Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What about those who never heard the Word?

[quote=john843]Fireball, that "proves" nothing. An earlier part of a book predicts a certain action or circumstance and later in the book it declares it fullfilled. Without knowing who truly wrote what when, you're just right back to "I have faith and believe in what it says". You truly do seem to be a man of strong belief and conviction and that IS admirable, but as far as it's being "proof" of anything, it's simply not.
John [/quote

Ah well, the facts remain. There were many OT prophesies regarding the future Messiah. If the NT gospels and the writings of Paul were correct, it would astounding and incomprehensible that one would conclude that the OT prophecies were not in fact fulfilled in the life and death of Jesus.

Prophecies made by different authors at different times and then all coming to fulfillment with Jesus? Remarkable for sure.

Having said that, I am of the belief that one so-to-speak "chooses what he believes." He can choose to believe in error if that is what his soul leads him to believe or he can believe in truth if that is where the spirit leads.

If one chooses to dismiss the OT prophecies and also dismisses the evidence pointing to fulfillment in Jesus, well, that is one's right I guess and ones choice. Live with it and die with it. So be it.

TF

The problem with those "prophesies" is that they are so vague in detail, time, and actual occurrence that claiming them "fulfilled" is senseless.

Well, let me give you a bit of my story. I was a non-believer and carpooling to and from the mine I worked at and noticed a book on this guys back shelf in the car. It was titled "The Late, Great Planet Earth." I thought is was a science fiction book and asked if I could borrow it. He looked at me in a funny way and said "sure". So, I took it and began to read. I was very surprised about what I read and did have a bible around from my kid days and started to read the book and then check the verses as they were presented in the book. Reading the book and checking the verses started off a 3-4 year investigation that ended up with me concluding that what I was reading in the bible was in fact true. I became a follower of the Lord and this book was a kinda kickoff point.

So, you can conclude that the prophecies were too vague and what not, but others may reach a different conclusion, as did I.

TF

btw, I have since concluded that Had Lindsey is not one of my favorite authors.

If you look at the "prophesies" themselves, you could make that vagueness stick, or not, onto a myriad of events - depending upon whether you wanted to or not. You wanted to believe them, so you did and you do. Fine; that's called faith, not fact.

honestly
I don't put a lot of belief into the bible as being the complete true word of god

it has been so to speak ,cut copied pasted and edited way too many times since the formation of christainity and its adoption as the official roman state religion. by way too many people in power(popes,kings rich people with influence)to suit their needs and purposes when convienant for them.

do a little research into the council of rome and biblical canon councils for various branches of christainity formed thruout the ages and what branches of christainity have what books in their version of "their bible" for what reasons
that would be a good start for you I think

Well, you have a bit of a point. One could look at a pumpkin and call it a basketball if he wanted to. After all, kinda round, kinda orange, about the same size. No matter what you tell me, I'm gonna believe it is a basketball. That belief will work for some but only up to the time the game starts and then one will find that it is not a basketball at all. That which he believed in will be smashed at the tip off.

That ball "won't bounce."

Fact is, faith is fact.

Also, one must bear in mind that if you have not had my experience, you error is saying that which I have experienced cannot be true.

TF

Renegade50,

I take no issue your statement of belief but RM is replying based on a "biblical" perspective. A question of "what the bible teaches" is not the same as "is the bible the word of god."

TF

That was even embarrassing to read.



eta: That there IS faith is a fact. What the faith in steeped in, is not, necessarily.

???

Faith is not fact? My faith is not fact? The "fact" that faith is real is not correct?

We must be talking apples and oranges somehow.

TF

Oh, I get it.... one's faith must be placed in that which is real and true. "Belief" does not create truth. Is that right? If so, I stand corrected.

TF

Missed it twice. I'll put that on my explanation, not your understanding.


That you HAVE faith is a fact. What you BELIEVE in is not NECESSARILY fact.

What you believe in MAY be fact, but simply believing something, does not automatically make it fact.

Better?

my point is that everyones belief is based on what certain people wanted to be read and seen in their versions of bibles thruout mankinds history
old testament wise
new testament wise
dead sea scroll wise
ect ecte ect


how can you toss aside certain texts books and documents and say they aint no good for this branch of christain religon
but yet keep certain texts books and documents for such and such other branch of christain religion

and these decisions were made by men as too what they thought or think gods word should be and put out to beleivers as a whole


kinda leaves a big what if type of scenario
as to the whole entire concept of faith and belief when it has been manipulated by man since its inception

oh I believe their is a god and he is a higher power for sure
im just saying that the bible has been manipulated to suit mans purposes way too much to be an authentic complete and true source document for people to say it is this way or hells highway for ya







p.s.
I was baptized a roman catholic
and that branch of the christain religion sure has some serious issues on its do,s and don't,s versus other branches of christain religons


Q.how did that all happen with offshoots of versions of the bible and versions of christain religons
since the roman catholic church basically started the whole thing after they decided what they wanted and didn't want in their "official bible"












A.man changing stuff plain and simple

There are two sides to every argument and this debate has been historically going on longer than any other... even longer than which came first, the chicken or the egg..

It's kinda like a game of poker... there is no middle ground... Either you're all in or you fold.

One either believes or one doesn't and in an individual's mind it's not likely to change but does happen from time to time.

I think calling beating on the dead horse is appropriate here, unless some are just working to keep their arguing skills from getting rusty

g

Prove this please.

"The quantity of New Testament manuscripts is unparalleled in ancient literature. There are over 5,000 Greek manuscripts, about 8,000 Latin manuscripts, and another 1,000 manuscripts in other languages (Syriac, Coptic, etc.). In addition to this extraordinary number, there are tens of thousands of citations of New Testament passages by the early church fathers. In contrast, the typical number of existing manuscript copies for any of the works of the Greek and Latin authors, such as Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, or Tacitus, ranges from one to 20."

THE QUALITY OF MANUSCRIPTS

Because of the great reverence the Jewish scribes held toward the Scriptures, they exercised extreme care in making new copies of the Hebrew Bible. The entire scribal process was specified in meticulous detail to minimize the possibility of even the slightest error. The number of letters, words, and lines were counted, and the middle letters of the Pentateuch and the Old Testament were determined. If a single mistake was discovered, the entire manuscript would be destroyed.

As a result of this extreme care, the quality of the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible surpasses all other ancient manuscripts. The 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provided a significant check on this, because these Hebrew scrolls antedate the earliest Masoretic Old Testament manuscripts by about 1,000 years. But in spite of this time span, the number of variant readings between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text is quite small, and most of these are variations in spelling and style.

THE TIME SPAN OF MANUSCRIPTS

Apart from some fragments, the earliest Masoretic manuscript of the Old Testament is dated at A.D. 895. This is due to the systematic destruction of worn manuscripts by the Masoretic scribes. However, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls dating from 200 B.C. to A.D. 68 drastically reduced the time span from the writing of the Old Testament books to our earliest copies of them.

The time span of the New Testament manuscripts is exceptional. The manuscripts written on papyrus came from the second and third centuries A.D. The John Rylands Fragment (P52) of the Gospel of John is dated at A.D. 117-38, only a few decades after the Gospel was written. The Bodmer Papyri are dated from A.D. 175-225, and the Chester Beatty Papyri date from about A.D. 250. The time span for most of the New Testament is less than 200 years (and some books are within 100 years) from the date of authorship to the date of our earliest manuscripts. This can be sharply contrasted with the average gap of over 1,000 years between the composition and the earliest copy of the writings of other ancient authors.

To summarize the bibliographic test, the Old and New Testaments enjoy far greater manuscript attestation in terms of quantity, quality, and time span than any other ancient documents.

The External Test

Because the Scriptures continually refer to historical events, they are verifiable; their accuracy can be checked by external evidence. The chronological details in the prologue to Jeremiah (1:1-3) and in Luke 3:1-2 illustrate this. Ezekiel 1:2 allows us to date Ezekiel's first vision of God to the day (July 31, 592 B.C.).

The historicity of Jesus Christ is well-established by early Roman, Greek, and Jewish sources, and these extrabiblical writings affirm the major details of the New Testament portrait of the Lord. The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus made specific references to John the Baptist, Jesus Christ, and James in his Antiquities of the Jews. In this work, Josephus gives us many background details about the Herods, the Sadducees and Pharisees, the high priests like Annas and Caiaphas, and the Roman emperors mentioned in the gospels and Acts.

We find another early secular reference to Jesus in a letter written a little after A.D. 73 by an imprisoned Syrian named Mara Bar-Serapion. This letter to his son compares the deaths of Socrates, Pythagoras, and Christ. Other first- and second-century writers who mention Christ include the Roman historians Cornelius Tacitus (Annals) and Suetonius (Life of Claudius, Lives of the Caesars), the Roman governor Pliny the Younger (Epistles), and the Greek satirist Lucian (On the Death of Peregrine). Jesus is also mentioned a number of times in the Jewish Talmud.

The Old and New Testaments make abundant references to nations, kings, battles, cities, mountains, rivers, buildings, treaties, customs, economics, politics, dates, etc. Because the historical narratives of the Bible are so specific, many of its details are open to archaeological investigation. While we cannot say that archaeology proves the authority of the Bible, it is fair to say that archaeological evidence has provided external confirmation of hundreds of biblical statements. Higher criticism in the 19th century made many damaging claims that would completely overthrow the integrity of the Bible, but the explosion of archaeological knowledge in the 20th century reversed almost all of these claims. Noted archaeologists such as William F. Albright, Nelson Glueck, and G. Ernest Wright developed a great respect for the historical accuracy of the Scriptures as a result of their work.

Out of the multitude of archaeological discoveries related to the Bible, consider a few examples to illustrate the remarkable external substantiation of biblical claims. Excavations at Nuzi (1925-41), Mari (discovered in 1933), and Alalakh (1937-39; 1946-49) provide helpful background information that fits well with the Genesis stories of the patriarchal period. The Nuzi tablets and Mari letters illustrate the patriarchal customs in great detail, and the Ras Shamra tablets discovered in ancient Ugarit in Syria shed much light on Hebrew prose and poetry and Canaanite culture. The Ebla tablets discovered recently in northern Syria also affirm the antiquity and accuracy of the Book of Genesis.

Some scholars once claimed that the Mosaic Law could not have been written by Moses, because writing was largely unknown at that time and because the law code of the Pentateuch was too sophisticated for that period. But the codified Laws of Hammurabi (ca. 1700 B.C.), the Lipit-Ishtar code (ca. 1860 B.C.), the Laws of Eshnunna (ca. 1950 B.C.), and the even earlier Ur-Nammu code have refuted these claims.

tell us what happened when the romans got ahold of all of this source document materials and passed on knowledge and how the "official 1st bibles"(state sponsored of course) got made into all its different off shoots and versions of christainity since the council of rome, constantine1 and further on down the line

post up some stuff on how different branches of christainity started and why and why different bibles contain certain books and not other and vice versa

of real interest to me is the Mormons
gold tablets/wives/young women
and basically the book of mormom and how that got made


then lets throw in the torah and qouran


all interlinked by people recoginized in each religons text and history

how does that all come about


it is nice that the ancient scholars paid attention to detail and precise content

unfortunately after christainity became the official state religion of rome and the western world

those people that followed up to this current day did not follow things to gods precise letter and intent at all.







keep on reading
I suggest you read up on lost books of the bible and why they have no presence in the bible
and who and or whom behind the scenes made or helped influence those decisions being made

many of them lost books are ot stuff and nt stuff
some of them are bogus ones that kooks made up and were disproved.

All that means bupkis after a couple thousand years of editing by ambitious men.

There aint even two bible historians that agree with each other, lots of if,and,buts..Because its written in circle talk.