"Parts of the Bible Aren't True"

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billcu1 said:
Then which is the best? We have Bible, magisterium and tradition. The holy spirit guides us through the church. Times change that’s why the Bishops are coming together in October once again.
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Time changes nothing, only men do. The Bishops will be guided by the Holy Spirit of God. God is missing in so many things.

Ed
 
CatholicHockey7 said:
And yet, those same scientists will insist we continue to search for life on other planets even though there is no evidence any life ever existed anywhere other than right here on earth. When confronted with their lack of evidence, they will respond, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” or, “we haven’t explored every possibility yet.”
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Theyre looking into to it to see if that statement is true.
 
Zadeth said:
Would it matter if parts of the Bible aren’t true? For example, I was informed that the “slavery of Jews in Egypt is a big problem. Historians don’t think it ever happened and this story plays a huge part in the Old Testament.” and that “historians are convinced Moses didn’t exist and the books attributed to Moses were therefore not written by him”.

Does this matter? I just get worried that if parts like this are false, how are we to know the rest of our beliefs aren’t also? 😦
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Actually, probably the reason there is not much evidence for this episode, is that it has been erased from history. After all, if you think about it, the pharaoh was humiliated by the whole affair. I doubt he would willingly commit the whole affair to history.
The way history is recorded or rather was recorded, was through the “scribes”, these were learned people who could write, either in clay tablets, (Babylon or Nineveh) or on papyrus.
They recorded what the king wanted to be recorded. If they disobeyed they could pay with their life. Read the account of Daniel or Joseph for examples.
So the only other possible proof is archaeological evidence (digs) that have their own difficulty (political, financial, religious).

…
 
SonOfMan said:
I disagree. The Bible is a book of assertions that need evidence in order to be credible. So far there is no evidence to back up what it alleges.
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Wait a minute…you’ll have to be more specific. There are a LOT of assertions made in the Bible, and to say there is no evidence to back any of them is a little bit absurd. For example, they are excavating what they believe to be the palace of King David now.

If you are looking for evidence of the spiritual assertions, you’ll have to use tools and methods designed to detect spiritual things. My previous post addresses that a bit.
 
Thorolfr said:
There’s also evidence that large parts of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges were put into writing centuries after the events that they supposedly describe. For example, in Genesis in talking about Abraham, it mentions the Philistines even though historians know that the Philistines did not come to this area until about the 12th century BC, long after the supposed time of Abraham. It also mentions caravans with camels in Genesis even though camels were not domesticated until a later time. There are many anachronisms in these books that demonstrate that they were probably written around the time of King Josiah of Judah in the 7th century BC and were edited by scribes into the period of the Babylonian captivity and the 2nd Temple period. Literary analysis also demonstrates that they are composite texts made up of different sometimes contradictory sources and were not written by Moses or Joshua, etc.
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Then again, maybe they’ve got the timing wrong.

I tend to think that tye Scriptures are very strong evidence, and that archaeology is a very wobbly “science” because it involves a lot of interpretation. Some things are cut and dried, others… not so much. Since the translation of dating events described in the Bible is made by us with very tricky information, it could so easily be wrong, as Rohr (the author of the book mentioned in the article) points out.

I read the book about 20 years ago, but he made a very good argument for the Bible’s references to a named Pharoah having been mistranslated, backing up his assertion with lots of direct evidence relating to the name, and lots of really good information related to the evidence for the Biblical history if that dating change is made.
 
Zadeth said:
Could critics not argue - “if the Old Testament is flawed/inaccurate, what is to say the New Testament is not either?”
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There are plenty of Christians, and many of them scholarly, who believe that is allegory in the Old Testament. Not all allegory, but much. This was a common writing form of the ancient world in which people would explain the world and Gods relationship with it, and also valuable tales of morality. But that the New testament contains none of the allegorical flavor. And that we know that men died and were martyred and tortured for what they witnessed in Jesus. The truth of Jesus does not stand or fall with the Old Testament. The truth of Jesus stands or falls with the truth of Jesus
 
SonOfMan said:
I disagree. The Bible is a book of assertions that need evidence in order to be credible. So far there is no evidence to back up what it alleges.
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Without doing any research, do you know the name of the first President of the United States of America? If you know who it was, what credible evidence have you personally examined that permitted you to conclude who it was?
 
SonOfMan said:
I disagree. The Bible is a book of assertions that need evidence in order to be credible. So far there is no evidence to back up what it alleges.
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No offense, but you clearly have done NO research on this. Archaelogy has discovered hundreds perhaps thousands of things in the Bible and shown them to be true. Theres obviously debate in areas, but to say NO evidence between what anything the Bible says and evidence is stating the laughably absurd.
 
SonOfMan said:
Saying “I dont know” is the most reasonable approach. We dont have any evidence, therefore we dont have any reason to believe something happened,at least at the moment. Until there is evidence, then we can begin to investigate, and then we can see where the cards fall.

In the meantime, we can certainly use our reasoning to deem what is and isnt probable. In all these years there hasnt been a single corpse, not one remain, not one legitimate DNA sample, not one public encounter of a Bigfoot, therefore its reasonable to conclude that he most likely does not exist. To say he definitely does exist in the face of all that abscence of evidence, would be unreasonable.

But no believer says “I dont know.” They always seem to know with certainty that Bible events happened, that God exists, etc. without a single shred of evidence.
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I think I heard somewhere that Sasquatch eat their dead.:eek:😃
 
St_Redemption said:
No offense, but you clearly have done NO research on this. Archaelogy has discovered hundreds perhaps thousands of things in the Bible and shown them to be true. Theres obviously debate in areas, but to say NO evidence between what anything the Bible says and evidence is stating the laughably absurd.
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Straw man.

Just because the Bible mentions real places, doesnt mean that the locations dont exist; thats not what Im saying. It means that whatever is alleged to have happened there, may not have happened.

Are you familiar with legends?
 
JerryZ said:
They recorded what the king wanted to be recorded. If they disobeyed they could pay with their life.
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But the king died, according the how the story goes. So what you say here makes no sense. If the Jews were the victors their evidence and writings would be abundant, not less due to being destroyed by a dead king, somehow. The event most likely did not happen is the next logical conclusion.
 
There will always be believers who understand the Bible to be 100 percent historically true. There have now emerged a different group of believers who accept the idea that even fiction can be truer than the mere facts and figures that history concerns itself with.

While Christianity has traditionally understood the Bible to be historically true in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the biggest change to Christianity in the past one hundred and fifty years does not come from those who understand that non-historical reading of the Bible, but from those who insist upon it as the ultimate reading of the Bible.

For thousands of years, the focus on the bible has never been on the history, but on interpretation of the literature, on the symbology, and the literary devises employed to bring across the spiritual message which was at the heart of all Bible study.

Now the focus is on the archaeology, as if the truth of the Bible lies in pottery shards.
 
SonOfMan said:
But the king died, according the how the story goes. So what you say here makes no sense. If the Jews were the victors their evidence and writings would be abundant, not less due to being destroyed by a dead king, somehow. The event most likely did not happen is the next logical conclusion.
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All the more reason to hide the fact. The Egyptians had political spin down to an art. If the history showed them or their rulers in a bad light they erased them from their monuments and histories–as a way of destroying them, not only in this life, but in the life to come–according to their beliefs. It’s why King Tut’s father was all but erased from history–because he so angered the other ruling class and the priests that he was stricken from the records. The same with Queen Hatshepsut, because she usurped the throne from the rightful heir and set herself up as pharoah. The Egyptians weren’t interested in recording history for posterity, as we think of it, but to keep the ruling order intact, so if an event took place they didn’t want to remember, they did their best to make it disappear.
 
Della said:
All the more reason to hide the fact. The Egyptians had political spin down to an art. If the history showed them or their rulers in a bad light they erased them from their monuments and histories–as a way of destroying them, not only in this life, but in the life to come–according to their beliefs. It’s why King Tut’s father was all but erased from history–because he so angered the other ruling class and the priests that he was stricken from the records. The same with Queen Hatshepsut, because she usurped the throne from the rightful heir and set herself up as pharoah. The Egyptians weren’t interested in recording history for posterity, as we think of it, but to keep the ruling order intact, so if an event took place they didn’t want to remember, they did their best to make it disappear.
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👍

Yes they did remove from history.
 
Darryl1958 said:
For thousands of years, the focus on the bible has never been on the history, but on interpretation of the literature, on the symbology, and the literary devises employed to bring across the spiritual message which was at the heart of all Bible study.
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I do wonder, however, what the spiritual message could be in stories about the Israelites annihilating their enemies in Canaan including women and children. Some Christians might have thought that that was a good and moral practice which should be emulated in some cases.
 
Thorolfr said:
I do wonder, however, what the spiritual message could be in stories about the Israelites annihilating their enemies in Canaan including women and children. Some Christians might have thought that that was a good and moral practice which should be emulated in some cases.
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I don’t know what the spiritual message of those verses are for us, and so far, internet discussions on such matters have been devoid of providing anything of substance on such matters, as far as I have participated in these discussions at any rate.

I do know that they take us back to a time before the sensitivities of humanism became an indelible part of our reality. and before such sensitivities had become a part of what we take for granted about what is moral and what is not.

I do not know what the spiritual message of such stories would be for us. But the mere tact that such stories take up so much bandwidth, even without resolution, does demonstrate that these stories are still very much relevant to our spiritual and moral growth.
 
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