Christianity likes to posit that the Bible is the “inerrant, inspired Word of God.” For starters, I would just like to ask simply, “which Bible?” There are several denominations of Christianity which only recognize the King James Version of the Protestant Bible. The Catholics use one Bible, the Orthodox Churches use another--except for Ethiopian Orthodox, which uses yet another version. The Catholics believe that the Protestant exclusion of the so-called “Apocrypha” is heretical, and the Protestants view the inclusion of these books the same way. Setting aside the different versions of the Bible, there are about twenty English translations alone, and the different translations themselves can be problematic, as subtleties and nuances often get lost in translation, often changing context or meaning sufficiently to dilute the intended message. I digress; which version and translation is the Word of God? They clearly cannot all be, if only because of the “heresy” of including certain books and excluding others.
When Pope Damascus convened the Council of Rome, God himself didn’t show up to guide the assembly process to determine which books were canon and which weren’t. The assemblers used simple scholarly and logical criteria to arrange the books into the Bible (e.g., which of the books seemed to agree). There was no “divine inspiration” at work, otherwise, presumably--giving God the benefit of the doubt, we’d have ended up with one complete, congruent text; but what we got instead was a collection of tales and fables intermixed with a little history, most with questionable and ambiguous lessons in subjective morality. How do we know that the books in the Bible are those that God wanted in the Bible? The Christian’s answer is “because the Bible says so.” Hunh?! So, once again we find that the rules of logic do not apply to God, because this is brazen question-begging, and of the worst sort because it is a self-sustaining (i.e. circular) argument (to be fair though, the muslims are much worse, “The qur’an says that muhammad was the perfect example for mankind, and the qur’an is perfect.” Who wrote (dictated, revealed, whatever) the qur’an? “Muhammad.” Duh...). Also, to borrow from Sam Harris, it is strange that God would create both the Bible and writers, yet make many of those writers better than himself. If such a book as Dante’s Inferno, or a play such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream cannot claim “perfection,” then how can the linguistically and logically flawed Bible?
Setting aside for a second that any book claiming perfection cannot, by definition, have multiple versions, there are numerous flaws in the Bible. The greatest flaw in the Bible is the so-called “virgin” birth of Christ. The virgin birth is usually called up on to lend credence to Christ’s claim to fulfillment of prophecy, thus his claim to deity. However, when the original Greek is examined, the virgin birth never happened; either by haphazard translation or deliberate mistranslation, the Greek word for “young woman” was altered in translation to “virgin.” The word used is never translated as “virgin,” except as it is used in the book of Mark (which is believed to be the basis for both Matthew and Luke). It is puzzling that the author of Mark chose to use “young woman,” if “virgin” was what he intended to convey. It seems that the use of the wrong word (calling back the previous paragraph) would tend to challenge the notion of the Bible’s perfection, at the very least, at most, the deliberate mistranslation of the word should go down as one of the greatest hoaxes in human history. Corollary to this point, the Bible traces the genealogy of Jesus through Joseph; if Jesus is “virgin-born,” then how is Joseph’s bloodline relevant? The short answer: in order for Jesus to fulfill the messiah prophecies, he had to come from the “House of David.” So, Jesus can either be from the line of David, or virgin-born, but not both. Again, the Bible fails in its alleged “perfection.”
Next, we talk about errors in "creation."
No comments:
Post a Comment