fatpie42

Good one.

I guess the entry in the list would go:
"The 'long day' described in Joshua 10 really happened and this has been proven by NASA computers."

The website's own words are probably pretty good for the explanation too.

Actually, the claim that astronomical calculations proved that a day was “missing” began over a century ago. In the last few decades, the myth has been embellished with NASA computers performing those calculations.

No one who repeats this story has ever provided details of these calculations—how exactly was this missing day discovered? This should automatically make people cautious. How could you detect a missing day unless you had a fixed reference point before this day?

In fact, we would need to cross check between both astronomical and historical records to detect any missing day. And to detect a missing 40 minutes requires that these reference points are known to within an accuracy of a few minutes.

It is certainly true that the timing of solar eclipses observable from a certain location can be known precisely. But the ancient records did not record time that precisely, so the required cross check is simply not possible.

However, I find it hilarious that they finish with:

NZSkep

why stop at camel. wouldn't 'house' have been even more effective
Camel makes no sense in the context of threading needles. rope makes perfect sense. you put thread through the eye of a needle. what would be the most difficult kind of 'thread' to fit through the eye of a needle? Why, a great big thick rope.
One possibilty:
Just the first one. Other early translators may have used that as a guide. Modern day translators would be too concerned about changing a phrase that has been so widely accepted to go back on it. (biblical innerrancy and all that bollocks)

Another possibility: the word was written Kamelos, but was smudged or just faded through age to make it look like Kamilos. the translators simply translated what they saw.


look at donkey Kong vs Monkey Kong for a modern day version of almost the exact scenario.
Monkey was misread/misprinted into Donkey, despite donkey making no sense
(the character was a gorilla!) and it just stuck over the years.

according to this site, some 11th century manuscripts did in fact translate it as the word 'rope'.
http://www.biblicalhebrew.com/nt/camelneedle.htm


if the translator makes the mistake on one manuscript because they don't know the correct translation then it would make sense they would make the same mistake on all three.


Just to be clear, I'm not claiming this is definitely true, but rather that it is plausible because it does at least make sense in the context of what was being said (about threading needles) and has some evidence to back it up.

fatpie42

I don't see why not, but the fact is that the word in the manuscript means 'camel' and we have absolutely no good reason to say that this was an error.

That the words for camel and rope are similar is a nice piece of trivia, but it doesn't mean that the synoptic gospel writers had intended to convey the alternative word. Even less likely is the idea that every single translator of the Bible has misread all three gospel accounts.

In the end, that you think it would have sounded better if they'd said rope (even coupled with the similarity of the words in Greek) does not make that the word they used.

Doesn't work I'm afraid. Bible translators are quite happy to propose alternative translations of the Bible. In fact it would get them quite a bit of attention in the media if they proposed an alternative translation of a well known biblical phrase. The members of the Jesus Seminar, for example, are not adverse to controversial claims.

Like I said, that would suppose that it was smudged in the same way in all three gospel accounts. This phrase is found Mark, Matthew and Luke, so we would have to be working on a scenario where all three accounts were equally misleading.

From the same website:
This means that some Christians in medieaval times shared your annoyance at the word 'camel' being used and made a similar decision to change the meaning on the basis of the similarity of the words in ancient Greek. However, the 11th century is 1000 years later than the original text was written. Considering that changes were made to the texts during 1AD, pointing to an alteration made 1000 years later seems to be clutching at straws....

As has been mentioned earlier, there are many different translators and in every version I have seen, they decided on the word 'camel'. I find it rather daft of you to suggest modern translators would stick with a faulty translation for the sake of tradition.

No, it has some conjecture to back it up. There's no actual evidence to be found. The similarity of two words in ancient Greek is not really a good reason to replace the word 'camel' with 'rope'.

fatpie42

Actually I think we could probably have an entry on that.

The claim would go along the lines of:
"Jesus miracles prove that he was the son of God"

The problems would be as follows:
(i) Prophets throughout the old testament are also claimed to perform miracles.
(ii) Many people during Jesus' time were believed to have performed miracles too.
(iii) Even the gospels admit that not all observers were very impressed with Jesus' miracles. This suggests that Jesus' miracles were not as spectacular as they are claimed to be and/or the kinds of miracles Jesus was performing were not any more impressive than those people saw elsewhere (most likely both).

I kinda rushed this, so if anyone can think of a better way of phrasing some of this stuff and perhaps has some more problems to add to the list, that'd be cool.

Mediancat

A non-Biblical one would be the infamous "She said yes" of Columbine.

Rob aka Mediancat

fatpie42

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/c/cassie.htm

I'd never heard that before.

Joe Bloe

Since Matthew and Luke copied Mark, all it would take would be for Mark to have made the error.

Given the uproar among the flock when some modern English translations tried to correct the traditional mistranslation, based on the Septuagint's mistranslation, of "young woman" as "virgin" in Isaiah 7, I'd say that Bible translators have some reason to stick with tradition over truth.

Which is not to say that an accurate translation of the actual Greek in this passage would be "rope" instead of "camel." The word in the Greek manuscripts is clearly "camel," and the translators are right. But the similarity of the words and the difference in how "rope" and "camel" fit in this context make it reasonable to posit that the writer of Mark (or a very early copier of Mark) made a mistake which was then copied by the writers of Matthew and Luke.

But it is good evidence to support the claim that Mark made a mistake which was perpetuated in Matthew's and Luke's retellings of Mark's story. It's not just an urban legend; it's a reasonable, though unprovable, hypothesis to explain why there is such a bizarre passage in the Bible as it has come down to us.

Of course, biblical inerrantists wouldn't like the implications of this -- a Bible writer made a mistake, and other writers copied that mistake -- but we know this has happened before, as with Matthew's virgin mother. So I don't know why some of them like to use this explanation of the passage. I suppose it sounds neat and they just don't think of the implications of the explanation -- and that supposition is certainly no stretch.

dettus

LOL you are right and I never thought if it that way before. Silly me. /bonk

fatpie42

I must admit that I thought this was the best argument, but NZSkep doesn't have that as an option as he has dismissed such a possibility as a straw man:

I hope that explains why I am balking at the absudity of every single early manuscript having a smudge on the word camel/rope in all three synoptic gospels.

With your (to my mind) stronger argument, the problem remains that we don't have the pericopes from which Mark compiled his gospel. As such, we aren't in any position to say that the original word is meant to be 'rope'. It is pure conjecture. It seems to only be worth putting forward as a hypothesis for the purposes of apologetics (edit: though even then it seems deeply problematic - well noted! ) and, as such, I think scepticism is the most sensible response.

At very least we'd expect to see some prominent writers out there proposing that the phrase ought to be different. Uproar is good for sales after all....

The thing is that this is best of a bad bunch of very odd claims. Others include the claim that the original text referred to a "camel hair" rope and then there's the ridiculous references to a special gate in Jerusalem. (However, I must say that I wasn't about to accept NZSkeps proposition that it is a matter of poor translation of the gospel manuscripts and neither, it seems, were you.)

I will accept the hypothesis that Mark made a mistake and, as you rightly note, this would cause serious problems for some Christians. It would thoroughly demonstrate that the synoptic gospels are working on a process of chinese whispers. Nevertheless, I will not accept that it is a hypothesis with strong backing (no matter how much it might make Christians squirm if it were).

Newfie

In Exodus 12:37, Moses left with 600,000 Hebrew men and "A mixed multitude also went up with them" of non-Hebrews (Exodus 12:38). Add to that the proportionate number of women and children and the total number involved may have been over a couple of million of people. Numbers 1:46 specifically gives the total as 603,550, but that might be referring to just the men.

It’s not difficult to imagine that crowd carrying enough gold to plate a statue, especially if the lot of them were escaping a region recently hit by “natural” disaster. Wouldn't you at least grab your wallet while fleeing?

Looting by the Hebrews is always a possibility too, but I seem to recall a theory I must have heard about twenty-five years ago that the Hebrews had not been enslaved as we understand the term. The idea was that the Hebrews were pressed into public building projects, like the native Egyptian farmers themselves were during the non-growing, flood season or times of drought, in exchange for supplies from the granaries during these lean times. The Hebrews, being nomadic herders, were not use to this kind of labor and, in the retelling, equated it with slavery as we understand the term.

It’s been a long time since I read this view, and I’m sure it has probably been debunked since then, so I’d appreciate any links to that effect if anybody knows of any.