All the other gospels say simply "three days." If he meant to just convey "three days" without the nights, the customary "three days and three nights" is not the appropriate term for the amount of time Jesus was in the tomb. As Miller notes, they are actually PARTS of the day and adding three DAYS and three NIGHTS equal three 24 hour periods. The "idiomatic" aspect of it to which Miller refers is that a "day" does not equal a 24 hour period but half a day. But it is still a definite expression of time.

And Bede, maybe Jesus was actually the "deceiving spirit" that God likes to send to get people to lie. Maybe he did it so that he would really be able to zap the Gentiles (2 Thess 2:11)....GASP, maybe you're all following a deception! It's a joke.



[This message has been edited by Le pede (edited February 13, 2001).]

As for the other question, please show me where the Bible ever says "3 days and 2 nights" or "40 days and 39 nights" about any time space. Please. then why fault Jesus for using the speech of his day?
____________________________

Mt 12:40
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

This is generally taken as a prophecy of the whole resurrection thing. Is that the wrong intepretation? How do you squeeze two nights into three nights from that?

Also, the Amalekite thing is a contradiction.
Either the Amalekite who confessed killed Saul, or Saul himself did. I agree that
the Bible sometimes is non-commital. That's
why I took issue with Turkel's explanation that the Amalekite was lying, since Chronicles could as well be lying, or they could both be lying. There's no way to choose which case is the true story. It ain't as simple as Turkel suggests. Remember Turkel didn't just say we were wrong, he named this one a Golden Duh, something blindingly obvious. It most certainly isn't obvious.

Michael
turton@ev1.net

Thank you, Michael, for your honest admittance in the first part of the post.

Regarding GM's short essay concerning 3 days and 3 nights, 9/10 of it is missing! He went into further detail quoting rabbinical sources that backed up the assertion, but somehow it's not on that page anymore. So I will continue to keep an eye out for that.

Regarding the skeptics' "victory" over Christians as far as Bible contradictions go, I'm not so sure. In the end, it is a matter of opinion, probably. In fact, even J.P. Holding himself doesn't really believe the Bible as we have it today is inerrant per se--which is why I referred you to his essay, "Inerrancy and Human Ignorance." I concede there are flaws, but I haven't seen any skeptic show where these errors put enough damage into the faith to render it foolish to believe or follow. Historians even go so far as to say that the discrepancies in the resurrection accounts add to their validity. (I know you didn't mention the resurrection, but I figured I'd add that bit. )

Good day.

Rew

Thanks for bringing up that very good point, Le pede.

What Turkel was doing with that was showing that while Time and Newsweek can be wrong (I also admit that in a few minor details one or more gospel writers were wrong--i.e. the resurrection discrepancies), we don't cancel our subscriptions to those magazines based on a few minor errors every now and then. Yes, the gospel writers may have been a tad off on some of the details, but it is quite a jump from there to say that their record of the life of Jesus is completely unreliable.

In fact, in the gospels while we see some details being disagreed upon, the core of the story--especially the resurrection--is in good harmony and intact.

What do you make of Turkel's big piece on the page, the Lincoln Challenge? That's the essence of the whole thing.

Rew

[This message has been edited by Rew (edited February 14, 2001).]

You are absolutely right. Just because there are minor contradictions in the Bible is not an argument that it should all be thrown out. Though I don't believe that all the contradictions are "minor." And unlike some in the Secular Web, I do not think it is ridiculous to believe in Christianity, nor do I condemn those who do so--(though I do think that some applications of it are dangerous and need to be vociferously opposed).

The idea you will always see me attack is the fundamentalist Christian position (i.e. biblical inerrancy) and those that think that Christianity is the ONLY legitimate religion.

I do not believe in the Christian stories because they are based on oral traditions and stories, as are many myths and stories. It is quite plausible that these stories are not true and as long there is that plausibility, to me there is not justification for belief in them. I do not believe the testimony of the Bible because to me there is no logical division between that and, say, the witnesses signatures in the Book of Mormon--or even other "pseudipigraphical" and apocryphal Christian and Jewish texts.

[This message has been edited by Le pede (edited February 14, 2001).]

I looked at the Lincoln challenge and it is pretty hokey. I never heard any academic claim their book was infallible, and no extraordinary claims are made about Lincoln.
I've heard Christians make all sorts of claims about the Bible.

I agree with La Pede and Rew that it is inane to worry about minor contradictions. Holding's tactic is to focus on reasonable inerrancy, to accept minor contradictions and pass them off as scribal errors, differences in translation, etc. Another tactic is simply to leave out problems. He skips many major objections and contradictions. How does a god of love order genocide? Gleason Archer was at least honest in his sick approval of the Israelites' genocidal activities in Canaan. I guess for Holding it is not even an issue.

So I'd like to know, how does Holding justify god's killing of David's son in light of god's promise not to kill anyone for the sins of the father (not to mention basic considerations of moral behavior)? You might explain the murder of all of Egpyt's firstborn as well in light of that promise as well. I can't find any discussion of this on his site. That's not a minor contradiction, but a fundamental contradiction of both god's promises and of basic moral considerations.

Michael
turton@ev1.net
I

Michael,

Did you read the fourth page of the Lincoln Challenge (http://www.tektonics.org/JPH_HICA_04.html)? Holding addresses that objection (among others) about the Lincoln biographies not being inerrant. That's not the issue at hand--he's merely talking about the gospels as reliable history.

Concerning your questions about the Bible's ethics, if you look at section 3.2 of J.P.'s Tekton page (http://www.tektonics.org/Tekton_TOC.html); it deals with some of those and other issues. Actually, most of the questions are taken up by Glenn Miller (Holding links to those), but they're dealt with nonetheless. As for God killing David's son when He promises not to punish children for the sins of the fathers, I've never thought of that one. I do know in some parts of the OT, God says He punishes to the third or so generation of a sin but gives blessings to the thousandth generation of a righteous person. And of course God carried that blessing out by raising up Jesus from the line of David. Perhaps that answers your question?

Hope this is helpful.

Rew

Ro 11:22
Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell , severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.
Ps 18:26
With the pure You will show Yourself pure; And with the devious You will show Yourself shrewd.
etc. etc. etc. In God we see a balance between holiness and mercy, justice and love. There is a tension there of principles. From what I've read, the Caananites were an exceedingly wicked people, sacrificing their children to their pagan gods, into witchcraft, and all kinds of sexual deviancies. Archaeology is supposed to confirm this. The question may rather be why God let them go their way for 400 years- till their "iniquity was full." He let the Israelites rebel and sin and sin in their idolatry for hundreds of years also before bringing the Assyrians and then the Babylonians on their kingdoms. That to me shows a genuine "longsuffering"- but not an "eternally long-suffering" aspect of God's nature. The God of Judgement is the same God as the God of Love(and remember how this love was displayed, in the sacrifice of His own Son! That also shows the "severity" of God's judgement on sin, that Messiah was cut-off(Daniel 9:26) from the land of the living for our sakes. If the Bible teaches the cross as proof of God's love, no doubt that "severe" cross also should remind us of God's severity.

Actually the prohibition in Deuteronomy about people not being "put to death" for the sins of the fathers is a prohibition against MAN putting people to death on account of the sins of their fathers. The Bible is pretty consistent on this when it comes to the sins of Israelites (with gentiles, kids and babies are fair game), in the sense that the person who usually brutally kills Israelite children is Yhwh himself, not society. BUT there is an exception to this. Yhwh orders the children, wives, livestock, etc. of Achan to die a horrific death by stoning (Josh 7). And of course, Yhwh orders the Amelekite massacre for something that was done hundreds of years earlier, but like I said, they were gentile.

That being said, the "visiting-the-iniquity" question is a serious issue. The exact same word that is used in Ezekiel to say "iniquity" (awon) is used in the Ten Commandments.

[This message has been edited by Le pede (edited February 14, 2001).]

a_theist,
Now you know that the actions of the Canaanites do not warrant genocide. So, what? The children are being sacrificed to idols, and the solution is to kill the children? Why couldn't the Israelites at least have captured the children and made them servants or something. This brutality was uncalled for and the Canaanite practices do not justify it. It's almost like saying we can kill all the men women and children in Las Vegas for what goes on there.