Question: "Why does Acts 9:7 say that those traveling with Paul heard a voice, but Acts 22:9 says that they heard no voice?"
Answer: As Paul relates his conversion experience to an audience in Jerusalem, he says, “They that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me” (Acts 22:9, KJV).
However, Luke, in relating the same event, says, “The men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man” (Acts 9:7, KJV).
So, which is it? Paul says “they heard not the voice,” and Luke says they were “hearing a voice.”
First of all, the word for “voice” in these verses is the Greek word phone, which means “a sound, a tone, a speech, a voice, or a natural sound.” With such a wide-ranging definition, the context must determine the most accurate meaning of the word. Most commonly, phone is applied to a voice from God, a human, or an angel. However, phone can also refer to sounds in general. It is translated “sound” in John 3:8, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound. . . .” Paul uses the word to refer to the “sound” of a trumpet in 1 Corinthians 14:8.
The flexibility of phone is quite evident in Revelation 1:15, “His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice [phone] was like the sound [phone] of rushing waters.” Here, the identical Greek word is translated two different ways.
These examples illustrate how confusion can arise in the comparison of Acts 9 with Acts 22. Paul heard a voice as Jesus communicated directly with him. The men with Paul heard the voice speaking to Paul but, to them, it was just an unintelligible sound. Did they hear the voice? Yes, in the sense that they heard something. But, since they could not understand what the voice said, it was nothing more than a sound—in other words, they couldn’t really “hear” Jesus.
The ESV clears up the seeming contradiction nicely: “Those who were with me saw the light but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking to me” (Acts 22:9). And, “They heard the sound but did not see anyone” (Acts 9:7). Not understanding the voice—but hearing the sound—is a good description of what happened.
Correct and we use this type of terminology all the time today. We say we heard something when we hear a noise, but when we hear a noise and cannot discern the speech we say we cannot hear the person. Again its the application of context and common sense.
Sloppy reporting at best. As written, it is an undeniably contradictory account of an event that was most probably an epileptic seizure. In both instances, being open to interpretation and needing explanation, the interpretation made by those who already have a conclusion, already believe, is skewed in favour of faith rather than reason or probability.
Actually it was quite a simple explanation. No seizures needed.
Occams Razor. People once believed that Spirits moved the wind and there were gods residing in the mountains and forests....so what is more probable, that Saul fell and had hallucinations because be suffered from epilepsy or that he was actually in contact with God?
What is the likely scenario?
Does epilepsy change a person's world view and make them intelligently articulate what they once detested? I think you are trying too hard and are not making a credible argument. You accept the account in part but not in whole. Why do you even believe that he had an experience at all? Or maybe it was just Damascus road rage because his skeptic employers weren't paying him enough. But then he went and worked for even less 😎
This was already addressed. Do you believe that the bombing of all citizens in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Berlin were immoral because the Axis powers refused to surrender under any terms? This was a much larger scale of indiscriminate destruction than the Canaanites who were given many opportunities and generations to reform before they were destroyed.
The NT makeover theory is logically unsustainable--the NT writers quoted the OT writers with no apologies--including the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
A lot of things were asserted but absolutely nothing was addressed, there is no comparison to be made between a God - presuming existence - ordering the butchering of women and children and taking virgins as sex slaves and what the allies did in the war, which is something that we alone are responsible for.
I laid out the Biblical criteria for it a number of pages back. When asked to address a Biblical question I give a Biblical answer. I'm not going to make things up or speculate when God said why He did what He did. How can that not be addressing the issue?
People once believed that Spirits moved the wind and there were gods residing in the mountains and forests....so what is more probable, that Saul fell and had hallucinations because be suffered from epilepsy or that he was actually in contact with God? ..
Christians still believe that the ground tremble of volcanoe eruptions and earthquakes are result of the Lord expressing his anger, and the mythical Ark had dinosaurs loaded aboard.
Then you have the crackpot Catholics that venerate-worship and pray over human bone remains.
Village idiot is the common denominator trait among members of many a christian group.
-Bulletproof and Waterproof don't mean Idiotproof.
So maybe it was Damascus road rage ... or perhaps he was late for a soccer game between Jerusalem and Damascus and the sun reflected off his neon road safety Jersey which blinded his eyes and he fell hitting his head on a rock and then heard voices. But his fellow traveling skeptics didn't believe he fell and heard voices because each time after that when he fell he didn't hear any. So they all took a turn at squinting at the sun and then falling trying to duplicate the event. In the it was inconclusive and they were late for the game. Paul was so distraught that switched to the Damascus team as a fan and never fell again. Then he wrote a book about the whole event. While his skeptic friends could not verify the account they said it was the most authentic conversion they ever read about.
In early Christianity, folks were forced to convert or die. Kind of sounds sort of familiar.
In early Christianity folks were forced to hide or die for 250 years.
Still, it survived and went on to become a Roman thing with Constantine, until Martin Luther arrived on the scene and freed the Bible from demagogues who chose to exploit it.
While it was a Roman thing, it was also militarized to stop islam and succeeded in that one task, even though it became things it should have not have become.
The Bible and Christianity had not seen the light of day for a very long time and the last several centuries it can be discussed fully and openly, though lieberal demoncraps and other vile filth worthy only of Hell would have that not be as it is.
It was also a Spanish Inquisition thing where other religions such as the Jews were forced to convert to Christianity. So from the early 4th Century up to the early 1500's other religions were persecuted by Christians.
Then a skeptic society was formed because, based on this new information that had been personally tested, they felt this could serve as a basis to correct Luke's skewed narratives. Understanding what happened to Paul would give new interpretive analysis to his epistles. Since that was a lot of the new testament...the remaining texts would benefit from intense scrutiny also. Everyone agreed that they will fall down and bump their heads each time they were unsure how to reconstruct a text. Soon my friends we will have new Bible. This will merit a movie and some press coverage. We will be lavished with praise for thinking outside the box. Because it's novel and popular it won't need to be historically defensible. And because all religions are equally valid we will be able to start our own with credibility. The potential here is amazing.
In early Christianity, folks were forced to convert or die. Kind of sounds sort of familiar.
In early Christianity folks were forced to hide or die for 250 years.
Still, it survived and went on to become a Roman thing with Constantine, until Martin Luther arrived on the scene and freed the Bible from demagogues who chose to exploit it.
While it was a Roman thing, it was also militarized to stop islam and succeeded in that one task, even though it became things it should have not have become.
The Bible and Christianity had not seen the light of day for a very long time and the last several centuries it can be discussed fully and openly, though lieberal demoncraps and other vile filth worthy only of Hell would have that not be as it is.
It was also a Spanish Inquisition thing where other religions such as the Jews were forced to convert to Christianity. So from the early 4th Century up to the early 1500's other religions were persecuted by Christians.
Christians still believe that the ground tremble of volcanoe eruptions and earthquakes are result of the Lord expressing his anger, and the mythical Ark had dinosaurs loaded aboard
And thunder is just angels bowling. You forgot that one.
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
When the church has not followed Christ they have done horrible things. When society and nations reject God they do things far worse i.e. atheistic Communism.
Their conclusions are radical: that the Israelites are Canaanites who forged a new identity, that there was no Exodus, that King David was not much more than a bandit, that the empire of Solomon never existed, and that the God of Israel may have had a wife, Asherah. All this, the new wave say, was whitewashed by the authors of the Old Testament (Tanakh), who only put pen to paper centuries after the events they wrote about.
Talk about creating myths and fairy tales ... Archaeology has progressed far enough in the last two centuries in the discoveries of steles that correlate with Bible accounts that these starting assumptions are so bizarre that only someone who really wants to create a new story for money, popularity, or a liberal agenda would consider it. These guys know that the left and media are open to any new possibilities for revisionist history. They also know that most people do not know or care enough about history to test their hypothesis. Dan Brown's Da Vinci code is a good example of someone who could sell revisionist history. Some of his conclusions are very juvenile--like the Bible was decided at Nicaea when they did not even discuss that as an item of business.
Dan Brown's works are not taken seriously by any credible biblical scholars:
However, if you want to discuss judeo christian myths, Modern Biblical Scholars agree The Exodus belongs at the top of the list:
There is an almost universal consensus among scholars that the Exodus story is best understood as myth;[38] more specifically, it is a "charter" (or foundation) myth, a story told to explain a society's origins and to provide the ideological foundation for its culture and institutions.[1] While some continue to discuss the potential historicity or plausibility of the Exodus story, the overwhelming majority have abandoned it as "a fruitless pursuit" (Dever, 2001).[39][40] There is no indication that the Israelites ever lived in Ancient Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula shows no sign of any occupation for the entire 2nd millennium BCE (even Kadesh-Barnea, where the Israelites are said to have spent 38 years, was uninhabited prior to the establishment of the Israelite monarchy).[41] In contrast to the absence of evidence for the Egyptian captivity and wilderness wanderings, there are ample signs of Israel's evolution within Canaan from native Canaanite roots.[42][43]. The modern scholarly consensus is that the figure of Moses is a mythical figure,[44] and while, as William G. Dever writes, "a Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century B.C.", archaeology cannot confirm his existence. [39]
Last edited by antelope_sniper; 07/09/19.
You didn't use logic or reason to get into this opinion, I cannot use logic or reason to get you out of it.
You cannot over estimate the unimportance of nearly everything. John Maxwell
When the church has not followed Christ they have done horrible things. When society and nations reject God they do things far worse i.e. atheistic Communism.
Not all atheist are communist.
You didn't use logic or reason to get into this opinion, I cannot use logic or reason to get you out of it.
You cannot over estimate the unimportance of nearly everything. John Maxwell
The agenda is to destroy the only nation dedicated to God by inculcating in peoples minds that we are nothing more than pissants and rats and there is no reason for morals and that animalistic behavior and pedophelia are A OK. IOW, the agenda is to follow the satan they deny the existence of.
The God in Numbers via Moses certainly seems to not condemn pedophelia.
And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites ... And they warred against the Midianites, as the LORD commanded Moses; and they slew all the males ... And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones ... And Moses was wroth with the officers ... And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? ... Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. Numbers 31:1-18
There is an almost universal consensus among scholars that the Exodus story is best understood as myth;[38] more specifically, it is a "charter" (or foundation) myth, a story told to explain a society's origins and to provide the ideological foundation for its culture and institutions.[1] While some continue to discuss the potential historicity or plausibility of the Exodus story, the overwhelming majority have abandoned it as "a fruitless pursuit" (Dever, 2001).[39][40] There is no indication that the Israelites ever lived in Ancient Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula shows no sign of any occupation for the entire 2nd millennium BCE (even Kadesh-Barnea, where the Israelites are said to have spent 38 years, was uninhabited prior to the establishment of the Israelite monarchy).[41] In contrast to the absence of evidence for the Egyptian captivity and wilderness wanderings, there are ample signs of Israel's evolution within Canaan from native Canaanite roots.[42][43]. The modern scholarly consensus is that the figure of Moses is a mythical figure,[44] and while, as William G. Dever writes, "a Moses-like figure may have existed somewhere in the southern Transjordan in the mid-late 13th century B.C.", archaeology cannot confirm his existence. [39]
When I read things like this I wonder about the level of scholarship employed.[/quote]
The Proto-Sinaitic script was the first alphabetic writing system and developed sometime between about 1900 and 1700 BC. People speaking a Semitic language and living in Egypt and Sinai adapted the Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic scripts to write their language using the acrophonic principle. This invovled choosing about 30 glyphs, translating their Egyptian names into the Semitic language, and using the initial sounds of those names to represent the sounds of their language.
For example, the Egyptian nt (water) became mem in Semitic and represents the sound /m/, and eventually developed into the Latin letter M.
Inscriptions in Proto-Sinaitic have been found at Serabit el-Khadim (سرابيت الخادم) a mountain in Sinai and at a temple for the Egyptian goddess Hathor (ḥwt-ḥr) that is located there. The script was partially deciphered by Alan Gardiner in 1916. Inscriptions very similar to those found at Serabit el-Khadim have been found at Wadi el-Hol (وادي الهول).
When we have very specific archaeological evidence which proves the presence of Semitic people in Eqypt and that this proto Sinaitc script was the basis of the Hebrew alphabet, it leads me to conclude that liberal scholarship is based largely on prejudice. While the level of scholarship in the Wikipedia can be good at times, its always best to check it against other sources. I guess we need to ask how the Semites in Eqypt got to Canaan and spread their language around without ever making an exodus.
Name one formally organized atheistic nation that was beneficent.
Do you believe in the existence of any gods other than the Christian God?
Avoiding the pertinent question? The Bible looks at the idolatrous forms of gods on one hand as nothing, but on the other hand as living demons which stand behind those representations--so the idols are nothing but their demons are real.
Question: "Why does Acts 9:7 say that those traveling with Paul heard a voice, but Acts 22:9 says that they heard no voice?"
Answer: As Paul relates his conversion experience to an audience in Jerusalem, he says, “They that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me” (Acts 22:9, KJV).
However, Luke, in relating the same event, says, “The men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man” (Acts 9:7, KJV).
So, which is it? Paul says “they heard not the voice,” and Luke says they were “hearing a voice.”
First of all, the word for “voice” in these verses is the Greek word phone, which means “a sound, a tone, a speech, a voice, or a natural sound.” With such a wide-ranging definition, the context must determine the most accurate meaning of the word. Most commonly, phone is applied to a voice from God, a human, or an angel. However, phone can also refer to sounds in general. It is translated “sound” in John 3:8, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound. . . .” Paul uses the word to refer to the “sound” of a trumpet in 1 Corinthians 14:8.
The flexibility of phone is quite evident in Revelation 1:15, “His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice [phone] was like the sound [phone] of rushing waters.” Here, the identical Greek word is translated two different ways.
These examples illustrate how confusion can arise in the comparison of Acts 9 with Acts 22. Paul heard a voice as Jesus communicated directly with him. The men with Paul heard the voice speaking to Paul but, to them, it was just an unintelligible sound. Did they hear the voice? Yes, in the sense that they heard something. But, since they could not understand what the voice said, it was nothing more than a sound—in other words, they couldn’t really “hear” Jesus.
The ESV clears up the seeming contradiction nicely: “Those who were with me saw the light but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking to me” (Acts 22:9). And, “They heard the sound but did not see anyone” (Acts 9:7). Not understanding the voice—but hearing the sound—is a good description of what happened.
Correct and we use this type of terminology all the time today. We say we heard something when we hear a noise, but when we hear a noise and cannot discern the speech we say we cannot hear the person. Again its the application of context and common sense.
Does epilepsy change a person's world view and make them intelligently articulate what they once detested? I think you are trying too hard and are not making a credible argument. You accept the account in part but not in whole. Why do you even believe that he had an experience at all? Or maybe it was just Damascus road rage because his skeptic employers weren't paying him enough. But then he went and worked for even less 😎
Your bias toward the incredible, the existence of fantastical, invisible magical beings, angels and demons, does not make you a fair judge of credibility in these matters. There are countless supernatural claims, Hinduism, Islam, ancient religions with their pantheons gods and demons, with each and every believer convinced of their own 'truth while dismissing the sceptic with the comment of 'credibility'
