Holy book or holey book?

[Zzyzx]

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Holy book or holey book?
Case of Jesus and the Adulteress

Most of us are familiar with the tale in John 8 about Jesus saving an adulteress from being stoned.

What most are probably NOT familiar with is that the tale does NOT appear in the earliest known copies of the Bible. Neither the Codex Sinaiticus or the Codex Vaticanus contain that story.

Those two, the earliest known existing copies of the Bible, do not contain the “Pericope Adulterae" (story of Jesus and 'let the one without sin cast the first stone'). So where did that story come from, why was it added to the Bible, and by whom and what authority.

Did someone make up that tale?

Weren't the sinaiticus and Vaticuanus accurate and correct Bibles?

[Willum]

[Replying to post 20 by bluethread]

We've backed it up, for example, Jesus insisting that sacrifices of coins with graven images of false gods be given as sacrifice to the false god Caesar. "Rend to the God Caesar..."

He violated those laws: You have no counter.

[liamconnor]

[Replying to post 19 by Divine Insight]

We are not in harmony. I do not reject the authenticity of the account on moral grounds; I simply remain unsure on historical grounds.

But you are in harmony with my position. My position is that the Bible cannot be true as it is written. (no moral assessments required)

And that's the position you have just agreed with above. You are willing to accept that parts of the Bible may indeed be totally fabricated and not trustworthy to be "God's Word".

I did not grow up in a religious context where "God's Word" was well defined. I certainly was never required to subscribe to the various theories of 'inspiration'.

So, if your main attack is against the Bible as defined by you, and thereby against the deity that penned it, well attack away, but you and I will be at cross purposes.

What "data"? All you have to go by are unverifiable stories.

If by data you mean there is nothing to examine for interpretation, well that is frankly ridiculous. We clearly have a time period before which no one talked about a Nazarene Jew rising from the dead; we clearly have a time period after which people did. We can pinpoint the turning point pretty well. We have documents written by people who believed in this event. We have specific names given.

This is incontrovertible; the chief tactic from atheists here is to fall into obscurantism (let's just see how many people respond to that paragraph with "Claims!" and "Unverified!"). Of course they are claims; and they are thus verified as claims. Whether they are verified as true claims belongs to the next step: analyzing those claims and giving the historical scene an explanation.


We thus turn to explanations for these facts and statistics, and what do we find? you (and most others) have shied away from a satisfactory explanation: mostly just glib and flippant throw-outs summed up in a word or two without any heed of historical criteria. Indeed, very few members here are willing to subscribe to a solitary explanation and defend it: every explanation given by every atheist here has been, by their own naturalistic horizon, implausible, limited in scope and power, and ad hoc to the point that Occam would be flipping over in his grave were he not decomposed.

You may retort that they are all "better" than a miraculous explanation. To that I have two comments:

1) Even if that were true, it is still meaningless. "Better" for whom? For your naturalistic presumptions, sure. For a sound historical criteria, i.e., a science intended to find out 'what happened in history'? Of course not. None of the natural theories pass the grade for what happened. They are all historically ridiculous, which is testified to here by the fact that very few are willing to select one and defend it, and (it seems to me) are somewhat embarrassed by few who do.

2) The natural explanations are not, by historical standards, "better" than the supernatural one. The supernatural one, by historical standards, actually fares well. It has great explanatory scope and power. It escapes the realm of plausibility, because plausibility does not apply. It is guilty of one ad hoc: a power behind it all.

unverifiable stories.

I am starting to think most atheists here that use this buzz word really don't know what it means in regards to history. They use it more as a magical formula, a trump card. As if Hannibal marching through the Alps is any more verifiable than Paul believing he saw Jesus raised.

In fact, your incorrect assumption that Jesus was restored to perfect health would actually make sense if Jesus had been magically resurrected by a supreme God. But clearly that's not what the stories have to say about the matter.

You are referring to John's gospel: a gospel that very few scholars use to reconstruct the history of the origins of Christianity.

Whatever its value for a historical reconstruction (originally I threw it out; but some recent scholars are making a good case) it is obvious that the author did not intend readers to think that Jesus was bleeding profusely from his side. Most people consider a permanent scar to represent a "wound now healed".