blt to go

The more I analyze this statement, the more fascinated I am by it.

If the author of 1 Samuel does NOT assert his/her account of Saul's death is true, does that mean it is false?
If the author of 2 Samuel does NOT assert his/her account of Saul's death is true, does that mean it is false?

I would THINK you would want to say that the failure of the author to assert that what they are stating is the truth, implies that they are writing the truth.

Otherwise, all of the authorship of the Bible, that does NOT state that the author thinks they are telling the truth, means, by default, they feel they are telling a lie?

Do either authors assert they are telling a lie? (Which is a curious argument for inerrancy, or even neutrality?)

Do you really want to go down this route, i.e. that it takes an assertion of truth, before it can be assumed to be true?

Edit to add: ARRRGGG. (forgot) The fact that the authors of the other three books ALSO do not assert the are telling the truth would allow you to assume they are telling a lie? (c) Clutch

Cross Examiner

Mark the distinction between a report (or reports) of the existence of two differing accounts from a report (or reports) confirming the verity of both differing accounts.

Regards,
BGic

Clutch

It was your point, wuddnit? I just reminded you that you'd made it!

blt to go

Spin, wiploc, Vinnie, Vorkosigan, you and I have made the same point so many times, I am forgetting who to credit for what!!

I thought it was you that brought up special pleading. But If I am wrong, so be it.

And On that point, BGic, I hope you will not avoid the rest of my previous post and address the "may or may not" prove cohesive nature.

Clutch

Wow.

At the end of the rope, and choked unconscious.

If you treat the bible as merely asserting the existence of a report that P wherever it says 'P', then you buy both consistency and truth. Bible says both P and not-P? Not to worry; all it's doing is reporting the existence of the two claims; there's nothing contradictory in the claim that contradictory claims exist, after all!

But obviously, this comes at the cost of: (i) utterly triviality, since nothing could be less significant than the mere claim that it has been said that P; and (ii) a hilariously unbelievable special pleading in any case, since there is exactly no precedent for regarding a text's contents as actually being meta-assertions that each sentence exists. Is there any reason whatever to suppose that when some text reads 'P', the content of that sentence is actually a report of the existence of the sentence 'P'?

How is this supposed to be more intellectually respectable than just embracing Tertullian's exuberant rejection of rationality?

Toto

<mod hat on>

Ahem.

Everyone here seems to be having a good time, so I don't want to put a halt to it - but I ask that you keep your comments focused on the arguments, not other posters.

Carry on.

Vorkosigan

Whether they reflect reality is irrelevent to whether they contradict each other. The idea of contradiction is a logical concept that lies in their relationship TO EACH OTHER, not in their relationship to reality. It is entirely possible for two stories to be both contradictory and false. "Contradictory" means "they cannot both be true. At least one account must be false." Nowhere in that concept is it implied that both accounts cannot be false.

Thus, the two accounts of Saul's death, whether or not they are false, are in fact contradictory.

Vorkosigan

GakuseiDon

In the NT, Peter denies being a follower of Jesus. The Bible doesn't even say he is lying. Would you say that this amounts to being a contradiction? I don't think so, because we can understand what's going on from the context.

Similarly, with Saul's death. A reasonable (though not conclusive) case can be mounted that the Amalekite was lying. He is caught with some of Saul's goods, and tries to pass them off by saying that they were given to him by Saul. David believes the story at first, but then says, "Hey! How could you have killed God's anointed?" Arguably, he is saying that the Amalekite was lying. (If he didn't suddenly think that the Amalekite was lying, it seems strange that it takes so long for him to suddenly decide to kill the Amalekite for Saul's death).

I'm not an inerrantist, so it doesn't matter to me one way or the other. This falls into the grey area of perhaps it is a contradiction, but a reasonable, though unprovable, harmonization exists.

Cross Examiner

More concretely, the Bible proposes that Saul was killed by his own hand (cf. 1 Sam. 31.4-6) and that an Amalekite claimed to have killed him (cf. 2 Sam. 1.1-10). Can it be true that Saul killed himself and that an Amalekite claimed to have killed Saul? Absolutely. Are these assertions mutually exclusive? Not at all. Is there a contradiction here? Nope. For some reason, Vorkosigan failed to reference verses 1-7 in the first chapter of second Samuel; the same verses that demonstrate the latter reference as a truth-claim about Saul's death made by an Amalekite, and not the author of second Samuel himself. Even though Vorkosigan is apparently something of a biblical scholar, we ought not presume he was being disingenuous here by omitting important, immediate context.

Regards,
BGic

blt to go

No, I would not say that this is a contradiction. However, I think this is a bit of a comparison of apples and oranges.

If Matthew said Peter denied Jesus, and Mark said Peter denied John the Baptist (but a reasonable conclusion would be that Mark meant Jesus), that would be a more similar comparison.

It is not the reporting of a lie, is is the reporting of two differing tales, and not indicating which, if either were treated as a lie.

Actually, David killed Joe the Amalekite because David believed him, not because he thought Joe was lying. 2 Sam 1:15-16

I would agree that a possible interpretation was that Joe was lying, but unfortunately, that is not stated anywhere. What is stated was that Joe raised his hand against the Lord's annointed.

No, in studying David, it is not surprising that he waited a bit and then killed him. David is portrayed as a VERY emotional man, torn by the whim of the moment. Review his history with Absalom.

As a side note, I would (of course) point out the question, "After Peter denied Christ the third time, how many times did the rooster crow?"
(Matthew 26:34, Mark 14:72)