Part 8 of Post Your Tough Questions Regarding Christianity

You don't know that. Yet.
Muhammid is not dead either, he still gets talked about.

 

http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=328747&p=1063231696#post1063231696
But according to this, the messiah was not to die.

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bump. I notice you conveniently skipped this.

 

Quote Posted by Akhlut on pg. 52 #514 of Part 3

Yep, that's a theory, and one that is rock solid at this point. One would basically require a time machine to disprove it at this point. (Post by Akhlut claiming that humans evolved from apes)
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The birth, the life, the ministry of His teachings, the miracles He performed, the death by crucifixion and the resurrection of our Lord Savior Jesus Christ was no theory, but was an historical record written in the New Testament of the Holy Bible based on first-hand witness accounts that took place some 2,000 yrs. ago.

Now you tell me...what is more credible, the historical record based on first-hand witness accounts taking place 2,000 years ago or a theory based on speculation and guesswork of something that is theorized as happening millions of years ago?

I'd say the historical record of Jesus as being more credible...what say you?

 

Quote Posted by Akhlut on pg. 52 #514 of Part 3

All humans (including yourself) are descended from numerous ape species, as I mentioned in the other post. And, again, the comparison to computers is a use of metaphor.
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Is that why sometimes when I get irritable I scream out...huhuhaha!...huhuhaha!...huhuhaha!?...lol

Look, ok I can respect your opinion and so it doesn't bother me that you think your great great great granddad was an ape monkey swinging from tree to tree eating a banana in the process.

I'll stick to my belief in the Holy Bible, I like the part in Scripture where it says, Then God said, "Let us make human beings in our image, to be like ourselves. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground." So God created human beings in His own image. In the image of God He created them; male and female He created them." Genesis 1:26-27 NLT

 

Just to clarify I was wondering how this thread topic was still getting so many replies and so I decided to take another peek. It appears the reason is because people post direct questions and you reply by side stepping it like you did in the above. This creates a circular kind of discussion that has no end.

Below is a quote from a previous thread topic of mine. I post it in here because it directly relates to this thread. My claim? You are the voice of your God because you are Gods creator. No question ever asked in these threads of yours that truly challenge your theistic view will ever hold merit and when there is no good answer you will simply claim the question is to blame.

You know nothing of God because there is no way for you to know anything about God.

You know everything about what your religion says about God because he is a construct of your mind based off of the construct of other minds. To create these threads you must have believed you were in a position to answer the questions presented to you even if you don't consider yourself an expert. So I present the following in an attempt to see what your qualifications are. Because if it comes down to, “well this is just what a believe” then people could have possibly saved themselves a lot of time.

 

Lazarus should get some points. He was resurrected after being dead for four days. And there were countless zombies who were resurrected. Even bones were resurrected.

 

Reincarnation was a widespread belief until the 5th century AD.

Many were fearful that Nero would return with an army of Parthians.... according to Revelation.

 

The simple fact is claiming that Jesus was a liar makes one a liar.

 

Yes, Jesus died for our sins and He Resurrected after that was fulfilled as God One in Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit.

Enoch and Elijah are individuals that lived a very pious and godly life they were able to attain full enlightenment like Buddha they are not the Messiah, redeemer or Son of God.

 

Lazarus was resurrected by the power of Jesus Christ, Lazarus did not resurrect himself it was God who brought him back to life. Jesus Christ raise himself from the dead because He is God. Not even Mohammed after he was poison could cure himself from the poison and eventually he died just like any ordinary mortals his body decayed and turn to dust unlike Saints whose dead bodies have this miraculous slow decaying process?

Zombies the same they are a product of some black magic, evil voodooism perform by someone on a dead body. Those zombies and bones can not resurrect themselves in fact no factual records have supported any resurrected bones, zombies or mummies actually happen only in the movies.

 

Probably as many as there are people who are Christian. Only math is not open to interpretation as 1 + 2 will always equal 3. Keep in mind that the oldest scriptures of the new testament were originally written in Hebrew roughly 30 years after Jesus passed away. That means that even the oldest pieces of it are from hearsay and could be wrong or misinterpreted already. Then the Bible got translated into Greek - adding some more misinterpretations and some more when it finally went from Greek into Latin. Depending on your Christian faith, it might have gone through German (if you're Lutheran for example) before it went into English. And now it's open for you to understand what Jesus said through the probably already a half dozen times misinterpreted version of the text. It is not a coincidence that there are so many Christian religions.

 

Well, here is another misinterpretation "Keep in mind that the oldest scriptures of the new testament were originally written in Hebrew roughly 30 years after Jesus passed away". It was after Jesus resurrected and went back to Heaven. And yes it was written in many languages maintaining its core message, concept, scripture and doctrines that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, Messiah and Redeemer whether it is written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, German, Spanish, English, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog, Malay, Hindi, Arabic etc. they all contain the same message. What differ is interpretation not the language. That is why after the 1st and 2nd generation of Christians had passed away many individuals started to give their own interpretation this result in the rise of what is called heretics. And the reason why after the 2nd century there was a rise of several Christian heretics was because Christianity grew becoming more politicised, militarised and commercialised.

 

I would guess that you don't speak any other language than English. If you would happen to speak more languages on a higher level you would know how difficult it is to express the same meaning in another language. A direct translation is rarely possible as you always loose content or add different content even in a word for word translation. Therefore the content first has to be interpreted and then translated. So the meaning of the sentence is translated not the words themselves. Especially in longer sentences with a deeper meaning - not to mention verses or bible scriptures.

But I am not a Christian myself. I was raised Roman Catholic however I am an Atheist. So I don't look at it from a faith perspective but rather a fact based one.

 

The new Testament was written in Greek and Aramaic.. Hebrew was mostly a dead language after the Babylonian exile.

Much is altered in translations.

 

People tend to forget that Jesus was raised Jewish. For a very long time in history people celebrated new-years on December 25th not on January 1st as January 1st was the date of Jesus's circumcision and a Jewish tradition, not a Christian one. Aramaic just an expression we use to combine Semitic languages - including Hebrew.

 

Galilee was prosperous and diverse.. a center for trade.. While Jerusalem was not. Take a look at the history of the Hebrew language. Its very dry reading.



Aramaic is a different language from biblical Hebrew. They use the same alphabet, but much of the vocabulary and syntax are different. In fact, Hebrew and Aramaic were almost as different as English and German are today. Webster’s Dictionary offers the following definition:


Aramaic: a Semitic language of which documents are known from as early as the 9th century B.C., orig. the speech of the Aramaeans but later used extensively in southwest Asia as a commercial lingua franca and governmental language and adopted as their customary speech by various non-Aramaean peoples including the Jews among whom it replaced Hebrew after the Babylonian exile.

Thus, the Jewish people learned to speak Aramaic in Babylon during the Babylonian Captivity. The Book of Daniel illustrates this transition. The first part of the Book of Daniel was written in Hebrew, but as Daniel began to explain the prophetic dream to King Nebuchadnezzar, he switched to Aramaic (which is sometimes also called Syriac or Chaldee). The next several chapters of Daniel deal with the succession of Gentile world powers and were written in Aramaic, and then the final chapters reverted to Hebrew.

When the Jewish people returned to Israel, they carried back with them the language they had learned in Babylon. Hebrew was used in the synagogue when the Scriptures were read, but the language of the streets was Aramaic. This continued through the time of Christ, and it is probable that the language He most frequently used was the common Aramaic.

continued.

http://www.levitt.com/essays/language

 

Early Christian Writings.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

Click on any of the "books".. and you will see the language.

 

We've certainly seen how much confusion comes about from limited language skills.

Regarding translations and how accurate they are, an exercise to try would be to take any sentence, translate it to, say, German, then Japanese, and back to English, via Bablefish. Try it!

When I am translating for someone, I cant just do it word for word. The equivalent word often does not even exist! In any case, the meaning will be lost if one uses a direct literal translation.

Biblical literalists who get hung up on the exact equivocation to use on one word are a funny bunch.

 

Actually December 25th was not considered a new year to Jews and they have at least 4 new years on the calendar. But that doesn't matter. Aramaic looks and sounds a lot like Hebrew, but it isn't Hebrew, it is a collection of dialects used in the ancient near East and was the vernacular for about 600years. In fact several prayers in the Jewish liturgy today are done in Aramaic. After the Babylonian exile, Hebrew was around, it was a holy language, a language of prayer in Bible. Even today, in Israel, there are some Jews who will not use Hebrew except in a prayerful way. There was a Jewish dialect of Aramaic, with its own grammar and lettering. But Hebrew was known. As for how to think of Aramaic, it is like Spanish. Think of the difference between Spain, Mexico, Central and South American Spanish. All are Spanish but each has a slightly different syntax and word choice and of course idioms.


Now the Christian Bible was more likely first written in Greek. The oldest books written by people who never met Jesus. They grew out of the stories of the new Jewish cult that centered around a man. Many unsure of his messiahship early on. Many writings were done in that time period from the late 1st century to the 4th century when both the Christian and Jewish Bibles finally become canonized. But as usual, new cannons developed over different strands of Christianity through the middle ages. Today the Catholics have a different Bible to the Protestants and the Orthodox Christians. Off shoots include books not found in either, and of course translation issues are clear when we go back and read early manuscripts. (Moses didn't have horns).

 

Heresies started even in the 1st century and it was little to do with politics, military or commercialisation. It was due to the circumstances of the time. It was mainly due to lack of leadership, and that was often down to lack of communication. No telephone, no recognised mail system, no TV. Heresies could often take hold before they could be recognised by distant leaders and corrected.
2 examples.
In one early church Jews insisted that Gentiles must be circumcised when they became Christians. The leadership heard of this as the church was 'fairly local'. They debated this and gave a ruling.
For a heresy that took hold see Rev. 2 Church at Pergamum.
See also the Nag Hammadi. While these Gnostic tractates are mainly dated 3rd century in Coptic language they were probably translated from much earlier Greek. As these are a collection of many they must have been written earlier and gathered over a period. The missing Greek 'Gospel of Thomas' possibly as early as the 1st century.

The problem with todays Christianity is that it is based on 4 Gospels whose writers are unknown and therefore not eyewitnesses. So how reliable are its 'core' doctrines.

 

Gospel of Thomas.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/thomas.html

 

Thanks, but I've read the Gospel of Thomas.

If you've quoted the website because I posted 'the missing Greek Gospel of Thomas' it was because the copy we have is the later Coptic edition, not the probable earlier Greek one which is missing.

 

from the site:

Substantial differences do exist between the Greek fragments and the Coptic text. These are best explained as variants resulting from the circulation of more than one Greek edition of Gos. Thom. in antiquity.

The existence of three different copies of the Greek text of Gos. Thom. does give evidence of rather frequent copying of this gospel in the 3d century. According to the critical edition of the Greek text by Attridge (in Layton 1989: 99), however, even though these copies do not come from a single ms, the fragmentary state of the papyri does not permit one to determine whether any of the mss "was copied from one another, whether they derive independently from a single archetype, or whether they represent distinct recensions." It is clear, nevertheless, that Gos. Thom. was subject to redaction as it was transmitted.

The presence of inner-Coptic errors in the sole surviving translation, moreover, suggests that our present Gos. Thom. is not the first Coptic transcription made from the Greek. The ms tradition indicates that this gospel was appropriated again and again in the generations following its composition. Like many other gospels in the first three centuries, the text of Gos. Thom. must be regarded as unstable.