leonarde

1) As I mentioned on another thread, if one takes
this absolutist position: ie what Luke wrote (or even MUCH that LUKE wrote) "isn't history at all" we end up with absurdities:

1)By the same standards Thucydides didn't write history at all (he made MANY MANY mistakes as ALL modern historians agree).

2) Heroditus, the "father of history", didn't write history at all. As I have read in translation a bit of Heroditus, I know that in the
notes and comments of the English translations there are admissions that much of his geography,
ethnography, and cultural material is considered
to be based on rumour. Heroditus himself at times
tried to distinguish between the two (the things
he himself had seen or heard directly on the one
hand, and those that he received 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. hand) but he didn't ALWAYS. He "filled in"
a lot of stuff.

3)RD elsewhere made some sneering references to Vanderzyden's designation of Luke as a "meticulous" chronicler. These terms are always
relative: how many ancient historians are BETTER
than Luke? I bet a FEW, but not many. The consensus among those whose business it is, ie professional historians of the time period and
paleographers, seems to be that he, Luke, was a
VERY good historian of his time.

4)The subject of (modern) newspaper accounts was
brought up. I've been reading newspapers since at
least 1963 (earlier if you count the sports section). In that time I've read literally thousands of errors, large and small. One that
sticks out was a report about 5000 people killed
INITIALLY at the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident
back in the mid 1980s. Many newspapers have a section called "corrections" wherein the goofs of
prior days are, well, "corrected".(And this doesn't even count the sleazier "tabloids").

5)A man's death reported erroneously?? Heavens to
Betsy! We KNOW none of OUR newspapers would ever
get that wrong! Except that they do.....from at
least time to time.

6)Neither Luke, nor Heroditus went to the School
of Journalism at Columbia University. We'll just
have to sift throught their material and figure
out what was valuable anyway.

Cheers!

Vibr8gKiwi

You've refuted nothing, you've merely suggested a possible (though unlikely) explanation. The contradiction still exists as we have no way of knowing if your silly compound event is what actually happened. The only thing we do know for sure is the events as stated conflict on their face and require explanation.

Someone else should probably say this as V ignores me and for some reason can't figure this trivial matter out for himself.

[edited to add... ]

Actually we know something else--even if V's silly compound event is correct, that would mean BOTH "inspired" gospel writers got it wrong. Perhaps V should be the official mouthpiece for his god since only he seems to know what is really meant in the confused mess known as the bible.

[ October 18, 2002: Message edited by: Vibr8gKiwi ]</p>

Vibr8gKiwi

Historians can make mistakes, they are just humans writing history. One would expect prophets and other "inspired" mouthpieces for God to be held to a higher standard (that is unless we just accept the bible is another work of ordinary men just like it appears to be).

[ October 18, 2002: Message edited by: Vibr8gKiwi ]</p>

Novowels

Ah. You seem to have figured out the Bible at last. Kudos!

leonarde

Posted by Novowels: Probably not the way you think: I take it that
Thucydides, Heroditus, Josephus, Luke, Tacitus,
Eusebius, and many many others were writing
history: the history of the ancient world in a form which was accepted by those then living. That
this must be, in a sense, "translated" culturally
and historically for modern readers is the case
whether the particular ancient writer was writing
largely about secular things (a la Heroditus) or
religious things (a la Luke).

The opposing view seems to be implicitly that "ancient historian" is a contradiction in terms.

That is not, naturally, what those involved in
the day-to-day study of ancient history hold.

Cheers!

Ion

I think it is an error to hold today's history standards to the level of antique standards.

When today's historians establish a fact from accounts by the likes of "...Thucydides, Heroditus, Josephus, Luke, Tacitus, Eusebius,..." they look at internal consistency in the text, possible bias by the writer and they look at external consistency with independent texts and with the scientific fields of medicine, biology, chemistry, archaeology and physics.

Since mid-20th century, history is a science with carbon dating for example that "...Thucydides, Heroditus, Josephus, Luke, Tacitus, Eusebius..." didn't possess.
I grew up entirely in an educational environment that holds history to scientific standards, no matter the faith of "...1 billion believers..." that are left behind time, to ancient standards.

History today is a science advancing with careful steps of scientific examinations, while tabloids that you mention are reckless gossips.
Like science, history makes mistakes today in evaluating facts, but like science, history retraces its steps to correct mistakes.
History of the ancient Egypt is an example.

For the purpose of this thread, and Judas falling headlong, head short, head up, head down, or whatever, the cause of Judas contradictory death would be hanging in any scenario advocated by Vanderzyden so far, and falling would be a consequence, not a cause.
Because falling is reported in the Bible as a cause, then there is a contradiction between the cause of hanging and the cause of falling.

Many contradictions of this nature in the Bible -some small like this and some big regarding Jesus, Exodus, Genesis-, disqualify the book as being divine, or even much historical by today's standards in science.

[ October 18, 2002: Message edited by: Ion ]</p>

leonarde

Vibr8gKiwi: Once again we see here a recurring phenomenon at
this message board: an implicit (but here quite
explicit)acceptance of the either/or, black or white, human or divine, frankly dualistic world-
view of the fundamentalists themselves. According
to Vibr8gKiwi our only choices are:

1)"accept the bible is another work of ordinary
men" (and nothing more).

2)some (here unspecified) "higher standard" which
Vibr8gKiwi assures us we "would expect".

Put together with some other posts by certain non-
theists here, that "higher standard" not only includes 'contradiction-free' narratives but ones
which classify animals, not by the (mis)understandings of the time of a given Biblical book's writing, but by the nomenclature and classification system of today (one wonders
what will happen then if, say, 1000 years from now
aspects of the classification system change).

My understanding of Scripture is: the very
human, very fallible writers of the various books
reflect, however imperfectly, this or that aspect
of the Divine Presence. This culminated in that
Presence taking on flesh itself: the Incarnation.

Getting back to Vibr8gKiwi's take: . This view,
stated here as an article of faith, is again the
view of the fundamentalists; they merely announce
that all such inconsistencies are illusory.

Cheers!

leonarde

Posted by Ion: This would be
news to the historians themselves; they
make no such claims.
From the overall contents of your post it is clear
that you don't mean by "science" a "social science". Have carbon dating and other technological advances changed this or that interpretation about the past? Yes, but that hardly means that history is a (hard) science. Nor
do most historians spend much time in their investigations on the use of such technology.

Newspapers: the New York Times, which is widely
acknowledged as the "newspaper of record" in the
US, has a recurring section called "corrections":
sometimes their mistakes are minor ones, sometimes
quite major ones (eg an obituary with an accompanying photo, not of the deceased but of some other person). IOW the problem of daily newspaper mistakes is not that of tabloids only.

Cheers!

Autonemesis

Leonarde, if the Bible is divinely inspired, we ought to be able to determine somehow what distinguishes it from other texts that are not divinely inspired. Do you agree with that statement?

Ion

To this post and the previous post by Leonarde (the one with 'one wonders what would happen 1,000 years from now when the system of classification changes' in it):
today, history is a hard science and historians make such a claim concerning historically established facts.

An example is the article 'Exodus: Scholars Dispute the Story' published in archaeological journals, and reprised under a softer title in the Los Angeles Times Friday, April 13, 2001.
I read from it:
"..."Scholars have known these things for a long time, but we've broken the news very gently.", said William Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona and one of the America's preeminent archaologists." after studies with carbon dating and other scientifical tools have been done on "...indications of destruction around that time at sites in Hazor, Jericho...".
Professor Dever grew up indoctrinated with religion, and his profession made him revise his beliefs.

Professionally, history is a hard science since about mid-20th century.
In this form, it reaches more and more the masses of people, changing old mentalities in different generations of people.