Butters

Posted by Leonarde,
"How can one determine whether you are "inspired",
Butters, when you make such a declaration of faith?"

I am not "inspired". I have looked at the text, I have listened to the commentary, and I find it all nonsense.

You can not approach a subject with the goal of determining if it is true or not, if you already believe it is true.
How do we know the Bible is true? Because the Bible says it is!

Think of the Judas accounts. If one says death by hanging, and one says death by falling, at least one is wrong, and the reliability of the Bible must be called into question.
If one account is about a hanging and omits it, this is a major ommision and the reliabilty of the Bible must be called into question.
There is no way out, unless you just WANT to believe it, in which case you will ignore all the problems, and believe it anyway.

Butters

Leonarde,
Before I could finish my last reply, you posted this.

"I find quite revealing......about your general attitudes. Luke was---though one suspects he made no money from it----a de facto ancient historian.
I don't think historians, even those who lived
2000 years or so ago, typically "changed [things]to suit themselves". Sometimes they probably tried to curry favor with a patron (if
they had one) but "to suit themselves"???? What
would that mean exactly? 'Let's see, I could have
Jesus rise on a Wednesday.....Nah, Wednesday's my
poker night, can't have that! What about Sunday
morning?!?'"

Luke was a"de facto ancient historian."

The only way you could believe this, is because you WANT to.
Who WAS Luke? When did he live? When did he write this "history?
No one can answer these questions, and yet, he WAS a historian!
What else did he write? What makes him a historian? You can suspect that he didn't make any money from it, but you can also suspect that he did. Since we know nothing about him, anything we say is speculation. Maybe he was trying to impress his girlfriend? Mabye he was trying to gain power through starting a religion. Mabye "he" never existed, and someone we know nothing about wrote his works.

Peel off the layers, and you find no core.

leonarde

When I was asking about determining your inspiration/non-inspiration in uttering I meant BOTH parts: how does one come to believe that "SOMETHING is out there"???? For it might be analogous to how "communities of believers" come to believe that a text is "inspired". Is the "something" TELLING you that it is "out there"? It doesn't seem very scientific; it sounds kind of mystical (I'm not being sarcastic; I'm curious).

Cheers!

leonarde

Posted by Butters: I'm going to do some research on Luke for another
interlocutor on this thread but the generalities:

1)Consensus is that Luke was the "Greek" physician
who was an acquaintance of Paul (mentioned in a
Letter to the Corinthians).

2)He lived in the 2nd half of the 1st Century.

3)He wrote the Acts of the Apostles as a companion
piece to his Gospel. He explains in the first four
verses of Luke's G why he was writing it. In both
works he addresses a Theophilus (who evidently received the works).

4)The works themselves are of enormous historical
value: in the very earliest pages of Acts we see
the church of circa 30 to 36 AD (ie even before Saul/Paul's conversion). You can't get much better than that if you are interested in early Church history.

5)Last I read, dating of Luke's G was circa 85 AD.
[added via edit]

Cheers!

[ October 19, 2002: Message edited by: leonarde ]</p>

Butters

Posted by Leonarde,
One quick reply since this is WAY off topic.
When I say I "believe" the "something" is out there, I mean that in most scientific theories, the universe at one time did not exist, it had a begining, and to have a begining, it must (probably?) had a cause. Since the unfolding of the universe SEEMS elagant and purposefull, I CHOOSE to "believe there is one. But don't misunderstand my use of the word "believe".
I am aware that there are other theories that dispute this idea, and if one is shown to be true, I will abandon my casual belief for the truth. But a personal God, with a human personality, that interferes in daily life, is just plain silly, and has been shown over and over to be false. Maybe something set this whole thing in motion, mabye not, but if it did, it has left us on our own, and anytime someone claims the oppisite, it is always been shown to be wishful thinking. There is nothing wrong with wishful thinking, until it clashes with reality.

Radorth

"the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth- that God governs in the affairs of men."

(Ben Franklin, old ex-deist). How old are you?

Well done Vanderzyden. One would think skeptics would be convinced, with all these redactors and zealous scribes messing around with the text. But then, they would have to be consistent and fair their thinking to take note. That's the nice thing about the NT. You can believe it and argue later with those who think they have found a problem. So we go back to the original and find only evidence of its verity.

OK, I'm taking back a half point. It's now 7-1-2 Christians, although I haven't checked on the geneology thread of late, the supposed "mother of all contradictions."

Rad

[ October 19, 2002: Message edited by: Radorth ]</p>

Butters

Posted by Rad,
Just more proof that some people believe what they want to beleive!

leonarde

A couple of posters expressed interest/incredulity /some other strong reaction
to my assertion that Luke was a "de facto ancient
historian". I'll try to do more research in the
coming days and post info (perhaps in a separate
thread). But for now the general picture I have
from past readings and THEN a citation.

Evidently in the first half of the 20th Century,
Luke's reputation was, among specialists in the field, primarily that of a historian. That
emphasis on his status as a historian was, I take
it, excessive (since NO ONE denies he was SIMUL-
TANEOUSLY writing a work which incorporated theology AND history)and produced a sort of backlash reaction among the specialists in which
his THEOLOGY was emphasized. Naturally, even within these broad contours, there were different
emphases: theologians tended to stress Luke the
theologian, historians, Luke the historian.

A book: "The Acts of the Apostles; The Greek Text
with Introduction and Commentary" by F.F. Bruce
(Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis, University of Manchester) 1990, Apollos, Leicester
England.

In the introduction there is a section "V. Luke as
Historian" (pages 27 to 34). Some excerpts:
To be fair, Bruce does then quote a theologian who
thinks that Meyer has overlooked the theological
element (page 27). Bruce himself, however, seems
to favor Meyer's assessment: (bracketed question marks indicate
Greek script word which could not be reproduced).

Cheers!

Butters

Posted by Rad,
"the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth- that God governs in the affairs of men."

(Ben Franklin, old ex-deist). How old are you?"

First of all, as much as I respect Franklin, I would have to see some of his proof before being convinced of it. Many great minds have believed all sorts of things for one reason or another.

Second, I'll be 500 years old next June.
No reason to doubt me, is there?

Ion

I don't know how you guessed, but you guessed right in two posts now that I am from Eastern Europe, from Romania. It's not in my profile, but you guessed it.

However, that's the only thing you guessed right:
Marxist ideology was despicable among us, rebel youth.

Read on:
You write "In the West, history took a far different trajectory..." than in the East.
However that's not true.

At age 18, I went from Romania to France, where I studied Electrical Engineering, and been in touch with the French history, arts and culture.

Religion is perceived in France, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy -countries I was exposed to at that time-, as the opium of the poor people in third world nations, and in the Western nations as both a money institution in the case of Vatican, and a cultural relic in the case of Western culture.

The key expression here is: 'cultural relic'.

History is perceived and taught in Western Europe as a science.

I learned it like that, in France.

Then I compared it with the Bible: history and religion are different.

In France, a science-minded country, people publicly mock the third world religious behavior of Americans, a supposedly enlightened Western country.
For example from my experience, try to see the differences between a girlfriend there with a liberal education, generally an advanced education since school is free, and a girlfriend here stuck up on cultural taboos;
or just read in newspapers what is liberal there, what is not permissible here in US and why they mock what's here;
like bullying people's lives based on the local ideal of forever making more money, or like "...the right to bear arms...", and many others.

In my profile I wrote that I aspire to live like a hedonist, and in 1990 it was a dilemma for me whether I can achieve that by chosing to come to US -a culturally more backward country than France is, and having a third-world religious mentality still engrained in it-.

[ October 19, 2002: Message edited by: Ion ]</p>