[Textcritic]

So, as usual, I am 10 days late to this discussion, and now run the risk of derailing the current trajectory, which is something that I hate doing. Nevertheless, I did want to get my bits in about CHL's and Street Pharmacist's exchange concerning literalism in Christianity.

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

This is obviously wrong. Absolutely no sect of Christianity thinks the New Testament is the literal word of God. Christianity's basic tenet is that God came to Man through his son. Consequently, the Gospels may relate some of the teachings of Jesus, but they are written by men, and as a result the occasional contradictions among the gospels are somewhat explicable.

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

You're wrong on two fronts. In the New Testament, it explains that the words written are God's breath:
"and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in …"

A couple of things:

First, CHL is too confidently dismissive of the notion that there are some Christian sects who endorse a literal interpretation of the whole Bible—including the New Testament. They are out there, and in many pockets within North America, extreme biblical literalists are actually the majority. He is basically correct about the central tenet of Christianity in the presented of Jesus, but does not seem to understand this within a much more complicated religious and cultural context. Christianity was originally a Jewish sect and as such found legitimation almost exclusively within their commitment to Jewish scriptures as THE written divine revelation. (Of course, what that means is another matter, and not a very simple one).

The idea that the New Testament writings were written by men is not an entirely benign concept. Constructed into it is the mystical status that was quite commonly attached to the practice of writing in antiquity (eg. the Sotah ritual in Num 5:13–31; also Egyptian execretion texts Mari A.2233 = ARM X, 9; also, PGM XIII—the Egyptian word for "script" or "writing" is literally mdw ntr: "words of the gods"), as well as the loaded concept of written revelation from God that was inherited from Judaism. This idea clearly extended far beyond merely viewing scripture as mere human productions. For example, the Jewish book of Jubilees (c. 200–150 B.C.E.) purports to have been recorded by Moses by dictation from an Angel who read from tablets that reside in heaven (Jub. superscription). The Temple Scroll is a rewritten version of the OT book of Deuteronomy with portions of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers dovetailed in. Its author clearly believed that his source material was a direct, spoken revelation by God, since he attributed the entire thing to him in first person dialogue.

Second, Street Pharamcist is wrong in his chosen translation and subsequent interpretation of 2 Tim 3:16, that "all scripture is breathed out by God" (πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος). The critical word here is θεόπνευστος, which literally read is "breathed out by God," or "God breathed," but because this is such an infrequently used compound word, there is still an ongoing debate about what it precisely means. While we cannot be sure what it was that the writer of 2 Timothy meant to communicate with it, I would venture to suggest that he almost certainly did not mean to suggest that "scripture" was actually "God's breath." Where it does appear in other Greek literature from around the same time period (cf. eg. Ps.-Phoc.129; Plu.2.904f; Vett.Val.330.19), context dictates that the word means something more like "inspire" in the sense that God has imparted truths or significant ideas which were then written down. Another problem with the text in question is what to do with the subject, "all scripture," (or "every scripture"?). I would maintain that the writer does not have a clear set of texts in view, and is thus providing license for interpretation of a whole range of unspecified cherished literature.

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

accepting that the Old Testament is literally the worst religious text of any major religion ever, why is it that Jews and Christians don't follow these rules? Why can they touch the skin of a dead pig and eat shellfish? Because either intentionally or by happenstance, their religious texts contain enough tools to allow their adherents to, with some sense of consistency and intellectual honesty, discard the archaic teachings of that book. The holy texts of Islam seem to provide fewer tools of this sort (again I'm not a religious scholar so this is just my layperson's sense upon reading it) - for example, if the Qur'an is the literal word of God, and it says that Allah has cursed the Jews, and you should slay apostates wherever you find them, it becomes pretty tough for the scholar of Islam to say "no, we shouldn't follow those prescriptions".

I would say that CHL is correct here in how he has qualitatively distinguished the Muslim doctrine of literalism from the Christian doctrine of divine inspiration. One important point to note here is that within Islam it is only the Arabic text of the Quran that is the precise, divine word of God. Within Christendom, it is the meaning of the words themselves, and thus whatever they say in the translator's rendering, or in the interpreter's mind. This may seem like a fine distinction, but it does make a big difference in how Muslims and Christians (and also Jews) view and understand their scriptures.