Raf

There are letters known as III and IV Corinthians. They are so obviously forgeries that, to my understanding, no one argues otherwise.

And now I've been through good chunks of "Forgery and Counterforgery," which I had no intention of buying until I saw it offered for a fairly reasonable price on Kindle.

One of the stars of the film, relatively unknown at the time, would go on to play Superman's father. Another, better known than the first then, about as well known now, would go on to play Superman's human arch-enemy. A third, fairly well known but not nearly as well known as the first two, would go on to play an Iron Man villain.

Vincent Antonelli Gil Buckman Lucky Day C.D. Bales Navin Johnson

Different character

Name the Actor Orin Scrivello George Banks Jonas Nightengale

No. One of the original plans was to make it an HBO series, but THAT DID NOT HAPPEN. Should have been more clear about that. And no, not District 7 (or any other district).

My interest in this thread is obviously academic, since I reject the concept of anything being God-breathed. I am able to participate because (a) the rules allow it and (b) I'm concerned with the statements of fact implied by the thread title. That is, there ARE errors and contradictions in the Bible. Does that mean it's not God-breathed? My position is pointless. However, IF the Bible is God-breathed, then God-breathed has to mean something. And it has to mean something consistent with the facts. That's where "plenary verbal inspiration" falls short. As I said earlier, I give fundamentalists credit for attaching a testable definition to "God-breathed," but the problem is that the Bible fails that test. It is not without error (Luke and the census provide us with as documentable an error as you're ever going to encounter). It is not without contradiction (again, the Nativity stories in Luke and Matthew cannot both be true; Acts and Galatians cannot both be correct about where Paul went after his conversion, etc). So whatever "God-breathed" means, it does not mean "verbal plenary inspiration." Fine. So what DOES it mean? I have no answer, but whatever answer YOU come up with must fit the facts. I would offer another qualification. The answer you come up with must not only fit the facts, but should probably do so in a way that would be unique to the scriptures. In other words, to say that "God-breathed" means "useful for teaching, reproving, rebuking and instructing in righteousness" would be insufficient UNLESS you are prepared to argue that a written work cannot be useful for those purposes without being God-breathed. I can think of a lot of written works that are useful for teaching, reproving, rebuking and instructing in righteousness, yet are not God-breathed. My suspicion is that you're not going to come up with a useful meaning of "God-breathed" if that's the criteria for a useful meaning. I could be wrong.

The original. WW is up

Clearly anyone who believes in plenary verbal inspiration is biased. You can tell because the evidence is to the contrary and the people arguing in favor of that position have a vested interest in it.

Herman Munster was supposed to be a DUH hint, but I think it was glossed over

Not a lot of roles for women in this movie, but one of the brothel employees won an Oscar for her performance. Um, performance as an actress.

"What a dangerous precedent. What if there more heroes like him? What if courage and imagination became everyday mortal qualities? What will become of us?" "We would no longer be needed. But, for the moment, there is sufficient cowardice, sloth and mendacity down there on Earth to last forever."

The Creature Frankenstein Herman Munster

Herman Munster

Steve, your posts sound like you disagree with points you're not making because you actually don't agree with them. ;)

Does this character even HAVE a name? And when did Cumberbatch play him?

Sherlock Holmes?

So he provides a link to a conservative Christian site. Unbelievable. Aesops Fables are god-beathed by the standard you're proposing here. Not literally true, but useful and meaningful, even if the authorship is in question.

Actually, Steve, you've got my position backwards. It's not that scholars who agree with me are unbiased and those who disagree are biased. It's the other way around: I take bias into account when assessing whether to trust a scholar on a particular subject. That is, I agree with scholars who are not connected to a vested interest in whatever conclusions they draw. Thus, when 90 percent of climate scientists say global warming has significant man-made causes, while 90 percent of scientists who work for ExxonMobil say human activity has nothing to do with climate change, I am inclined to trust those scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome. Conservative Christian scholars have a vested interest in certain positions, and the authorship of Luke appears to be one of them. I do not trust their judgment on this issue, not because they're Chtistian, but because the evidence shouts against it from the rooftops. So I have repeatedly cited evidence in my explanations about Luke. You, on the other hand, have repeatedly cited conservative Christian scholars. Feel free, but I have made a case for their bias that has nothing to do with whether they agree with me. I agree with those scholars who do not have a vested interest in the answer. Among those scholars, the consensus is that Luke did not write Luke, just like the consensus among scientists who do not work for fossil fuel companies is that human activity contributes to global warming, just like the consensus among doctors who don't work for Phillip Morris is that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. In every other field, you take bias into account when assessing claims and conclusions. Somehow, when the subject is the Bible, that flies out the window. Here's the key: scholars who don't believe Luke wrote Luke lose absolutely nothing I'd they're wtong. Those who DO believe Luke wrote Luke have as lot riding on that conclusion, because so much of the reliability of the gospel is supposedly tied to it. What do I lose if Luke wrote Luke? Nothing. He's still woefully unreliable as a historian. What do you lose if he didn't? A crucial claim to historical accuracy. Tell me, who is more likely to allow bias to affect judgment here?

There are a couple of verses that come close. If you take that particular verse from Corinthians you have to concede that it's only talking about the things Paul is writing in that particular section of that letter (elsewhere in the SAME letter he FLAT OUT TELLS US) that he's offering his opinion and not a commandment of the Lord. There's the verse that talks about holy men of God speaking as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, but that's not a blanket claim about scripture (and, alas, it's another forgery, a letter claiming to be written by Peter, though Peter didn't write it, dictate it, sign off on it, approve it, endorse it or read it). So God-breathed is in a forged letter, holy men of God spake as they were moved by the holy ghost is in a forged letter, and, oh, "rightly-dividing the word of truth"? Yeah, that too.

I have a hypothesis about that. But before I get to that... Steve, I don't think we're clear yet on why I moved this thread here from Questioning Faith. From the "About this forum" thread on Questioning Faith: I think you can see that this thread does not fit that description (not necessarily anyway). Anyway, you never complained about it, but I wanted to make it a little more clear than I have. In any event: Protestant Christianity started with an exaltation of the Bible over church tradition. Never mind that we don't even HAVE a Bible if not for tradition. The early Protestant churches distinguished themselves from the Catholic Church by placing their doctrinal emphasis on scripture over tradition, and they distinguished themselves from each other by claiming to adhere more closely to scripture than the other guys. Take away the inerrancy of scripture, and it's just a bunch of people wrangling over the words of men. Wierwille asked "why division," answering that it's because of a wrong dividing of The Word. But that's not the case at all. We have division in the church precisely because the doctrine of inerrancy, the refusal to admit these gospels and letters and histories contradict each other worse than the DC Multiverse (yes, I'm exaggerating). Inerrancy breeds inflexibility. If the Bible is always right, and it says what I think it does here, then I'm right, no matter what you think it says somewhere else. Without inerrancy, we can say, "hey, Paul seems to disagree with James. Fascinating. What can we learn from each of them?" WITH inerrancy, we can't stand the thought of Paul disagreeing with James, so we force them to agree with each other. (Yes, I recognize the irony of ME using this example. What can I say? Time has passed). And if I'm right, then YOU ARE WRONG. GET OUT OF MY CHURCH BEFORE YOU POISON EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING WITH YOUR HERESY. I lose my claim to be right if you can be right too. Anyway, that's my thought on Protestant Christianity's vested interest in the inerrancy of scripture. Just a hypothesis.

No No. Closer to sword and sorcery than cop flick, but I've never heard this movie described that way.

The genre is crime. One of the plot devices, a brothel with a particular set of offerings, was actually modeled after a real brothel. But before you insult one of their offerings, it would be wise to make sure she's not really who she claims to be.

I think exploring authorship, in and of itself, is off-topic. HOWEVER, it is on-topic if we relate it back to the thread question. So even if we don't come to agreement on who wrote which book, I may still raise points that try to establish the premise, from which we need to answer the question: Is it still God-breathed if it wasn't written by the person we think wrote it? In the case of Matthew, Mark and John, I think the answer is a hypothetical yes. They don't CLAIM to be written by the men whose names they bear. So establishing that Matthew didn't write Matthew does not affect the question. Paul and Luke are somewhat different. If Paul didn't write II Timothy, then we have the problem of the only book of the Bible to posit a "God-breathed Word" being written by a demonstrable liar. So where do we get "God-breathed" from? If Luke-Acts is not written by a companion of Paul (and I have listed some reasons I don't think it was), then can we say it's "God-breathed" even though it was written by someone who is actively misrepresenting himself? You're free to reject my premises on the pastoral epistles and Luke. And you're (of course) free to argue those points. But I don't believe citing a work as proof of itself is valuable. To say "Acts was written by Luke because of the 'we' passages" is to ignore the pervasiveness of forgery in the first century. It was RAMPANT. To say, "Look, the fist verse of this letter identifies its writer as Paul," as if a forger would say otherwise, is to utterly miss the point. The salutations in the pastoral epistles don't prove Paul actually wrote them! The fact that they disagree so radically with the known letters of Paul indicate that they were not written by him (or dictated at his behest). The fact that "Luke" says "we" does not prove he was a companion of Paul -- it only proves he was trying to pass himself off as one. This side issue arose when I said scholars agree with Bart Ehrman that Luke did not write Luke. No, I haven't conducted polls. Neither has anyone else on this thread. I do know that Ehrman has written two books on the subject of forgery in the Bible. One of them, Forged, is written for a lay audience. I've read that one. The other, Forgery and Counterforgery, is a scholarly work, not written for laypeople. I haven't read it. You, Steve, might come across it. It might persuade you. It might not. But you are being taught theology by committed Christians. That is an identifiable bias (as I've noted elsewhere), and I caution you to distinguish between the state of scholarship in the field as opposed to the motives of apologetics. So I actually wrote to Ehrman and asked what the state of scholarly consensus was on the authorship of Luke. His reply: This mirrors what I suspected: Christians, who have a vested interest in the answer, come to one answer. Others, who have no vested interest in the answer, come to a different conclusion. Sorry, it's not a situation where I get to monopolize the time of someone who doesn't know me from Adam, so I can't grill him much further (except at his pleasure). We're not going to resolve it on this thread. I know "appeal to authority" is a fallacy, so take Ehrman's comment with a grain of salt, or a pound. My only question was the state of the scholarly consensus. To prove the case, I'd have to probably buy his book and compare it to others, which is not something I have the time or inclination to do. If Luke wrote Luke, so be it. It doesn't explain why he's calling Paul a liar or why he thinks Herod was alive during the Quirinian census (or that the census required Joseph to leave his home, which is the opposite of what a census does). As many problems are raised by the gospel with Luke as the author as are raised by the gospel with anyone else. But God-breathed? Maybe on issues like what Jesus taught and how Paul's doctrine and practice evolved. But certainly not on history. On history, Luke is demonstrably unreliable.