously defending the Jesus bit, he's got pride enough to publish his full findings to peer review, only don't it beat all, it's everybody but himself keeping him from doing it.

My observation has been that nature provides plenty opportunity to amaze and astound. There's no need making up gods, when Mother Nature is so much more worthy of our attention and adulation.

[Athetotheist]

[Replying to otseng in post #2809

If the body was dematerialized by layers, the cloth at the top of the head would have experienced less inward force than the cloth parallel to the plane of the body, so there would be less interaction of the cloth with the dematerializing body.

If the body had disappeared in layers along the horizontal plane, the cloth covering the top of the head would still have been pushed inward by the alleged vacuum, remaining in contact with the curvature of the cranium and the sides of the head.


"Here again is the outlandish story----told ONLY by Matthew----of an entire detail of Roman soldiers being bribed by Jewish leaders, upon whom they looked with utter contempt, to tell their commander that they all fell asleep, which would have incurred the death penalty regardless of any promise made by the Jews."

I agree it's an outlandish story. And really this is evidence the guards did not fall asleep.

Right----taken altogether, it's evidence that there were no guards there at all.

[otseng]

My personal, amateur opinion on the shroud is that it's a cloth strikingly similar in age and origin to its era, and presents a fine example of artistic technology from the day.

What era are you referring to? Medieval era?

And the guy most vociferously defending the Jesus bit, he's got pride enough to publish his full findings to peer review, only don't it beat all, it's everybody but himself keeping him from doing it.

Nobody is stopping me from doing anything, I'm simply upping the ante to address the issue of bias. Are you backing out of accepting the challenge?

My observation has been that nature provides plenty opportunity to amaze and astound. There's no need making up gods, when Mother Nature is so much more worthy of our attention and adulation.

This reveals the fundamental assumption of skeptics - there are no gods or the supernatural. This is why skeptics always resort to science to explain things, because science also assumes no gods exist. But here's what's interesting about the TS - the science of the TS refutes the assumption of science. I have been using science to investigate the shroud in this massive subtopic on the resurrection. There is no evidence that I've presented that is not based on empirical study. Anyone can theoretically verify and falsify any evidence I've presented. But, once we reach the conclusion, only then does it leads to the extranatural. Of course skeptics will balk at this. But this is why I've also spent so much time showing that scientists are already doing this through the multiverse, a multiplicity of dimensions, dark energy/dark matter, etc.

[otseng]

If the body had disappeared in layers along the horizontal plane, the cloth covering the top of the head would still have been pushed inward by the alleged vacuum, remaining in contact with the curvature of the cranium and the sides of the head.

There could be some inward pressure at the top of the head, but not much compared to the pressure perpendicular to the plane of the body and so would be insignificant. At the sides of the body, the cloth is also touching the body, but there is no imaging there as well. For the angle encoding, I don't think the threshold of lack of imaging is only at 90 degrees, but somewhere less than that (maybe 80?). Around the ears, there had to be some angle of the cloth around that area, yet the ears are also missing.

I agree it's an outlandish story. And really this is evidence the guards did not fall asleep.

Right----taken altogether, it's evidence that there were no guards there at all.

That doesn't make sense either. If the general public knew there were no guards at all, why make up a story about make believe guards?

[otseng]

Symbolism is used throughout the Bible. Many things are referred indirectly and not directly. For those who are programmers, this is like using pointers instead of using direct references for variables.

The “pointer” and “reference” both are used to point or refer an another variable. But, the basic difference among both of them is that a pointer variable points to a variable whose memory location is stored in it. The reference variable is an alias for a variable which is assigned to it.

https://techdifferences.com/difference- ... nce-2.html

Practically all programming requires pointers in addition to references. In the Bible, "pointers" as well are used quite often.

One example of this used throughout many Bibles is the encoding of God's name in the Old Testament. Practically in all Bible translations God's name is never directly translated, but instead is written as the LORD. It is a "pointer" to God's name, but is not a direct translation of what is in the Hebrew.

Another example is Jesus never called himself God or even the son of God. Rather, he also used a "pointer" and commonly referred to himself as the son of man.

Throughout the Bible, "pointers" are seen in symbols, imagery, metaphors, types, parables, analogies, riddles, etc. We could literally spend forever investigating this. But, suffice it to say that the Bible is full of indirect references.

[Athetotheist]

[Replying to otseng in post #2816

There could be some inward pressure at the top of the head, but not much compared to the pressure perpendicular to the plane of the body and so would be insignificant.

The alleged vacuum would make it significant.

If the general public knew there were no guards at all, why make up a story about make believe guards?

If the other gospel writers knew that there were guards, why do none of them [not even Luke, who claims in 1:3 to have investigated everything carefully] corroborate Matthew's story?

What seems more likely is that the disciples removed the body and that the general public simply drew that logical conclusion after Mark's brief account, and that Matthew made up the Roman guard to make the removal seem impossible.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to otseng in post #2822]

Of course skeptics will balk at this. But this is why I've also spent so much time showing that scientists are already doing this through the multiverse, a multiplicity of dimensions, dark energy/dark matter, etc.

You've repeated this many times, but I think you're simply mischaracterizing what these placeholder descriptions are. None are proposed as nonnatural in any way. Dark matter and dark energy are placeholder names for things that are believed to be very real and natural, but we don't know exactlly what either of them are yet. So these names were coined as placeholders.

Dark matter is proposed as "something" that does not react to light but exhibits the effects of gravity. It is proposed as the "thing" that is present to hold galaxies and large cosmic structures in place when current physics suggests that the gravity of all observed stars in a galaxy, for example, is not nearly sufficient to hold the galaxy together as an entity. Dark energy is similarly proposed as the "thing" that is behind the (observed) acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Something is causing this, we don't know exactly what, so this term was coined. But if/when we do figure out what dark matter and dark energy are, they will no doubt get new names that are appropriate for the fully natural phenomena.

The Higgs boson was called the "god particle" before it was confirmed in 2011-2013. This was a media term coming from a frustrated physicist who called it the "GD" particle. Before its discovery, it was hypothetical and expected as a missing part of the Standard Model of particle physics, but the public picked up on the "god particle" description and some interpreted that similarly to how you're interpreting things like multiverses, extra dimensions (mathematical usefullness only), dark matter and dark energy. If these things are proven to exist (like the Higgs boson) then they will be fully natural and not supernatural or nonnatural.

This is why skeptics always resort to science to explain things, because science also assumes no gods exist.

And it also assumes that the supernatural does not exist, which would prohibit invoking nonnatural explanations as any formal scientific hypothesis. Not knowing what dark matter is yet does not imply that it is, or could be, nonnatural. It is not proposed as a nonnatural thing.

[otseng]

The alleged vacuum would make it significant.

Again, I don't agree. The path of dematerialization by layers is perpendicular to the plane of the body. The effect is like an elevator falling, so most of the pressure would be downward for the top part of the cloth and the reverse for the bottom part.

What seems more likely is that the disciples removed the body and that the general public simply drew that logical conclusion after Mark's brief account, and that Matthew made up the Roman guard to make the removal seem impossible.

We can look at this from two perspectives.

From the perspective of the TS, it is not possible. The blood marks on the shroud are not broken and are fully intact. There is no evidence the body was stolen or removed from the shroud.

From the perspective of just the Biblical accounts themselves, I don't think it aligns with the gospels either. But, if need be, we can get to the resurrection from just the Biblical perspective later, which is another huge subtopic.