Summations Only

What a snarky thing to say. I've never denied it. It's one of the Bible's special characteristics that it was written by many men over fifteen hundred years. Imagine that, PaulK finds fault in what I've written. Will wonders never cease. Oh I'm sure it won't be unambiguous by your standards since you specialize in finding conflicts and contradictions and ambiguities galore in the scripture. Anticipating that sort of reception, I'm not terribly motivated to do the chapter-and-verse thing for you, but we'll see tomorrow if I'm up to anything like that.Meanwhile, have you heard of The Scarlet Thread of Redemption? There's a little book on it available online and many references to it by others. That's what I'd be looking at to see if the references might be unambiguous enough. They run throughout the scripture though, and that's pretty impressive to me. Not to you I'm sure.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The Bible is a complete work in the sense that all its books contribute to the same ultimate end, as prescribed by God, but the fact that individuals separated in time often by hundreds of years and by different historical circumstances wrote the various books ought to demonstrate that it's no fiction.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

That one was, beause it was possessed by Satan, and he can talk.But yes I believe a lot of things *modern man* can't believe, ever since I became a believer in God. The Bible is full of supernatural occurrences that you all dismiss out of hand just because they're supernatural.But becoming a Christian made me a believer in them after forty five years as a nonbeliever. Well, really, for me the road to belief in the Biblical God was through encounters with supernatural phenomena that my New Age friends took for granted. They didn't believe in God but they had seen angels and demons and had all kinds of strange supernatural experiences. I was having a few of those myself so I found theirs interesting and believable. But mine got scary and I was very glad to find there was a solution to that scariness in Christ.I got to pondering this and related things and wrote a blog post on it last night that some here might find interesting.Or not: Rum Thing: Is Christianity a Fairy Tale Come True?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And there you are again speaking your false reading of the Bible from the deepest darkest jungle of self-inspired Bible mutilation. You aren't even in the same part of the jungle as other Bible mutilators. That's the thing, when you go off on your own you leave not only consensus and tradition behind you even leave other weird loners behind. A place from which you'll never see that the Bible is a collection of reports that all work together to a common end, so that we find out in the Book of Revelation that the serpent in the Garden WAS Satan. God doesn't tell us everything at once, He reveals the truth in stages that are more digestible for human minds. Of course you refuse to submit your mind to His methods and there you are deep in the jungle. I hope there's enough to eat out there.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Uh, you want me to summon him and introduce him to you?

What?You go from accusing me of denying that the Bible is a God-inspired whole, but now "admitting" it, to what exactly? But the evidence is incredibly strong and worthy of trust. Yes of course the authors didn't all have a fine grasp of what they were writing, they wrote what God inspired them to write, and the New Testament, Peter I think, even says that the prophets didn't fully understand the wonders that were being revealed through them. All that is evidence for God's inspiration of the scriptures after all, which is the subject of this thread. The Bible was written to be just clear enough for believers but obscure enough to throw off people who have an inclination to scoff. Pascal said that. The scarlet thread is very clear to some of us, but if you spend all your time demanding perfect clarity you're just going to find yourself deeper and deeper in obscurity. Try believing it instead of criticizing it.

That WOULD be hubris, and I'm so glad it can't happen. Just saying it gave me the creeps. Of course if I tried it he might send me a low-ranking demonic functionary in his place. That would be creepy enough. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The truth can't drive anyone away from Christianity. From false "Christianity" yes. Not that I think I've done a stellar job of it, but I know I've only presented truth here.

But that's ridiculous. Of course it had multiple human authors, all moved by the Spirit of God.As for the rest, Oh well.

I don't know how you are finding this difficult. God DID author it, by inspiring the human writers to write according to His inspiration. As I said, I have serious doubts that you would be persuaded by the excellent evidence there is. But I haven't yet read the Scarlet Thread of Redemption. We'll see how that goes. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Unfortunately I agree with jar, an extremely rare event if not exactly a first since I also agree with him about guns. He's never right about what the scriptures actually say but I think he's right about your very strange idea about how Jesus could have decided to fulfill the scriptures himself with John's help. That does make Jesus into a con man.And it also raises a lot of questions.How could there have been such consistent prophecies down the centuries for Jesus to decide to fulfill if God hadn't inspired them?Actually I suppose you must simply deny the majority of those the Church has treated as messianic down the centuries.For instance, how did He manage to get himself born in Bethlehem or are you discounting that prophecy? And did He invent the idea of the virgin birth that Matthew and Luke emphasize? Or are you just going with the idea that Matthew and Luke were liars or idiots?And why would God support Jesus in such a manipulative effort anyway, by raising Him from the dead? Especially if, as you seem to be suggesting, the correct understanding of the messianic prophecies was the Pharisees' expectation of a military success against Rome, which would of course make Jesus' ideas wrong?He could not have been raised from the dead if He had not been sinless and if He was ONLY human, with two human parents, which you seem to be implying -- that is, that God was not His begetter -- then He would have inherited original sin and not be sinless. I'm sure there are plenty of other problems that your scenario creates too but these are what come to mind at the moment.How did the Pharisees manage to get any coherent idea at all out of the messianic prophecies if they were all merely inspired in the sense you insist on, as what, some sort of spiritual intuitions or something?There was a general expectation of the soon coming of the Messiah in Jesus' day, which is why so many false messiahs kept cropping up, but the expectation certainly suggests that the Old Testament was read as having given such a prophetic picture.What about Simeon and Anna who welcomed Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophecies?And please remind me, why do you insist that there be no supernatural inspiration to the prophecies and their fulfillment? Something about contradicting your idea of the true message of Jesus? How so?======ABE: Of course you are saying the prophecies were not really prophecies but what on earth can it mean to say such ideas were "inspired" even in the sense you use the word since they do seem to be prophetic? Did Jesus invent the whole idea that they are prophetic then? And taught that to his disciples so that's why they wrote as they did? I'm sorry, I'm just having too much of a problem with this whole idea to answer it properly.I guess you must be hinging a lot on His praying about these things, which I suppose you figure got God on His side? But if prayer is possible; that is, if you believe God does hear and answer prayer, what problem can there possibly be with the idea that God inspired the prophecies in the first place? Both are supernatural.So I guess you're saying Jesus' interpretation of these things pleased the Father and that's why He favored Him and raised Him from the dead? But with your idea of the Father as a sadistic genocidal maniac why would you expect Him to favor Jesus' nonmilitaristic interpretations?And what in any of this scenario fits Jesus to be the Savior of Mankind? Or does that matter at all?GDR, this is all too confusing.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

GDR, this is a lie whether you know it or not. You have consistently made this accusation OF THE SCRIPTURE ITSELF without my having said a word. YOU read the scripture as presenting such a view of God, this is not based on anything I have said, except that I believe the whole scripture is the word of God and do NOT have the same view of it you have.This is all YOUR view, leave me out of it.Take that back.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Jesus would have known without question even if it was through faith, because He knew God the Father intimately. You trivialize faith. The Gethsemane prayer, done in "great agony," should be taken as an indication that what He was facing was far worse than any other self sacrifice we could think of. He was dying for the sins of all of us, giving up His soul, and being forsaken by the Father which would have been an agony in itself for him. IMHO yours does.

"Theocracies today"? You mean Islam? That's the only theocracy I know of. You would compare Islam with the history of Christendom?. That's perfectly idiotic. You don't even know the source of the "secular" morality in the West, do you, all you ridiculous screaming idiots.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm really sorry if that is the case to any great extent. I believe it all myself, as adults do at least among the born again Protestant groups I consider myself part of, so I wanted to weigh in here on that. A lot of us do believe all these supernatural things, as well as the traditional claims about authorship of all the gospels and other NT books.I understand it's hard for modern man to accept such things, they are practically the definition of myth to the modern mind. I did a blog post on that and related things recently. You many not be interested but mayge somebody is: Christianity, a Fairy Tale Come True?.I mention among other things how startling it can be to discover that what you thought was a myth is actually reality. I mention a few Christians but I also remember being extremely startled myself long before I was Christian to read in a literary magazine a German scholar's willingness to consider that the old explanation of demons as the cause of mental illness might have something to it. He wasn't a Christian and I don't remember his name but just the way he said it so matter-of-factly, a literary scholar actually thinking demons might be real, is that kind of very startling experience that can completely change a person's perspective. It didn't change mine at that point though I couldn't get it out of my mind.