ax

note for "nogods4me".
The genealogy in matt and mark are Joseph and mary, if jesus came only from joseph then he could not be king( the curse of jekoniah),so to come from david a 2nd time it would be through nathan.The greek verse in mark 3:23 translates as follows: "jesus (supposed son of joseph) the son of heli etc...".Mary's father was heli.So you see-jesus descends from david through both parents.Historical (jewish) documents prove that in the ot it says that the messiah would come through the line of david.
You guys are weak!!
Oh, and God can do what he likes(like the bear thing or hardening Pharoah's heart.God is niether
one thing, or another, he can be lots of things at once(vengfull,happy,sad,angry).

[ May 14, 2002: Message edited by: ax ]</p>

Mageth

A problem with that, ax, is that Hebrew society was patriarchal, and AFAIK no birthright/lineage was received from the maternal line; a child's lineage was considered only from the paternal line.

ax

Both male and female records were remembered in jewish society.The male was held as more important although.Mary is the only female listed in her line, so it is still consistant with the way things were done. Jesus told (john) his disciples nothing harmful, sure he told them he would do what in fact he didn't, but it was not a malicious act.Who says that the bears mauling the children is a fault in the bible? Maybe the children knew that it was dangerous to provoke a prophet,(although I am against just "assuming things" to understand the bible),the fact is that it happened.

Skeptical

I didn't realize we were playing the "can you answer this objection" game. It appears that we are since your "you guys are weak!!" statement appears to be directed in general at the participants in this discussion. Ok, I'll play.

Please explain the discrepancy in the year of Jesus' birth as reported by Luke (6 CE) and Matthew (before 4 BCE). Please do not use any of the strained apologists arguments that are discredited by Richard Carrier here: <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/quirinius.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/quirinius.html</a> (if you think one of these arguments is actually correct, please explain why Mr. Carrier is wrong in his analysis and please be specific)

I'm very interested to hear your explanation and look forward to a fresh explanation of this apparent problem.

Also, you state "God can do what he likes". Undoubtedly, God could do pretty much whatever he chose given his supposed power. However, if God chose to, say, torture small children by plucking out there eyes or skinning them alive, would you consider this to be a moral action, just because God did it? (these sorts of activities occured during the witch hunts in the 16th century, apparently with God's approval as the acts were done in the name of Christianity)

Do you believe that any act committed by God is automatically "good"? Do you believe that a God who would commend genocide, or any of the other atrocities in the OT, is worthy of worship? If you had a vision in which God talked to you and told you to slaughter your family, would you do it? Is there any action that you would not do or agree with if you think God approves of it?

cloudyphiz

another problem there ax is that mark contains no geneology. and, the bible gateway tells me that mark 3:23 is:

also suspiciously absent from mark are some of these things:
a virgin birth
wisemen, shepherds at birth
resurrected jesus (the ending, 16:9-20 being a late addition)
dead saints a-marchin' into town
etc.

now, keep in mind mark was the oldest gospel and it was used as a source by the authors of the other two synoptics. hm. kind of makes you think...
(well, i doubt it).

-gary

Skeptical

Really? Are you sure this incident is "historic" and not "poetic"? What makes you sure? I'll repeat my question I asked earlier that you didn't respond to:

"...when one starts to apply critical analysis to the OT and NT, it's quite a chore to sort out what is "poetic" and what is "historical" using any other benchmark than what is historically/scientifically verifiable. If you've got some other objective criteria for performing this task, I'd be interested in hearing it."

I'm still interested in hearing your criteria for sorting out what is "poetic" from what is "historic".

Sojourner553

Gee I remember specifically debating you on the topic -- and when I thought I made some good points you went silent.

Maybe by "satisfactory" you meant that it didn't give you the "right" answer (ie the one you "wanted to hear"!)

Why do you assume "belief" makes one act in an obvious moral way? History has shown it was primarily CONSERVATIVE RELIGIOUS groups who fought and opposed toleration, democracy, slave abolition, women rights, and laws outlawing child abuse.

There was a post about why should a person care about brutalizing and killing a child. I gave some quotes how some RELIGIOUS individuals could justify killing because they felt they were following a "higher" calling. Here were my examples (quotes were illustrative of their mindset-- not actual):

"Why should the child be killed?"

* "These measures were needed to save the child from Satan and protect its soul for heaven." -- Andrea Yates

* "The child would have spread a false religion and needed to be tortured to demonstrate its beliefs were wrong." -- Tomás de Torquemada

* "The child was an infidel and if allowed to grow up would have hurt the holy cause" -- Bin Laden

* "The child was probably GAY anyway" -- Reverend Jerry Falwell

* "This was all appearance: The child was obviously an 'impressionable' young woman and therefore under the influence of a 'disembodied spirit', making such unpleasant measures necessary to remove her demons" --
Heinrich Kramer; James Sprenger (authors of THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM)

* "Suffering demonstrates the mercy of Jesus" --
Flaggelents from the Dark Ages.

No actually -- if all the evidence was perfectly equal (ie the glass was exactly half empty and half full) I would choose religion. I gave you a list once of the problems I LOGICALLY see with religion. Again, the post went silent/dead after that (as if the person on the other end hung up the phone.)

Sojourner

[ May 14, 2002: Message edited by: Sojourner553 ]</p>

lpetrich

So Haran has read the parts of the Koran that promise eternal hellfire to those who worship Jesus Christ as a god? I'm surprised that he has not converted to Islam just in case that is true. Consider this set of scenarios. If Islam is true and he accepts it, he will get to live like a sultan in the next world, he will experience no excessive heat or cold, he will live in a lushly gardened and watered palace, he will eat luscious fruits and drink non-intoxicating wine, and he will have some very nice new wives created just for him. If Islam is false and he accepts it, he will have lost nothing. If Islam is false and he rejects it, he will have lost nothing in that case also. But if Islam is true and he rejects it, he will suffer everlasting torment; he will be chained in place, he will be forced to wear clothes that will produce superhot fire, he will be beaten with iron rods, he will have boiling water poured down his throat, and new skin will be created for him as old skin burns off.

And I think that Occam's Razor does favor atheism -- simply assume as little as possible. And Haran himself is more than willing to be an atheist with respect to every religion but his, except, perhaps if he considers their deities to be exist but not to be worth worshipping.

That's a horse-excrement attitude that I refuse to subscribe to. That's like saying that one has no right to reject Islam unless one first reads the Koran in the original Arabic, no right to reject Hinduism unless one first reads the Vedas in the original Sanskrit, no right to reject Hellenic paganism unless one first reads the works of Homer and Hesiod in the original Greek, no right to reject Norse paganism unless one first reads the Eddas in the original Old Norse, etc.

More likely ecause they discover that the Bible is not as great as it is presented as being. I personally have found that story of Jesus Christ and the fig tree extremely appalling -- it represents extreme immaturity.

(Snipped: a lot of attempts to defend Elisha's reported siccing of some bears on some little boys who had been teasing him about his baldness)

My favorite speculation was that story was invented in response to little boys teasing bald men.

Mark does not feature a genealogy, but Luke does (I think that ax had misremembered), and Matthew and Luke agree on tracing Joseph's genealogy without reference to Mary.

Where's the evidence, O ax? Provide EVIDENCE, not claims. And I mean DIRECT evidence, not "explanations" for Biblical embarrassments.

The writers of the Bible trace ancestry exclusively through the male line -- from beginning to end. So leaving out Mary was a natural thing for them to do in the Matthew and Luke genealogies, which are both genealogies of Joseph.

Or was claimed to be in the Bible. I still think that this represents something morally wrong in the Bible. And claiming that it had simply happened is beside the point. If the Bible is supposed to be some sort of great moral lesson, then it is legitimate to evaluate it as if it was.

Steven Carr

Haran throws obfusaction in peoples faces.
There are two words , not one, (n matter how many times Haran tries to say there was a word translated little children). One of the words is small. I defy Haran to find an example in the Bible where these *two* words are translated 'gang'.

However, Haran is the expert on translation. Perhaps he could give us a Hebrew translation of 'qatan na'ar' from 2 Kings 2:23.

Paying special attention to 'qatan'

Haran

Obfuscation, Steven? Is that anything like what your website does? I don't seem to recall you knowing the first thing about translating from P52, yet you attempted to argue anyway.

I was not attempting to obfuscate anything. I merely mispoke. There are two words, and the translation would not be of 'qatan na'ar', as you have it, but 'u-ne'arim qe'tanim' (literally translated 'and boys young/small') as the actual text of the OT has it (you didn't include the conjunction and correct forms of the words - but then you knew that, right?).

I have not seen a translation that says, specifically, gang, but many scholars do give this impression. As a matter of fact, many translations are almost there as NoGods4Me pointed out earlier.

ASV - 'young lads'
NIV - 'some youths'
NLT - 'group of boys'
NAU - 'young lads'
etc.

As a matter of fact, here is a entry under na'ar in the TWOT:

"South Arabic Tigri language of Ethiopia yields a [lexicographically similar] verb: 'instigate rebellion', noun: 'mischief, revolt', which sheds helpful light on the incident of Elisha's tormentors who were attacked by bears (2Kings 2:23-24). Assuming it likely that this large band of boys (42 were gashed by the bears, while still others must have escaped!) were teenage rowdies, the ASV translative, 'young lads,' would be more appropriate than either KJV 'little children' or RSV 'small boys'."

Man! You guys complain about Christians reading the underlying text to literally! Give me a break...

Continue to doubt my abilities if you like, but I usually have good scholarly information to back up my opinions.

Haran