Cactus Game Design Message Boards

I think PBS is only for Minnesota. (I think) It's Called something else in other places.

I think PBS is only for Minnesota. (I think) It's Called something else in other places.

Its PBS here in NV

I think PBS is only for Minnesota. (I think) It's Called something else in other places.

ur wrong,its CALLED PBS in IL. 

It's PBS out here also, though I've heard a couple of other acronyms that seem to fit better than 'Public Broadcasting Station'...

I had to laugh at the 'scholars' who didn't back up their statements about J and E.

I'd like to help clear this up so it doesn't start any weird phobias of scholarship.

1. Quite a few scholars still think the Exodus happened, even ones that support the multi-source theory. News stations and book publishers need to get viewers, and viewers watch controversial stuff. Nobody is going to watch a documentary titled "UFOs: They Don't Exist" or "The Bible: All the Stories You Learned in Sunday School are True." As such, sit lightly to anything you see in pop culture related to biblical scholarship. It tends to be outside the bounds of convention and proof because that's what excites the imaginations of people without a background in the subject. Just look at how many specials PBS has done on string theory.

As to the multi-source theory, I'll do a little show and tell on how it works (the tell part is going to involve some Hebrew, which is the strongest evidence for the theory but also has to be taken on faith by those who can't read it).
Look first at Genesis 1+2. I'd recommend printing them out from Oremus or Bible Gateway or Crosswalk and getting a highlighter to mark the overlap and distinction between the two passages. There seem actually to be two creation accounts, one from Genesis 1:1-2:4 and one from 2:4-24. Note the different sort of concerns and stylistic differences between the two: in the 1st, God is a spirit which transcends nature, in the second God is imminant and human-like. In the first God creates people "in our image," in the second he makes the adam (man) from the adama (the earth). In the first account, God is very concerned about the holiness of the Sabbath. In the second, he is very concerned about the holiness of Marriage. In the first, God creates humans on the sixth day. In the second, humans are created on the same day as the heavens and the earth. Scholars started to notice patterns like this throughout the Torah, such as noah's flood, where one story is concerned with clean animals and the other is concerned merely with preservation. In the clean animals account, seven pairs of clean animals are brought onboard the ark for the sacrifice afterwards. In the other account, the sacrifice is not mentioned, so there's no need for extra animals.
Several other differences characterize the sources:
1. The presence of archaic language, full of markers like energic “nuns” (an extra letter N on the back of some words, similar to the e in the early modern English "Olde"). If you read a phrase like this in a book:
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour,
hat gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
You'd know you were looking at English written between 1230AD and 1490ish AD. The Hebrew is similar.
2. Names of God are different in different sections. Some use the phrase "Lord God" (YHWH Elohim), others use only "God" (Elohim).
3. Some are clearly later. In the same way as the above language was clearly from the 1400's, there is no way you'd read lyrics from Skillet's Better than Drugs and mistake  them for a chant written in the 1200's. For example, the fall of Babel is loaded with Aramaic words. There is no way that Moses authored the copy of this text that we have, because Aramaic didn't exist when he was alive.
4. The concerns of different authors are different. Some are very concerned with geneology, some with purity, others with covenants, etc. These, combined with the other factors, gradually allow the text to be devided into different "sources" which are concerned with different things, and write in different ways. While the division isn't perfect, it is good quite a bit of the time. Some scholars have suggested that the Torah comes form hundreds of oral sources compiled by a few writers. This is difficult to prove, but explains some of the problems in reading.

As a final note, there is a huge upshot for Christians from this work: unlike finding Jesus' body buried in a tomb, or believing that the NT was written by a cult in the 300's, this scholarship poses absolutely NO PROBLEMS for orthodox Christian belief. If you can't believe that a group of people can be inspired as easily as one can, than the NT is not inspired, the OT that Jesus and the disciples quote from was not inspired (The LXX) and the canon itself is not inspired. This scholarship simply attempts to treat things like the presence of disjointed accounts which stop and start abruptly, Aramaic words in texts supposedly written 1000+ years before Aramaic, and a bizarre preoccupation with landmarks that would have only been important after the fall of the southern kingdom more seriously.

As to the Exodus itself, hyrogliphs mention a group of sort of hired fighters living in Egypt called the "hea-brah-ous." Whether or not these are the children of Abraham is uncertain.

-Ross

and parts cannot (ie. the flood covered the whole world, Adam was a real person, the world was created in 6 days, etc.)

That's the assumption for materialists, but not everyone who believes in source theory falls into that category. For example, I don't believe that Moses wrote any part of the bible, except possibly the Cantical of Moses in Exodus, and I still believe there was a Moses, Solomon, David, and that the things they did were just about what the Bible says they did. I will admit that materialism is more rampant among source theorists, but connecting the two is like connecting ID and biblical creationism. Even if they seem connected, you have to take them at their word that they're not, because they needn't be. What I was saying was not that a lot of source theorists are not materialists; I was saying that you don't need to be (I have 30 friends here in a group called PFR, not one of us believes in Mosaic authorship of the Torah but our biblical beliefs are probobly similar to yours). In a nutshell: saying that Moses did not write the Torah does not endanger Christian orthodoxy in any way. The other things you mentioned, obviously, might.

-Ross

The church's exegetical issues are frequently obscured by a question of need. For most people, even today, the verdict of Church vs. Galileo is unimportant.  For the vast majority of people, it poses no obstacle to believe that Moses wrote the Torah, so if it becomes a stumbling block to your faith, don't worry about it. For Serious OT scholars, this stuff is what enables them to chart the dates in your study bibles, line the stories up with archeology, and get a clearer picture of how the story relates to the activity of God's people in the world. I'm not neo-orthodox or tensive enough to believe that the bible and Christian doctrine must be accepted completely blind, with no attempt to support it's claims or show it's truth through other mediums. Some people, perhaps like Underwood, could continue to be Christians if the body of Christ was found moldering away in a tomb in Jerusalem. I can't, because my faith is based on truth, not a "leap of faith," so I continue to find the scholarship valuable (FYI, the first time I heard about this theory was from an Orthodox Rabbi in college, not at Seminary).

-Ross

I'm curious.  Do seminaries even teach anything from Proverbs?  Or do they believe that Solomon wasn't real so there is no need to?

"Solomon has limited proof of existence, because they can't search for archological evidence under the Dome of the Rock." PBS

The problem is that this is a very unstable foundation for the authority of scripture. And given enough time and secular input, too many of these Christian scholars get sucked into false teachings.

I appreciate your concern. I've certainly had to filter some things since I've been here. However, this was a pre-seminary position, and one which is unlikely to change given what I've studied. Consider that inerrancy is not necessary to have authority. The church has always taught this, except in a small pocket America for the last 120 years or so. The inerrancy movement really started with B.B. Warfield's Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (which I have on my shelf) in the 1880's. Before that, the word of God was considered to be more malliable in the hands of observation, reason, and interpritation. Maybe the last 1800 years of Christians had it all wrong, but given their tremendous input to the faith as a whole, I sort of doubt it.

That said, the document is authoritative. Passages are not for throw-away because of culture or disbeleif, unless firm evidence is mounted against a literal reading (i.e., Israel enters into a battle in which 1,800,000 are killed, or more than the US fatalities in WWII, WWI, and the Civil War on both sides combined). I agree that all scripture is God breathed. I support the teaching of all passages, no matter how challenging. It's just that I have to look at what's in front of me too, science and the physical as well as the bible and faith. Inerancy can easily sublimate in the the Docetic heresy if this stance is not observed.

-Ross

The first part of what you said I don't think is true, because the priests themselves didn't consider the scripture to be flawless. This tradition goes straight back to the apostles. Consider what it would mean for Paul, writing 1+2 Thessalonians about 25 years before the Gospel of Mark, to say "cling to Christ, not to the law." When that letter was read out in an assembly, it would be the same as saying: "Don't listen to the scriptures (OT). Listen to me and the Gospel I have." Church fathers picked up on this to a lesser degree; doctrines of fall, angelic rebellion, hell, resurrection, etc. all involve heavy interpolation.

As for the rest of your argument, I agree, but I think that the ancient position was closer to reverence than current inerrancy. In the modern evangelical view, the text rules everything, and almost becomes the priestly mediator between the Christian and God (hence the Docitism). There have actually been really comprehensive studies done on how Warfieldian inerrancy (the kind that evangelicals believe in now) is something never before seen in theology. It's true that most people until the time of Darwin took the facets of the bible for granted, but even as early as 250-350AD, Origin would call the notion that all the animals in the world boarded the Ark "absurd" (along with huge sections of Levitical law, oddly enough) and Turtullian would admit that some of the Israelites spectacular victories were beyond belief.

Again, I don't think opinion is enough to say this, but only when something is clearly an exaggeration (the 1.8mil killed) or clearly a perspectival view (Sun standing still). Otherwise, it should be considered at face value if at all possible.

-Ross

You see it is a short trip from where you are already, to being at a place where even the fundamental truths about Christianity become suspect, and subject to the knowledge of man.

Every truth which is not established by the power of the Holy Spirit working faith in us is under the knowledge of man. What you've done is placed all the authority on the interpritation of a written physical document, thereby making all faith subject to the opinion of man. God is not inside the bible. God is not the bible. Reading and knowing the bible does not save you. Reading and knowing the bible does not mean you know God. If the Holy Spirit is not at work, being able to recite the entire text in the original Greek and Hebrew is worthless.

I'm determined to take the bible at it's word: if it claims something as a miracle (look for contextual clues: is nature clearly subverted, is God's presence clearly noted, are people astonished?) then I'll believe it as such. However this was simply two very... small... nations which got together and managed to inflict more casualties than three brutal conflicts in the modern period. It wasn't supposed to be a miracle. It was supposed to be a fact. My thought is that, given that there was probably no official body-count, and that Middle Eastern civilizations had a tendency to excaudate carnage and devastation following a victory, a million Ethiopians killed probably means a heck of a lot, but is not meant to show that Israel and Ethiopia miraculously mobilized 50% of their populations based on archaeology to fight this battle.

-Ross

That's a good point. In an ideal world the gap between authority and inerrancy would be farely small, and operate on universally comprehendible logic. My baseline is essentially this: Was Galileo right to say that the literal reading of Joshua was in error? I try to make sure that every facet of scripture that I seek an allegorical explanation for is under the same sort of pressure from science or archaeology and does not evidence any special outpouring of God's creative power (I do believe that God kept the daylight for Joshua, but I disbelieve the incidental implication that the sun revolves around the earth). What keeps me in check is the resurrection: Paul says that if we don't believe this miracle our faith is in vain. I agree. The Resurrection is the most potent miracle Christ performed. If that serves as the starting point, I can't reject any of his other miracles, because then I would be saying that he had not the power, which would ultimately call into question whether or not he had the power to save all humanity. In that respect, you make a good point: a lot of people, even a lot of divinity school and seminary professors, haven't thought through the implication of post prophecy biblical dating (God is powerful enough to be God, but not to know the future) and of materialistic interpretation of miracles (God is powerful enough to rise from the dead and save sinners, but not to stop a woman from bleeding. It's a dangerous path, but because of the Galileo incident, and the witness of the Church fathers and reformation theologians, I simply cannot hold that the bible is without error in its literal reading. It's not a matter of what I think; it's a matter of what is testable as a fact. I still believe that God's miraculous power can overturn natural order, but if the passage at hand indicates the biases or limited perspective of a person living on earth 3,000 years go, then it is right to gloss its literal meaning for something else.

As an aside, what do you think of the book The Case for Christ, or of apologetics in general. Do you think that people should try and confirm with logic and science the things of scripture, or that this is an affront tothe trust we're supposed to have in scripture?

-Ross