Raf

Please research the words "perfect understanding" in Luke 1:3. It does not say in Greek what it says in English, methinks.

In my suppositions, God doesn't make mistakes. Man does. The Bible has mistakes. The mistakes cannot be attributed to God. They can only be attributed to man. But they are actual errors in the Bible.

What are we to make of these verses? Is this God's advice? Where does it say it's God's advice? It's explicitly not God's advice. It's explicitly Paul's advice. Now, it's good advice. God wouldn't disagree. God wouldn't disagree with a mom telling her kid to look both ways before crossing the street, but that doesn't make her advice the God-breathed Word! Paul gives us some good advice here. Take it, and cool. Don't take it, and that's cool too. You haven't sinned. The point is that the advice Paul gives is declared in the Bible to NOT be God's Word. This is a real logical conundrum. Everything in the Bible is God's Word. Something in the Bible declares itself to not be God's Word. It is God's Word that something in the Bible that is explicitly addressed to believers is not God's Word. Only by forcing the equation The Bible = God's Word do we have a problem. Eliminate that equation, and there IS no conundrum. Some of Paul's advice is a direct commandment of the Lord. Some of it is not. Sometimes he makes it obvious. Most times he does not -- what he writes is presumed to be of God, although nowhere does he state that what he is writing is God-breathed. "God showed me these truths" is very different from "God is making sure I use this particular preposition because if I use any other word your whole Bible will fall to pieces." Some other "that's Paul's words, not God's Word" items should be obvious. I am as certain as I could possibly be that God does not want me to wait for Tychicus to show up at my door or my church to tell me everything or to encourage me with the latest news about Paul's well-being (Ephesians 6:21-22). I am absolutely certain that I did not send gifts to Paul via our mutual friend Epaphroditus (Philippians 4:18). Colossians 4:7-17 make perfect, perfect sense as Paul writing to people he knows, and no sense at all as divinely inspired scripture with a purpose and meaning for my life. It is not "God's Word." It's a dude writing a letter to a specific group of people and adding personal touches. A lot of what he writes is applicable to any Christian, anywhere, anytime. But some of it is clearly not. When I say the Bible lacks the self-awareness to consider itself God's Word, this is what I'm talking about. Paul doesn't know he's writing Scripture. He thinks he's writing a letter. If he knew he was writing Scripture, it's hard to imagine he would include the personal touches. It would be like me writing, knowing I am writing The Holy and Eternal Word of the Living God, and using the last few lines to say "Yo! Shout out to my homeboys in the Boogie Down Bronx! Yeah boyeeeeeee!" Who would do that? Just some (doctrinal) thoughts.

That's a whole different can of worms. I did not intend to address the believability of certain Bible stories (talking snakes, talking donkeys, a man who loses strength because of a haircut). Whole different can of worms. I intended only to talk about two stories that disagree irreconcilably on a given point. I'm talking about Paul swearing up and down that he did not do exactly what Acts records him doing. Somebody's wrong there. I'm talking about Matthew saying Joseph and Mary didn't take up residence in Nazareth until after the sojourn in Egypt, while Luke tells us they lived in Nazareth first, then traveled to Bethlehem, then Jerusalem, then back to Nazareth while Christ was still days old. Not apparent contradictions; actual errors. And one of the things TWI excelled at was taking these bizarre efforts at reconciling conflicting accounts and making OTHER people look dishonest for failing to engage in this kind of intellectual dishonesty. The stories about Peter denying Jesus make a whole lot more sense when you just recognize that the gospel writers got the main point right but differed on the minor details, for a host of reasons. By making God the selector of each word in the Bible, TWI robs the Bible of the ability to contradict itself. Then TWI comes swooping in to the rescue. We can resolve all these contradictions! (No, you can't. You can only claim to). TWI is, of course, not alone in this. When the letter to Timothy says all scripture is given by inspiration of God, it is not referring to itself. There is no reason to think it is referring to itself. There is no reason to think it was discussing the gospel of John or the Revelation or I and II Peter or most other books of the New Testament, many of which had not yet been written. That is what I mean when I say the Bible lacks the sense of self-awareness to refer to itself as God's Word. Paul, in I Corinthians, draws very clear distinctions separating when he is referring to a commandment of the Lord and when he is speaking as Paul. If it's ALL God's Word, the distinction makes no sense at all. At all.

Holy cow. Resistance is NOT futile! I'm going to change the name of this thread to "TWI and Forcing Harmony in the Bible." I would ask that we keep the discussion here about TWI. Any specific discussion that tackles a particular issue and ends up being doctrinal, we can flag and move to doctrinal. Everyone okay with that as a ground rule?

Nope. Can't be antagonistic if we agree

Somehow I expected a more, I don't know, vigorously antagonistic response.

I'm going to have to move this to doctrinal at some point, but maybe not just yet. The problem I have with the harmonization efforts is that they take a reasonable proposition and stretch it to unreasonable limits. Remember the old story about the blind men and the elephant, and how every one of them is right about the elephant even though they appear to be contradicting each other? That's a real healthy way of trying to approach apparent Bible contradictions, and as long as the conflicts lend themselves to such a solution, I am comfortable accepting the harmonization. But sometimes, now and then, the conflicts just don't lend themselves to such a solution. Every single gospel puts three crosses on that hill. Every one. Maybe, MAYBE John doesn't, but I think the more natural reading of the verse puts three crosses up there, not five. Not one gospel explicitly states there are five crosses up there. Three in Matthew, three in Mark, three in Luke, and I'm no Greek scholar, but I think three in John makes more sense than five. Every gospel that mentions Peter's denials say he denied Jesus three times. There's a discrepancy in the number of cockadoodle-doos, but not in the number of denials. We can harmonize and find six, but can you find me a gospel that lays out six denials? You can't. They all count to three and then stop. Where was Jesus when the Magi come to visit? Read Matthew, and only Matthew. He's in Bethlehem. There's not a scrap of an indication to the contrary. Then Jesus goes to Egypt. Then he comes back. Then AND ONLY THEN does his family settle in Nazareth. But read Luke, and only Luke. There are no Magi in Luke, of course. There's also very little Bethlehem. Jesus is there to be born, then skips town right away. A pit stop at Jerusalem, and whamo! They're in Nazareth. Not a hint of an Egyptian detour before or after. Jesus is still an infant when the family settles in Nazareth according to Luke. He's probably in preschool by the time they get to Nazareth according to Matthew. These are not "apparent" contradictions. It's a big fat glaring gaping discrepancy. Now, one can argue that Matthew never says the Magi find Jesus in Bethlehem. It's true. It doesn't say that. But it utterly fails to give even the slightest indication to the contrary. You cannot read Matthew on its own and conclude that the Magi found Jesus somewhere else. These guys were writing quasi-biographies (as opposed to full biographies). They were not manufacturing jigsaw puzzles and deliberately leaving out pieces that deliberately created an incomplete picture that could only be assembled by buying someone else's puzzle! Matthew didn't leave out Nazareth and just say "Ah, whatever; Luke will fill them in." Matthew doesn't take the writing of Luke for granted like that. And Luke just ignores Matthew entirely on the Nativity. The only things they have in common are Joseph, Mary, virginity, Bethlehem and the baby. I could go on. Maybe after I move this to doctrinal...

Some folks may have noticed, back during the Mike wars a decade ago (it's been longer), that I refused to allow the debate to be distracted by appeals to actual errors in the Bible. My reasoning back then was simple: I was holding PFAL to its own standard of what it meant for a written work to be God-breathed. The Bible never actually declares itself to be without error or contradiction. That's an assertion made by PFAL about the Bible, not an assertion made by the Bible itself. If PFAL is God-breathed, then PFAL must be right about what it means to be God-breathed. PFAL must therefore be without error or contradiction. We saw rather clearly that it is not. PFAL has both errors and contradictions. If PFAL is right about the Bible,, then the Bible will be without errors or contradictions. But what if PFAL is wrong? Not about itself, but about the Bible? What if the premise that the Bible is without error or contradiction is simply a false premise? We find a shocking reality we cannot ignore: The Bible quite simply never, ever, anywhere, makes such a claim about itself. Nowhere. You may find a reference to God's word as perfect, but here's a shocker: the Bible lacks the self awareness to call itself God's word! VPW popularly said: "The Bible does not contain God's Word. It is God's word." Really? Is that the testimony the Bible gives of itself? Where? Why can't two writers looking at the same event disagree on minor details, as is common? Why shoehorn six denials for Peter when every single gospel says there were only three? What if God's Word is simply that he was crucified, and the small stuff is just that-- small stuff? Scriptural inerrancy as promoted in TWI really appears to be an unattainable fantasy. A thread on actual errors in the Bible would make the Actual Errors in PFAL thread look like child's play.

I was only interested in how TWI addressed the discrepancy. Addressing the discrepancy itself is doctrinal. Not sure I'm interested in THAT conversation.

As you wish, WordWolf. However, I do believe Steve answered my question.

It's not Wierwille who skips from noon to 9 a.m., it's John. And John skipping from noon to 9 a.m. without so much as a "the next day" reference strains credibility beyond the breaking point, in my opinion.

Perhaps plausible, but it now strikes me as rather arbitrary to shoehorn an entire day of activity between vv. 16 and 17 and suggest, for no comprehensible reason, that the author did not find the events of those 21 hours worth mentioning.

Oh, that's right. Wierwille stretched out the timeline. Totally forgot about that.

I tossed my copy of Jesus Christ our Passover in the trash some years ago, but I have a question regarding how TWI handled one of those pesky apparent discrepancies. In Mark 15:25, it says that Jesus was crucified at 9 a.m. In John 19:13, Pilate doesn't hand Jesus over to be crucified until noon. They can't both be right. I remember being very impressed with how JCOP handled discrepancies (although there are some arguments I no longer buy, but that's not important right now). How did JCOP handle this one? Anyone still have it?

Jump in

Oh duh. Psycho

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl First quote was a clever quip about the actual Disney ride.

Cheated to get it. Will post an answer Monday if no one really gets it before then.

Are the movies in the right order, or did you describe the second one first again? I think I've got the first one, but I'm stumped on the second.

George, because I cheated.

Very good sir.

A boy wizard learns more about potions than he ever bargained for when he stumbles upon a used textbook written by a cartoon Moses.

Eric Bana Troy Orlando Bloom

I'm here. I'm here. A boy wizard learns more about potions than he ever bargained for when he stumbles upon a used textbook written by Moses.