Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
Most people don't know this though.. I mean pastors are taught it at seminary, but when they get to churches they seem to teach mostly from a devotional point of view, they don't touch anything that the past 300 years of Biblical scholarship has worked out.
So most don't have any cognitive dissonance, because they haven't read the gospels horizontally, or struggled with the discrepancies, or know that many of the books were written fraudulently (many of the Pauline letters weren't authored by Paul), etc etc. As far as they know the Bible is inerrant because they haven't seen any different.
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The only change in the last three hundred years in Biblical scholarship is the rise of german rationalism. Its view is that the scriptures are just a book written by men without inspiration from God. The goal of their textual study is to find the most likely explainations for the supernatural events of scriptures that would exclude God in their explaination. They see fullfilled prophesy as proof that what ever book it was in must have been written after the event. They see all the miracles of Christ as either lies or tricks.
They assert that any resemblance to another religion is proof of plagiarism. They see any minor conflict in the narrative of the gospels as proof of inaccuracy while ignoring all the work scholars have done in the last 18 hundred years to understand and explain those supposed conflicts. Pretaining to the gospels and epistles; when they see differences they scream error and when they see harmony they scream plagiarism.
In actual fact they see nothing at all because they exclude the most obvious conclusion before they even begin: That God inspired the 66 books that make up the bible and that the Messiah came 2000 years ago; taking on the form of a lowly man and was faithfull unto death; rising again 3 days later having reconciled all who would believe unto God.
I can see how an atheist would delight in german rationalism because it gives you all a false confidence that you are right and their is no God. But what I don't get is how you personally accept their half truths as (pardon the pun) gospel. Are you so ingrained in your beliefs that you lack the ability to measure their assertions against orthodox apologists?
Now I worked 70 hours last week and hoping this week to shave it down to a mere 60 hours. I don't have a lot of time to respond to these posts. If you or your atheist buddys want they can flood this thread with questions and half truths and I won't have even the slimmest hope of responding to it all. Perhaps you guys need such volume to keep your faith up; I don't know. But I would appreciate you backing up some of the claims you have made against Christianity as of late.
Lets start with your latest one. You said above that many of the Apostle Paul's letters weren't written by him. What proof do you have?