Peter Kirby

Because the biblical link is tenuous, I think I made a mistake about asking on panentheism in this thread. I have created a new thread in General Religious Discussions. Please continue any discussion about deism/pantheism/panentheism there.

best,
Peter Kirby

Evangelion

Mr Kirby - I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Currently at a mate's place, and only have time for a short post, which I'm devoting to Vinnie.


Vinnie -

It means that he died for our benefit, not as a substitute instead of us.

Well, that would leave us up the metaphorical creek without a corresponding paddle - which would, I suggest, be rather unfortunate.

The Biblical one.

Seriously, I'm not entirely sure what it's called (don't even know if it has an official name), but Mark M. Mattison does a good job of explaining it in his article here, where he also rips the guts out the Penal Substitution model. :notworthy

Thanks, I'll check 'em out. I see that you reject PS, which is good news already.

Celsus

Sorry more work for you Peter... A really good, short introduction to archaeological enterprise in the ANE and recent developments is J.C. Laughlin's Archaeology and the Bible. Absolutely readable, with an introduction to how archaeological method developed, contemporary debates, new methods and discoveries, avoids the polemics of minimax debates (while giving the minimalists a fair hearing), and lots of pictures to boot! And all in less than 200 pages!

Also: Amihai Mazar's Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10,000-586 B.C.E. and Ephraim Stern's Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods (732-332 B.C.E.) (they are a companion set). I've only got my hands on Vol. 2 (Stern), and still waiting for Mazar's to come.

Joel

Hugo Holbling

I have another suggestion, unrelated to book recommendations:

Would it be possible to have a sticky thread giving links (with brief explanations as to content) to the important debates that have occured in this forum on various issues? This would be a real boon to those who - like me - have no expertise whatsoever to join in but are interested in reading through them, especially those we may have missed for one reason or another. It's asking alot, but there it is.

(As an aside, i'd really appreciate it if Mr Kirby could make an error in a post someday, as one of my ambitions in life is to disagree with him.)

Evangelion

Mr Kirby -

No, not at all. I think you might have missed the point I was making in my previous post. I'm not saying "the resurrection must be central to the Christian faith because it's frequently attacked by atheists" - I'm saying "atheists recognise that the resurrection is the central event of the Christian faith, and attack it (quite understandably) because they realise that if it falls, Christianity falls."

And of course, such an attack becomes necessary for those atheists who accept the existence of Christ as a literal historical figure.

It's OK, I'm not offended. Just a bit puzzled, that's all. I want to make sure that we understand each other.

Oh, I know you didn't. But you looked like you might be about to, which is why I said that I don't see why you would suggest that my position is not a rational one.

I was hoping to get in ahead of you.

I understand what you are saying. But you see, I believe that I have good reason to accept the account because I believe I have good reason to accept the Bible as a generally reliable document. It's not as simple as merely accepting the Gospels at face value.

I take the Bible as a whole, accepting the reliability of the Gospels on the basis of the fact that (a) previous books have proved reliable and the Gospels are consistent with these, (b) the Gospels appear to have some historical support (enough to be credible, at least) and (c) the supernatural events in the Gospels are consistent with my world view.

OK, perhaps "every good reason" was something of an overstatement.

Let's change it to "I have good reason."

Peter Kirby

Evangelion: This is false. I would maintain that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is not a verifiable historical event, but I don't think that the falsehood of the bodily resurrection of Jesus would prove that Christianity is false. (Note: it would prove that some forms of Christianity, perhaps yours included, are false.)

Also, many of the atheists who attack the inerrancy of the Bible would say that inerrancy is a central tenet of the Christian faith. The point of my comment is that what atheists do and don't attack is not a reliable criterion of what is central to the Christian message. An argument that the physical resurrection of the flesh of Christ is necessary to Christianity would have to be made on other grounds.

Evangelion writes: I am now further confused as to whether you think that Christianity is believed in because of evidence and what role you assign to "faith." The above statement of the Bible as a "generally reliable document" reads to me like a form of naïve fundamentalist evidentialist apologetics.

best,
Peter Kirby

Evangelion

Mr Kirby -

I think you mean that it is false in your view.

That is your prerogative.

Correct. I maintain that without a literal resurrection, there is very little that we can call "the Christian faith." Without the concept of a need for salvation and a process which faciliates it, we are left with a handful of moral principles and a few interesting stories. This reduces Christianity to the role of a mere fridge magnet (as previously noted) which in turn means that Christianity is little more than a form of existentialism by another name.

*sigh*

I already agreed with this. I did not predicate my argument that "the resurrection is central to the Christian message" on the basis of the fact that it is attacked by atheists. In fact, I have argued the reverse. Please go back and read my posts on this subject.

Obviously. And as you can see, this is what I do. I argue for the necessity of the resurrection on the basis of soteriology.

I'll try and keep it simple:

• I believe that Christianity should be believed in on the basis of an intelligent faith; that is to say, on the basis of a faith which is not blind.
  
• If I believed in Christianity purely on the basis of faith, I would not even bother with the Bible. I'd just "believe it" regardless. But this is not what I do.
  
• I argue that Christianity should be believed on the basis of evidence and faith.
  
• I accept that there is insufficient evidence to prove Christianity absolutely; that is to say, without recourse to faith. Faith therefore becomes a necessary part of the equation.
  
• However, I do not believe that there is absolutely no evidence in support of Christianity at all.

Is this helping?



Generally speaking, the Bible is a reliable document. It contains verifiable history, including names, places and events. At the very least, it is generally reliable on that basis alone. (See also here.)

There may be insufficient evidence in your eyes, but there is certainly sufficient in mine.

Peter Kirby

I meant that it is false that all atheists who argue against the bodily resurrection of Jesus regard it as a necessary tenet of Christianity.

There are at least two different forms of Christianity that do not require a literal resurrection of the flesh of Jesus' body. The first is that the resurrection is true as a metaphysical and universal statement of the victory of life over death, which is not dependent on the fate of Jesus' corpse. The second is that Jesus was a great moral teacher who should be emulated in his life, not iconized in his death and alleged reanimation. You may disagree with these ideas or consider them unorthodox, but they are forms of the multifaceted Christian faith. You have shown only that a physical resurrection of Jesus is necessary to some forms of Christianity.

It seems that you are saying is that faith is believing in certain doctrines that are supported by evidence to a degree that is not strictly warranted by the evidence. This gives the primacy to evidentialism, for without the evidence there would be no faith. You also maintain that a contravention of natural law (the fleshy resurrection) is central to the Christian faith. This suggests to me that you are actually among those who held to the second position, supernaturalism and evidentialism.

Your link basically just said that there are a lot of early manuscripts of the biblical books. Do you really think that is a good reason to regard the stories as mostly true?

best,
Peter Kirby

Vinnie

Ditto that. Textual criticism does not establish the historical reliability of a text. It can at best, demonstrate that the text has come down to us in its original form.

The NT has decent attestation for a copied work of antiquity but there are a few problems:

Some Textual Difficulties Associated with Christian Works and the NT at an Early Period:

Early on there was no slavish devotion to the exact wording and the text could be and was meant to be expanded upon (Brown).

Some Christians accused others of corrupting the texts.

GJohn was redacted.

Q was redacted at least once.

We have four forged endings of GMark.

GThomas was redacted at least once.

GMatthew and GLuke may have used different versions of Mark
when writing their Gospels.

GM and GL may have used varying versions of Q when writing their Gospels.

Gospel composition was a fluid process. Form criticism tells us that the shaping of the Gospel material was a fluid process as well!!!!

The number of alterations made in light of doctrinal considerations is very difficult to assess (compliments of Mr. Metzger).

Numerous insertions, omitions and alterations are found in the texts. For example, the pericope de adultera in GJohn 7-8 and tons more.

With such examples of wholesale editing at very early dates I am not sure what the likes of Mcdowell and these apologists base their claims on. To be quite honest, a Pauline letter could have underwent heavy redaction early on before the Pauline corpus was collected and distributed. We have no way of knowing and given all the instances above, we know Christians were not altogether shy about editing texts in the early church.

All these apologetical studies completely neglect this area of study and move on to different tests. I call for a more honest and objective methodology than this. I also call for a more honest position based on the data.


Vinnie

Evangelion

Mr Kirby -

Fair enough.

Not entirely. I accept that faith is frequently present in the total absence of evidence. The point I am making here is that it is necessary to distinguish between different types of faith; blind faith vs. rational faith; mere faith vs. faith + evidence.

And the key word here is "evidence", rather than "proof."

See above. I maintain that faith appears in different forms, some of which place a greater emphasis on the existence of evidence than others.

No, because the second position insists that...

• there are good arguments for the factuality of miracles

...which I deny.

In fact, I believe that your two categories require some renovation. They are not particularly well defined, IMHO. There is more cross-over between them than you appear willing to admit.

Um... that wasn't really my point. The question was "Are they reliable?", but the nature of this reliability was not actually specfied.

I attempted to cover two forms of reliability in my response:

• Reliability of historical references.
  
• Reliability of textual evidence.

By this I mean that the Bible can be considered reliable on two grounds:

• It contains verifiable historical references.
  
• Its textual history - though somewhat chequered - is generally consistent, showing that we have the Bible today in a form that is sufficiently close to the original.