Diogenes the Cynic

I disagree. Faith is immaterial to one's ability to follow a chain of logic.
Ehrman doesn't say that. What he says is that even if any of it was inspired, we no longer have any ability to know what the official, "inspired" text was. Since an omnimax God would certain have the ability to preserve an inspired text if he wanted to, then God must either not have thought the original texts were very important or they never existed in the first place. It makes no logical sense for God to inspire a text and then let it become corrupted almost immediately. If you can't tell which copy is accurate, then you can't tell which (if any) remaining copy is "inspired."

Ray Moscow

It makes no sense to argue or believe in an "inspired" book that no one has or can ever have.

This is more obvious when one looks at the more extreme "inspired" positions, like "inerrancy".

Julian

I think there might be a problem on older IE versions. Try IE 7 or Firefox. I guess I should fix it but it would be far down on my priority list. I noticed a few issues with the text, though, nothing major but even so.

Julian

Roger Pearse

But what chain of logic is involved? All I can see in this kind of argument are assertions about an entity to which the person in question does not even pretend to have access. That's daft, surely?
Yes, I know. But if we remove all the bible-specific stuff and place the logic in our own words, is there any practical difference between this and the form in which I phrased it? I don't see that there is.

Roger Pearse

True, but doesn't this beg the question of whether this inspiration -- whatever it is -- is at the mercy of typos? How do we know?

I know that if I wrote a message to someone, it would survive every single word being changed (e.g. if it was put into another language). Would that prove that I had not inspired it?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Craigart14

[QUOTE=Magdlyn;4889108]My experience as a college professor in the Bible belt supports Ehrman's observation. I teach portions of the Bible in world lit classes, and my students usually know nothing about it except a sort of folkloric oral version they hear at church. One of the reasons for that is that fundamentalist preachers often "get the call" rather than an education. Even they frequently know very little about the Bible. As a teacher of literature, I think perhaps that very few people actually read and understand literature well enough to have much of a grasp of such a complex collection of works. They take the same approach to the text that they take to the world, i.e., adding completely insupportable ideas so they don't have to relinquish any beliefs. "Jesus had three different sets of last words," I say. "Maybe he said 'It is accomplished' after he said 'Into thy hands I commend my spirit' and 'My God, why have you forsaken me,'" they say. "Judas died twice in two different ways," I point out. "Well," they say, "maybe he hanged himself first, and then he fell down and his guts spilled out." "The ancient Hebrews thought the sky was a solid dome," I say, "and that the stars were fixed to the inside of it and the sun and moon entered through six different doors at the base." "How do you know it wasn't like that back then?" they ask. If it's any consolation, they read other texts the same way, speculating about information that is in no way suggested by the text. And their pastors have no training in how to read literature, but instead "just know" what the Bible means without having to show any logical connection between their interpretation and what the Bible actually says. It is, as my brother used to say, "aargghhsome."

As for the evangelical vs. fundamentalist debate, it seems to me that memberships in the two groups often overlap. Fundamentalism traditionally requires belief in the "fundamentals": Creation, the deluge, virgin birth, resurrection, atoning death of Jesus, and Biblical inerrancy. Most of the fundamentalists I know are also evangelical and most, though they claim to believe the Bible is perfect, are not YECs.

Craig

Diogenes the Cynic

They're not assertions, it's a logical conclusion based on predicates provided by believers. IF God is omnimax AND wants to preserve his written word BUT the word is now corrupted and unavailable to us THEN one of the predicates must be wrong, and I repeat that the predicates are asserted by believers, not by critics.
There is. Ehrman does not say categorically that an original, inspired autograph is not theoretically possible. He says that the fact that it's no longer available to us necessarily mitigates against either God's omnipotence (which is functionally the same as saying he doesn't exist) or that he ever thought it was important in the first place. In either case, the Bible provides no reliable access to God. This realization is a kick at the very foundations of faith for a fundamentalist. A God who provides no access to what he thinks or wants might as well not exist.

Ray Moscow

It just means that the hypothetically "inspired" work is forever out of our reach. As I said, this is more obvious in the extreme forms of the doctrine, like inerrancy.

For those who hold to a looser form of "inspiration" than inerrantists, this is less of a problem, since one can suppose (though not know, unfortunately) that the basic message is still there even though the words have changed somewhat.

Ray

Craigart14

I've got to disagree, Roger. Ehrman's 30,000 variants (actually identified by John Mill in 1708) are only in the NT; there are more mistakes than there are words. Some of the changes are deliberate. If the original writers were inspired, what about all the revisers? And what does "inspired" mean? Visions? Dreams? (In the case of John of Patmos, nightmares.) Inspired or not, it's so unclear that early Christians fought with each other for nearly 400 years over whether Jesus was divine or human, begotten or adopted. As Ehrman says, how can we know what it means when we don't even know what it originally said?

Craig

Roger Pearse

I'm not sure that either this comment or Ray's addresses mine, tho.

All the best,

Roger Pearse