How were Men inspired by God to write the scriptures?

Kind of like folktales, folklore, and fables, you know what is written is changed, but you have to trust that it’s mostly real. After all, King James had the original Bible “translated” from Hebrew to Elizabethan English, and then burned the Hebrew copy. So yes, changes have been made, but trust them for the most part.

You can’t.

Edited by me.

I don’t believe they were. If I’m wrong, I imagine God would be quite capable of sending men voicemail directly into their heads.

@HeyZeus: I am eagerly awaiting my first email from God!

…how can we say the present state is anywhere like the Word of God?

Opinions differ on that

@jaytkay: Surely if it is the True Word of God, the opinions cannot logically differ – shouldn’t His word be the final Word?

Translations differ.

How can we know if the word of god isn’t the word of a giant pineapple? How were these men inspired? They were inspired by power and the seemingly effortless ability to gain control over a large population of people, in my opinion.

I don’t think you can say it’s the word of god or divinely inspired by god. I think all scripture, all supposedly “revealed text” is the result of people, human beings, either writing down what they believed about god or what they wanted other people to believe about god or some combination of the two.

they were all drunk one night, and one guy was like, “dudes, lulz I got a great idea!”

God invented natural hallucinogens?

First, man has invented at least 2,037 One Supreme Gods and/or Goddesses in the course of recorded history. Who knows what the total would be if we could somehow include prehistoric Gods and Goddesses? I;m prepared to dismiss all of them that weren’t powerful enough to even keep themselves in the running to this day as obvious human inventions, QED they were frauds frauds.

That leaves us a handful of GOds and Goodesses who might legitimately lay claim to the One True Creator title. For any of those to have guided human writing, storing, editing, replicating, and canonization of today’s Bible, the diety doing this would have to be able to intervene in cause and effect and change what would be its ordinary outcome. But we simply don’t see that happening, ever. Mass attraction doesn’t ever suddenly decide not to work. The second law of thermodynamics never decides to suddenly and inexplicably run in reverse. QED, no diety wrote or guided the scriptures. Men did.

It’s not. Every edition of the bible changes it, and the meaning. We would need to read pre-King James in Greek. The Protestant bible follows the version of the Torah as edited by the rabbis at the Council of Jamnia in 100 AD. The Catholic bible follows the Greek Septuagint, which was translated ca. 300 BC. There are 17 books in the Greek Orthodox bible that are not found in the Protestant bible; four of these books are missing from the Roman Catholic bible.

Divine revelation is your answer.

@BarnacleBill those are considered to be apocryphal books.

@Hibernate I shouldn’t speak for @BarnacleBill but I think that the fact there there is someone, some group, some authority, etc. somewhere, at some point in time who have decided and determined which books, which texts are “apocryphal” and which are not is exactly the point he is making.

Indeed you should not speak for another [ unless you are his/her attorney ]

But read a bit what is an apocryphal book then you’ll see why some see them that way.

Cheers.

@Hibernate I will wait for @BarnacleBill to weigh in on this because, just like god, only @BarnacleBill can tell me whether or not I interpreted his words correctly :-)

My point is not the content but that even when you speak of “The Bible” you cannot speak of the Protestant Blble, because the Protestant Reformation itself was and editing of the Bible, and its source even for the Old Testament itself is an edited version, and therefore interpreted. In order for it to not be modified, you have to go back to its earliest form. Which is not the Protestant version.

The Bible itself is a collection of stories. There are thousands of gospels that were not included. The modification of the bible has always taken the form in part due to a political agenda, designed to unify Christians for some sort of political agenda. The language and content shapes and defines the adherents. Translation of the bible bastardizes the intent of the scriptures, and there is a certain amount of hubris involved in putting out a new version of the bible.

The bible is not necessarily the word of God, but the word of man, using God as a premise to shape the behavior and beliefs of others.

The claim is that the first five books of the Bible were given to Moses by God, and also that Allah dictated the Koran to Muhammad.

Here is a puzzling question. Who is supposed to have written the book of Job? Job could not have written it. He had no way of knowing about the wager between God and Satan.

Ancient people were not the only ones claiming to be inspired by God. Bahalluah made this claim in the 1800’s, and his “inspiration” forms the basis of the modern Baha’i faith.

Muhammad’s alleged “inspiration” also was not lost to subsequent edits. The Quran was assembled shortly after his magic cave experience.

And of course, every two-bit televangelist and modern cult leader claims to be inspired by God (or aliens, or whoever). It strikes me as absurd to suggest that we should treat the “inspiration” claims of ancient people like Moses or Jesus more seriously.

For the record, I think the argument that “the Bible has gone through all of these edits and translations so we can’t know what it really says” is (1) not really true and (2) misses the point.

First, yes, the Bible has been edited and translated. Some of those edits and translations have changed some important things. And sects disagree on what apocrypha to include. But for the most part, the general meaning and text of the Bible has remained pretty consistent throughout history. The Dead Sea Scrolls are not too different from the Septuigent.

Second, this argument seems to presume that there is some lost “original” version of the Bible that is somehow more true or legitimate than the “fallen” versions filled with edits and mistranslations. Uh-huh. The bronze-age nomads who composed the original version of the Bible (probably originally an oral tradition, first written down as late as 400 BC) were at least as ignorant and morally savage as the people who later edited their manuscripts. It’s likely that the “original” version would probably be even less accurate and more resembling the Babylonian myths and laws that the Hebrews cribbed from.

@Qingu I don’t follow either argument 1 or 2 above.

First, If the Bible is the perfect, inspired word of God there should be no difference between the Dead See Scrolls and the Septuagint. There should be no disagreement between the Catholic, Protestant, and Greek Orthodox Bibles the Torah, and the Koran. They were supposedly all inspired and are the complete and perfect revaluation of the same God.

Second, I don’t think that those who doubt divine inspiration of the current many versions of God’s word are looking for some missing ancient text that is the correct version. What, did God loose the power to control events on Earth 2400 years ago, and so the 400 BC version is spot on but later translations and copying of codexes have spoiled it all? I think they are suggesting that the whole thing is a human invention and there is no inspiration from a deity involved. That’s certainly my take on it.

@ETpro you tell’em bro ^^

@ETpro,

If the Bible is the perfect word of Yahweh… well, maybe you could argue that Yahweh would ensure that the text was preserved in translations. Or maybe he wouldn’t. I mean, this is Yahweh we’re talking about, the guy who screwed up his creation on the first try and had to press the “reset” button with the flood, the guy who couldn’t defeat a plains-dwelling tribe because they used iron chariots. Or, to put a more charitable spin, the deity who constantly allows “human error” to foul up his perfect plans. Christians who believe the Bible is magically inspired can easily parry this argument by playing the “human error/sin” argument as an explanation for the tiny discrepencies between editions/translations.

But the basic problem here is that “If the Bible is divinely inspired” is a huge, huge fucking “if.” Why on earth would anyone be willing to grant this premise? Would a Christian grant a similar premise “If the Quran is divinely inspired” when arguing apologetics with a Muslim?

Here is my point. Evidence suggests that modern versions of the Bible do not differ all that significantly from more ancient versions. Rather than seize upon the differences (and there are some important ones) as the basis of an attack on the religion, I prefer to just attack the religion based on what the Bible actually says.

I mean, we are talking about a book that says—even in the earliest versions, and in clear Hebrew—that the sky is a solid dome, that humans were made from clay, that donkeys can talk, that slavery should be legal, that women are property, that rape is not actually a crime, and that genocide is a legitimate and in fact God-ordered practice against people who live on your land. There is plenty to criticize about the book and the religion that sprouted from it without nitpicking translation differences.

@Qingu I totally agree with you on that.