The Bible is a Book of Fairy Tales

That's the nature of what history is. There's no evidence that your grandpa existed. There's no evidence you did anything yesterday. The nature of witnessing is that humans wrote down what happened and became history. By this very nature, history is not necessarily evidenced. Only stupid and brainwashed people think that history should be evidenced. You can actually grab any history book of any nation old enough, say written more than 1500 years, then go through each section with the same question, "how the section is evidenced". In the end, human has no history if evidence is required.

 

By this standard we would have to accept all religions.

No, written stories 2000 years old do not make them true.

 

No, you need to examine into how valid the witnessing is, and together with other factors to see which is more legitimate.

In a nutshell, among the 100% humans who know for a fact that black holes exist, 99.99% of them don't have the evidence. It by no means says that claims of 'red holes' and 'yellow holes' stand. We examine other factors for 'black holes' to stand as a truth.

 

So all this Egyptian hieroglyphs and pyramids are not historical evidence?

All the geological strata are not historical evidence?

All the fossils are not historical evidence?

All the craters on the moon are not historical evidence?

Strange how people who are "stupid and brainwashed" can understand scientific evidence but those who believe in biblical fairy tales can't!

Then again the believers in biblical fairy tales also believe that people rode around on dinosaurs.

 

The evidence of what?

Jewish historian Josephus wrote a series of books some 2000 years ago. The books are divided into books, chapters and sections. Now read the book to tell us how many sections out of the totals are supported by what you just described here.

You are completely out of reality! In your imagination that each page of history book can be supported by something like pyramid in Egypt, while in reality it's not!

 

Evidence that the bible is just a bunch of stone age fairy tales written down by people in the bronze age.

And let's just straighten out the order here.

Since theists believe the bible is not a bunch of fairy tales they need to provide credible evidence that it is not. However since you have already admitted that you can't the case is closed.

 

Exactly Hawkins.....thank you for that glimpse into reality!

 

“The New Testament has been changed and translated so many times over the past 2,000 years, it’s impossible to have any confidence in its accuracy. Everyone knows that.”

This challenge has stopped countless Christians in their tracks. The complaint is understandable. Whisper a message from person to person in a group, then compare the message’s final form with the original. The radical transformation that occurs in so short a period of time is enough to convince the casual skeptic that the New Testament documents are equally unreliable. Communication is never perfect. People make mistakes and errors are compounded with each generation. How then can we know that the New Testament documents we possess correctly reflect the original documents that were destroyed nearly two thousand years ago?

This challenge is remarkably easy to answer if you know a few simple details. In most cases, the person making the skeptical claim doesn’t have the facts. To prove this, just ask, “Have you studied how the ancient documents were handed down?” Be prepared for a blank stare — they haven’t. Let’s go over some of the facts you can use to respond in case they ask you the same question.

Setting the Facts Straight. It’s hard to imagine how one can reconstruct the text of something written two thousand years ago. The skepticism, though, is based on two false assumptions about how an ancient document such as the New Testament was transmitted over time. The first assumption is that the transmission was more or less linear — one person told a second who talked with a third, and so on, leaving a single message many generations removed from the original. The second assumption is that the text was transmitted orally, in which case it is more easily distorted and misconstrued than if it had been written. Neither assumption, however, applies to the text of the New Testament. First, the transmission was not linear, but geometric — that is, one original birthed 50 copies, which generated 500 copies, and so on. Second, the transmission was done in writing, and written manuscripts can be tested in a way oral communications cannot.

Reconstructing Aunt Sally’s Letter. Here’s a little story you can use to illustrate how such a test works. Pretend your Aunt Sally learns in a dream the recipe for an elixir that preserves youth. When she wakes up, she scribbles the directions on a scrap of paper, then runs to the kitchen to make her first glass of the potion. In a few days Aunt Sally is transformed into a picture of radiant youth because of her daily dose of “Sally’s Secret Sauce.”

Aunt Sally is so excited that she sends detailed, handwritten instructions on how to make the sauce to her three bridge partners. They, in turn, make copies for 10 of their own friends.

All goes well until Aunt Sally’s dog eats the scrap of paper on which she first wrote the recipe. In a panic she contacts her three friends who have suffered similar mishaps, so the alarm goes out to the others in an attempt to recover the original wording.

Sally rounds up all the surviving handwritten copies, 26 in all. When she spreads them out on the kitchen table, she immediately notices some differences. Twenty-three of the copies are exactly the same. Of the remaining three, however, one has misspelled words, another has an inverted phrase (“mix then chop” instead of “chop then mix”), and one includes an ingredient that is not listed on any of the others.

Do you think Aunt Sally can accurately reconstruct her original recipe from this evidence? Of course, she can. The misspellings are obvious errors and are easily corrected. The single inverted phrase stands out and can easily be repaired. Sally would then strike the extra ingredient, reasoning that it is more plausible that one person would accidentally add an item than that 25 people would accidentally omit the same one. Even if the variations were more numerous or more diverse, the original could still be reconstructed with a high level of confidence if Sally had enough copies.

This, in simplified form, is how scholars do “textual criticism,” an academic method used to test all documents of antiquity, not just religious texts. It’s not a haphazard effort based on hopes and guesses; it’s a careful linguistic process allowing an alert critic to identify and correct the possible corruption of any work.

How Many and How Old? Confidence that the original text has successfully been reconstructed depends on two factors: how many copies exist and how old they are. If the numbers are few and the time gap wide between the original manuscript (called the autograph) and the oldest copy, then the original text is harder to reconstruct. If, however, many copies exist and the oldest are close in time to the original, the scholar can be more confident that the exact wording of the original can be pinpointed.

To get an idea of the significance of the New Testament manuscript evidence, let’s first look at the manuscript evidence for other ancient, nonbiblical texts. Josephus’s first-century document The Jewish War survives in only nine complete manuscripts dating from the fifth century AD — four centuries after they were written.1 Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome is one of the chief sources for the history of the Roman world during New Testament times, and yet it survives in partial form in only two manuscripts dating from the Middle Ages.2Thucydides’s History survives in eight copies. There are ten copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars and seven copies of Plato’s works. Homer’s Iliad has the most impressive manuscript evidence for any secular work with 647 existing copies.3

Note that for most documents of antiquity only a handful of manuscripts exist, some facing a time gap of 800–2,000 years or more. Scholars, nevertheless, are confident they have accurately reconstructed the text of the originals. In fact, virtually all of our knowledge of ancient history depends on documents like these.

The Biblical Manuscript Evidence. The manuscript evidence for the New Testament is stunning by comparison. The most recent count (1980) shows 5,366 separate Greek manuscripts. These are represented by early fragments, uncial codices (manuscripts written in all uppercase Greek letters and bound together in book form), and minuscules (manuscripts written in lowercase Greek letters).4

Among the nearly 3,000 minuscule fragments are 34 complete New Testaments dating from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries AD.5 Uncial manuscripts providing virtually complete New Testaments date back to the fourth century and earlier. Codex Sinaiticus is dated c. AD 340.6 The nearly complete Codex Vaticanus is the oldest, dated c. AD 325–50.7 Codex Alexandrinus contains the whole Old Testament and a nearly complete New Testament and dates from the late fourth century to the early fifth century.

The most fascinating evidence comes from the fragments. The Chester Beatty Papyri (papyriare manuscripts written on paperlike material made from papyrus reeds) contain most of the New Testament and are dated mid-third century.8 The Bodmer Papyri II collection includes the first fourteen chapters of the Gospel of John and much of the last seven chapters. It dates from AD 200 or earlier.9

The most amazing find of all, however, is a small portion of John 18:31–33, discovered in Egypt. Known as the John Rylands Papyri and barely three inches square, it represents the earliest known copy of any part of the New Testament. The papyri is dated on paleographical grounds at AD 117–38 (though it may be even earlier).10

Keep in mind that most papyri are fragmentary and only about 50 manuscripts contain the entire New Testament. The manuscript evidence is nevertheless exceedingly rich, especially when compared to other works of antiquity.

Ancient Versions and Patristic Quotations. The accuracy of the manuscripts can also be checked by comparing them with two other groups of texts known as the ancient versions and the patristic quotations. By the third and fourth centuries the New Testament had been translated into several languages, including Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian. Translations of the Greek manuscripts (called versions) help modern-day scholars answer questions about the underlying Greek manuscripts.

In addition, there are ancient extrabiblical sources — catechisms, lectionaries, and quotes from the church Fathers — that contain large portions of Scripture. Biblical authority Bruce Metzger notes, “If all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, [the patristic quotations] would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.”11

The Verdict. What can we conclude from this evidence? Professor Daniel Wallace notes that although there are about 300,000 individual variations of the New Testament text in the manuscripts, this number is very misleading. Most of the differences are completely inconsequential — spelling errors, inverted phrases, and the like.12 Of the remaining differences, virtually all can be sorted out using vigorous textual criticism. In the entire 20,000 lines of text, only 40 lines are in doubt (about 400 words), and none affects any significant doctrine.13 This means that the Greek text from which we derive our New Testament translations is 99.5 percent pure.

Using these facts, the point to press home with the skeptic is this: If we reject the authenticity of the New Testament on textual grounds, we’d also have to reject every work of antiquity prior to AD 1000, since there is less manuscript evidence for their authenticity than for the New Testament.

Has the New Testament been changed? Critical, academic analysis says it has not.

— Gregory Koukl

 

Is Islam a false religion?

 

What are you blubbering about. Why are you shooting the messenger. Do not blame me for the OT depiction of God - I did not write it.

God gives the Israelite's a set of rules to follow. One of those rules states that children are not to be punished for the sins of their parents.

Later on this same God commands the Israelite army to kill children and babies - because of the sins of their parents.

This action was not just xenophobic and genocidal - it a contradiction (flip flop) on his previous command.

Sorry to burst your bubble and reducing you to throwing mindless insults from the peanut gallery prior to running to the playground to stick head deep in the sandbox of denial but .... don't blame me for lack of scriptural knowledge.

 

It is a religion, I'll leave it at that.

 

That is too silly. First of all there was no person named "Josephus" 2,000 years ago because the name "Josephus" did not exist at that time. So you have a person with a false name writing a fairy tale in support of another fairy tale and you accept both of them as the truth. Con men must really love you. I have a nice ranch on Mars I can let you have for a good price. It has rolling hills, green grass, and abundant fresh water.

 

Is it based on a real God? Is Allah our lord?

 

It is a religion branching off of the God of Abraham who is the God I worship (though not after it branched off.)

 

Is not Christianity just another branch off the OT? Isn't Jesus different than the OT God?

 

What has the Code of Hammurabi to do with dietary codes? The Jewish dietary code was drawn up when the scribes started to write the Tanakh around the 7th century BCE. It was mainly taken from civilisations who had experienced the problems with pork, shellfish and the rest over the centuries. Our modern diets consist of what we have learned of centuries regards good and bad. People before the Hebrews didn't need a written code. They had learnt what to eat, and what not to eat by experience. Similarly other regulations were also taken from earlier civilisations.

When the stories ofAbraham, Moses, the Exodus were written by the scribes they showed their ignorance of earlier times by writing things that could never have happened. Moses could never have written 'Ur of the Chaldees' - they were 400 years after his time. Abraham could never have bought land from the Hittites. They don't appear for 3-400 years after Abrahams death. The Exodus story is so obviously written by men who had never known desert life or travel. 2,500,000 - 3,500,000 people could never have left Egypt together - certainly not without some notice in Egyptian history. It was nearly half the population of Egypt at the time.
The marching order and the camping order given are impossible if studied.

 

I told you the truth you have no idea what you are talking about. Sorry but that is just the fact. First you got things out of order. Ezekiel comes well after Judges, both in time and location and the circumstances are completely different and you've got both stories completely wrong.

 

No Ur was the predecessor of Sumerian empire well prior to Moses. Chaldees is just another of the names for various people living in the Fertile Crescent. Uh dude leaders have been fudging the truth for a lot longer than you seem to be aware of. Ramses called Kadesh a great victory the truth all things considers would have it at best a draw. And he isn't the only one. The rest of your screed depends almost enitrely on which set of scholars you want to talk to. There is a good bit of argument as to when various events happen. The primary ones that ought to be ignored are the Jesus seminarians who seem more interested in finding an excuse to ignore rather than an explanation of.

 

Nope.

 

So, Jesus is the same monster as in the OT. Of course, my original point is that Jesus and the OT God are no more viable(verifiable) than Allah.

 

Your inability to understand the monstrous societies that God in the Old Testament was dealing with is duly noted.

 

Almost all of the cities mentioned in the Bible have been located as have many of the individuals named and most of the civilizations. Amazing record for a book of fables. Especially considering that many of those supposed fables have been verified from other sources.

 

No,no,no. You don't get off with this nonsense. This mythical God had no problem having people stoned for working on the sabbath, but yet could not control people from owning others as property? Or having hundreds of wives? Or treating daughters as property? Apparently, he could tell people not to murder, but genocide of other tribes and killing babies in mass was tolerable? Wake up.

 

Your confirmation bias does not alter the FACTS one iota.

There are NO contemporary written accounts for your book of fairy tales.

 

Absolutely not.