131–140 of 183 posts
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> It's also strange that Protestants trust the Orthodox/Catholic church to decide what is scripture They... don't: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Bible
And who decided what the "New Testament" is? Hint, not the Protestants...
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Yeah, it's actually one of the last sentences in the New Testament - Revelations 22:18. Jesus did his best to tone down the fire and brimstone, but the Abrahamic god is not a particularly forgiving one.
You have no clue what you're talking about. Jesus spoke more regarding the topic of hell than everybody else in the bible _combined_.
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Yep it’s a very narrow focus on one person, and disregards the millennium of Judaic and Christian traditions that followed on from Abraham. In general, to my ears “Abrahamic religions” is a forced academic classification, and doesn’t point to any actual spiritual kinship shared between the religions thus classified.
> In general, to my ears “Abrahamic religions” is a forced academic classification, and doesn’t point to any actual spiritual kinship shared between the religions thus classified. They all share the same god and the same origin story, and even share religious sites. Compare them to any other religion, and they are quite close.
Apples and oranges are quite close when compared to chairs and tables, but they’re different.
Regarding the “same God” thing, you’re two thirds right, Islam being the other third.
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No. Revelation, IIRC
Yeah, it's actually one of the last sentences in the New Testament - Revelations 22:18. Jesus did his best to tone down the fire and brimstone, but the Abrahamic god is not a particularly forgiving one.
Jesus introduced the fire and brimstones. The old testament does not really have the concept of hell or eternal punishment.
Odd that an all powerful god would choose text written in dying languages, easily susceptible to being lost or destroyed, as the preferred method of communication.
Thomas Paine, US founding father and deist, believed God's Word is the universe he created. From "The Age of Reason": It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh a universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they be. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it c…
Rather superficial article about the subject. Whole books are written about the subject or why one translation is better than another. (A quick search will find you people telling you not to use the King James translation.) The article does not even touch upon culture things, such like how to deal with a translation for a culture where pigs are kept as pets or cattle, while in the old testament they are considered as…
> (A quick search will find you people telling you not to use the King James translation.) Most of them are bad reasons - for example, one very popular criticism is the claim that KJV invented the usage of the word "unicorn" in the Bible, and it's actually a wild ox. But it was traditionally translated that way from the time of the Latin Vulgate, and nobody knows for sure what a re'em is. [Ed - it turns out the Septu…
Looking at the KJV's book of Revelation, it contains all the errors that Erasmus's Greek manuscript for the book of Revelation has. It's a terrible, and often invented, translation of that book. It's not just a few problems with a word here or there, it's part translation, and part some book which was invented some time in the 16th-17th century. (Meaning that some of the KJV book of Revelation was invented at that time - the actual book was probably written in the 1st century).
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> posing as a continuation, while the previous revelations are then discarded. Can't the same argument be raise for Christianity? I'm sure at the time of Jesus he saw himself as rectifying Jewish practice (and of course there are the passages where he says that the old laws are still in force), but pretty quickly Christianity was modified and sold to gentiles (thanks to Paul, who never met Jesus and wrote 13* of the…
Christianity does largely embrace the previous revelations still, even if they don’t follow most of the regulations. Listen to any AM radio station preacher and you’re bound to hear about the 10 commandments, the psalms, etc. They have various degrees of reinterpretation but the original content is still widely used and promoted. In contrast Islam seems to only tangentially refer to the Tanakh or the New Testament an…
Where do I find a literal translation of the bible? I would like one that does not force a meaning on words that are not known. I think have read enough fiction with made up words to be able to understand something anyway. Also, maybe not based on Latin? Latin was not the original language anyway, and I got fed up with the mistranslations that we keep repeating as correct. I gave up after searching and learning the h…
Some translators might have looked at the Latin, particularly in hopes of clarifying some of the Hebrew, since we have almost no non-Biblical texts in ancient Hebrew. I guess the assumption there--if anyone did do this--would be that Jerome (the main translator into Latin) was closer to the time that ancient Hebrew was spoken, and might therefore have had access to a better understanding of its meaning. But this idea is mostly speculation on my part.
Faithfulness to an imagined "original text" is often asked for, often attempted, but wholly futile. We have no such "original text". There never was any such "original text". Read it in the form most entertaining, and you will experience it in the purest form still possible. Seek precision, and you will go badly astray. Anything that turns on the exact meaning of a word will be forever ambiguous. There can be no usef…
> Faithfulness to an imagined "original text" is often asked for, often attempted, but wholly futile. I think this overstates the case, especially when it comes to the text of the Bible. Thousands of variants exist, but this is precisely because the text was so widely copied. The prevalence of manuscripts and pieces of them dwarfs every other ancient document by orders of magnitude. The abundance provides a means of…
Odd that an all powerful god would choose text written in dying languages, easily susceptible to being lost or destroyed, as the preferred method of communication.
Why would an omnipotent and omniscient God create such a mess, you ask? A lot of theological ink has been spilled on that question, but I think the consensus was that it was the best that could be done, given a (theological) concept of free will. The alternative was for God to create nothing at all, or at least nothing sentient.