Enlighten Me

Coincidentally, I was just reading in "A History of God" (Karen Armstrong) that the Pharisees were actually sincere, and highly spiritual folks whose rituals and practices were meant to cultivate a sense of God's presence in their daily lives. The condemnation directed towards them in the NT is apparently misplaced...

Vinnie

Correct. Even E.P. Sanders notes this throughout his works. hence my short statement: "Pharisees were actually cool dudes."

I said nothing about the Bible I said that Christian texts which dennigrate the Pharisees cannot be relied upon. Historically, the Pharisees were cool chaps and some of the Gospel stories lack historical plausibility and appear to have highly creative forms (e.g. Jesus's disciples are accused but not Jesus himself).

Vinnie

Rhea

Confused. Doesn't the bold part indicate that you agree the bible can't be relied upon?


Minor point though, I'm presently disproving the notion that debating on the internet is for naught. Interesting new understanding.

Vinnie

The Bible is a non-existant entity to me. A bunch of people threw a bunch of texts together and called them God's word. Yes, I thin kthe Bible is unreliable in the way most Bible followers use it. In hsitorical discussions such as this I try to avoid generalizations about the "babble" and instead opt for treating each work in its proper, individual historical context as any good historian not blinded by canonical predjudice or bias for or against such works should. To use "the Bible" is to accept a canononcal dimension of the collection and simply confuse terms in my book. Historian = no canonical dimension. Rather, any "anthology-dimension" would need come from the broader corpus of all early Christian writings. But i don't see how such a thing would be useful for critical discussion.

Vinnie

sharon45

Many christians find the obvious mistakes inside the NT, so they turn toward more overlooked 'sources' to try to piece together an 'understanding' of the christian belief, but more on their own acceptable personal terms. That is their own choice to do so, but mostly why the NT is so blatantly wrong so many times, is that there were far too many different writers involved in the project, and all of these original impressions had to be scaled down to be later compiled into the current NT as it is, warts and all. But even with just going by just one book to try to define a version of a christian belief, accepted in the NT or not, that is also easily enough shown to be faulty on its own merit, even without the other works needed to conflict opinions and statements.