steve_bnk

'Faith remains a central factor, and even secularists have empirically unverifiable faith that their discoveries are the final arbiter...'

I ooubt you would fiund any professioinal secular archeologist who would claim to be such an authority.

We do find Christian 'scholars' who take liberal literary license to make claims based on archeological finds.

I can accept and even respect your faith. But you can not reinfirce your faith by claiming a lack of evidence leading to a logical conclusion is also a faith with no foundation.

The problem is by your reasononing you must also allow the possibility other traditions may be valid.

The irony in your approach is that it is all three Abrahamic traditions who claim to be the truth.

steve_bnk

I would think if one has faith, then there should be no propblem saying simply I know there is no evidence, but I believe.

No emotional crutches, no debassing science which finds no evidence.

When I rea the geneology in Genesis generational timnespans were npt exactly the same, but there were paterns. To me it was clear the writer had an ide oft he names of people and was inventing the durations like lifespan, marriages, and births.

Why on Earth would anyone be surprised at differnces? If there is no evidence for the event, how can any one date be better than another?

If any ethic group were in captivity or residence in Egypt for 400 years, I'd expect there to be a record somewhere.

Some Egyptin aristocrats would have married or had some experince with Jews. Visitors/traders to Egypt would have known of Jews.

There would have been some mention of reiigious friction in Egyptian history over a period of centuries.

Duvduv

Because I have gone through many of the verses in the Samaritan Torah that differ from the Masoretic Torah and found that many of the Samaritan differences are found in those targums.

stephan huller

whatever

Chili

I never read Job, but if that Joseph from Matthew was from Egypt and only pretended to be from Nazareth, clearly: "out of Egypt I have called my son" but "he shall be called a Nazorean" it sounds to me that there was Billy Graham style revival in Nazareth that got the best of him there.

Chili

The 3 lines that make up the number 4 are the 'lesser gods' known as 'power, wealth and beauty.' Number 5 is the inversion of faith, and 3 is half-way-full-circle in both-minds and so kind of like a lost-loser in search of destiny but will enjoy a strawberry along the way the way home.

steve_bnk

I was speaking about the OT. What got passed down as the Jewish OT was probably a fraction of what existed BCE . My Oxford bible commentray says Job was probably part of a larger lost set of wisdom/teaching materials.

As I understand it the JC of the NT would have been recognizable as a Jewish chrasmatic. In general form he would not have been unique.

Chili

They were not materialists, obviously, and knew that already then that the sun was the centre from a human point of view.

The reason why the world is 'said to be flat' is because it was created in the singular and the planet earth that already was in Gen 1, and the heavens were created in the plural and therefore was not a blank slate at birth.

Doug Shaver

Not a problem. Find me someone who is omnipotent, omniscient, and unconstrained by time or space, and I'll accept their word for whatever they say.

Doug Shaver

You can stick the "faith" label on that reasoned expectation if you wish, but unless you're doing apologetics, I don't see the point.