Amaleq13

Then why don't you apply it? You clearly treat your texts differently from other ancient texts.

Do you have evidence that the methodology(ies) you criticize is(are) not applied uniformly to all ancient texts?

What you describe is the opposite of "neutral". Instead, it is an attempt to create unique presuppositions for a particular text or body of texts with a specific intent to skew the results in favor of a preferred outcome. This is also known as the logical error of "special pleading".

Given the inherent fallibility of the human mind, it is entirely irrational to attempt to understand any creation of the human mind with a presupposition that it is free from error.

Steven Avery

Apply what ?
You didn't offer a neutral methodology.

Sure. My analysis of inspiration of a manuscript has all sorts of facets that you would not accept. (World-wide acknowledged events, beauty and depth, transformative potential and reality). However if you want to stay on a straight textual level, if you can find a decent neutral methodology, let me know.

Tis an irrelevant question. If the methodology will create errancy in every text then it is worthless for errancy analysis. Period. If you want to ask me personally why I accept the Bible and not the Gilgamesh Epic or some gnostic text as inspired, or the quran, thats fine. My answer is not likely to be mostly textual.

I never claimed that I knew of a neutral methodology.
That's why I asked you if you had one.

If the "logical error" would be applied to any theoretical or practical inerrant text, and accuse it of being errant, then the logical structure itself is not neutral and needs overhaul.

True. If the statements of Psalm 12:6-7 and 2 Timothy 3:16 are not true, and the Bible is simply a human mind creation, then we would ipso facto reject any inerrancy contention. The key component here is whether a text inspired by God would be a "creation of the human mind" or a creation of the mind of God working through man.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Helpmabob

Doug Shaver - He may well be infallible in writer realms. But I doubt he would cut it as a comedy scriptwriter these days. Meanwhile, the Bible holds its validity despite been written up to 15 centuries before Shakey appeared on the scene.

Doug Shaver

By itself, logic already is neutral. Of course it can be applied with bias, but to whatever extent any analysis of any text is actually a logical analysis, to that extent it is necessarily a neutral analysis.

Theoretical neutrality gets dicier. Any theory has its presuppositions. That is unavoidable. To the extent that a particular theory's presuppositions preclude certain conclusions, that theory could be said to be biased against those conclusions. On the other hand, to the extent that a particular theory's presuppositions guarantee the confirmation of certain conclusions, to that extent it is rather obviously biased against any contrary conclusions.

When I study ancient texts, I'll freely admit to presupposing a natural provenance for them. That is not presupposing their errancy, but it certainly makes it possible for me to infer their errancy if they contain assertions that can be parsimoniously attributed to human error.

Now let me mention a presupposition I don't make, and which some apologists apparently do make. I do not presuppose that human error is the least likely explanation for any apparent inconsistency or other anomaly in an ancient text. I do not think it necessary to rule out every last hypothesis offered in defense of an inerrant interpretation of any writing. An apparent problem *is* a problem, and if human error can explain it, then it is human error unless additional evidence proves that the author could not have made that particular mistake.

I'm probably not qualified to agree or disagree. I have not read enough about those methods that was written by its practitioners to have a clear understanding of their thinking. What little I have read was written by people who think the practitioners are going to burn in hell for questioning evangelical dogma.

When examining any ancient text, though, when someone tells me that I must believe whatever it says, I'm just going to ask "Why?" and see what kind of answer I get. I see no reason to evaluate religious texts differently from any others, or Christian texts from other religious texts.

You beg the question by saying it is overused. Whether it is appropriately applied in any particular case must be decided by all the evidence relevant to that case. That it was wrongly used in nine cases tells us nothing about whether we should use it in the tenth.

It is beyond me to imagine how any method of research, study, analysis, or whatever could change an inerrant text into an errant text. Whatever was written is either true or false. Our task is to figure out as best we can, by the best means available to us, which it is.

I cannot tell from the context just what you mean by the "historic Bible." However, the mere fact that Christians assumed certain things about the Bible for over a thousand years tells me nothing about the likelihood that the assumptions were true.

As for what the "overwhelming manuscript evidence" proves, that depends for me on the particular point at issue. However, a thousand manuscripts from the third century cannot by themselves prove anything certain about what somebody wrote during the first century.

Doug Shaver

What does that mean, and does it have any relevance to criteria for deciding whether the authors of the Bible were infallible?

pharoah

The problems that I see within the Bible has absolutely nothing to do with who wrote it and when it was written. Even if Moses wrote the Torah, David wrote Psalms, Job wrote Job, Samuel wrote Samuel and Matthew wrote Matthew, the same errors would still persist.

Again, it doesn't matter to me if the manuscripts have been tampered with or not, the problems are still there.

I hate to break it to you, but the KJV has at least as many errors as any other translation. It's irrelevant to me whether it came from "better" manuscripts or not.

Why not start at the beginning? On day one it says that God created the earth. On day three it says that God created all of the plants. On day four it says that God created the stars, essentially the rest of the universe, to give light to the earth. This story flies in the face of all current scientific knowledge. Plants need sunlight to survive. The earth is not the center of the universe. This story must be relegated to the category of myth.

Sure you can say that god worked a miracle to keep the plants alive before creating the sun, or you can argue that the cosmology of Genesis can somehow be reconciled with our current understanding. The problem with this approach is that ANY creation story can be made acceptable once you accept the existence of the deity that performed the creation.

That may be true for the Islamists to some extent, although AFAIK they don't accept the NT as part of their scriptures. However, the LDS does use the KJV, although they appear to overrride it with the JST. Here's an interesting article on the subject.

Christianity is hardly free of its own canon problems. For instance, why don't Protestants accept the deuterocanonical books?

What is your definition of inerrancy? From what I can tell, you seem to claim that the KJV is inerrent not so much because of its content but because you believe that it's very close to being a carbon copy of the original manuscripts.

Amaleq13

The approach you agreed was "reasonable" (ie applying a methodology uniformly to all ancient texts). You do not follow what you have described as a "reasonable" approach and I was asking why that might be. You have answered that question in this post, I think.

Not according to your definition of "neutral" but your definition is clearly flawed and specifically intended to support your presuppositions. The methodology(ies) you criticize are neutral by any rational definition of the term. Your criticism rejects the entirely rational presupposition that human efforts will contain flaws for no other reason than it conflicts with your faith-based presupposition.

Even logic must bow down to your presuppositions! :rolling:

You are truly the paragon of circular reasoning. :notworthy:

No one who values rational thought need bother arguing with you on this subject.:wave:

Sven

Nice smokescreens praxeus is putting up here, to hide two simple facts:
(1) All texts from today are know to be written by humans. Humans are known to make errors. So errancy of a text simply has to be the default position.
(2) Even if we knew of no methology to establish the inerrancy of a text: How should this bother an omnipotent being? If there is a god, and if this god "inspired" the bible to be inerrant - the only conclusion we can draw from the fact that it's commonly regarded not to be inerrant is that this god simply did not want us to believe in its inerrancy.

Two simple facts. Which should end this stupid inerrancy discussion in every rational mind.

mens_sana

Maybe because the religious experience, at least with Paul and the Gnostics, was a charismatic or ecstatic one. And these experiences can be experienced for only so long before the ecstatic state in not repeatable (about 2 years, per Bourguignon, Religion, Altered States of Consciousness and Social Change, Ohio State, 1973). Then, when the state is no longer available, what does the believer fall back on? Identification with the small group, institutionalization of church authority, and the text, the text, the text.

mens_sana

While Jericho was first settled during the Mesolithic period (ca. 12,000 BCE), at the time Joshua and YHWH brought its wall tumbling down, it was largely uninhabited, with no walls, and was not reoccupied until the 11th century BCE. [Information courtesy of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, V. 3, Oxford University Press, 1997]