Gystex ~
G: "Christ is simply not perfect. He is not always right and he doesn't know everything (he didn't know how to write, for instance)."
Clearly the Bible presents Jesus Christ as morally perfect. During His time on earth, He "emptied Himself" as Philippians 2 puts it, leaving a measure of His divine abilities and knowledge, but as we know (or ought to know) Him now, He is divine, perfect, impeccable, and so forth.
(Also, Jesus read from Isaiah in Luke 4:17-20, and quoted from the Old Testament quite a bit on many other occasions. And in John 8:8, Jesus wrote something on the ground (though the text doesn't say what it was -- one copyist's guess was that He wrote down the sins of the people standing around Him at the time). So I think there's more evidence that Jesus was quite literate than that He wasn't.)
G: "A lot of these little nitpicky contradictions become irrelevant if one simply accepts that the Bible was written by fallible human beings who got some stuff wrong."
Well, I agree that quite a few of the SAB's objections are rather nitpicky, and the one about the size of the mustard-seed is one example. Jesus was speaking in a predominantly agrarian society, not to a botanists' conference.
G: "It's simple logic that one cannot reasonably argue with:"
Watch:
G: "Human beings wrote the Bible. Human beings are imperfect and make errors sometimes. Therefore, the Bible can have errors. The argument I generally hear against this is, "Yes, but they were inspired by God, who is perfect, and therefore the Bible is perfect.""
My argument is different (though I do believe that the human producers of the original Biblical text were specially inspired by God). It's simply that your premises --
(A) Human beings wrote the Bible,
(B) Human beings are imperfect and make errors sometimes, and
(C) Therefore the Bible can have errors --
do not actually imply the existence of any errors in the Bible. They only point out a scientific possibility. By the same approach, (A) Roger Bannister was a human being, and (B) human beings are rather slow and often, even at their best, run at a rate of less than a mile in four minutes, and (C) therefore, it was possible for Roger Bannister to run at a rate of less than a mile in four minutes on the day that he ran a mile in less than four minutes.
Again: the syllogism only shows the way to one possibility without precluding the opposite possibility. Dictionaries, science textbooks, and mathematical primers also are produced by human beings, but that does mean that they necessarily contain errors.
Yours in Christ,
Waterrock
G: "Christ is simply not perfect. He is not always right and he doesn't know everything (he didn't know how to write, for instance)."
Clearly the Bible presents Jesus Christ as morally perfect. During His time on earth, He "emptied Himself" as Philippians 2 puts it, leaving a measure of His divine abilities and knowledge, but as we know (or ought to know) Him now, He is divine, perfect, impeccable, and so forth.
(Also, Jesus read from Isaiah in Luke 4:17-20, and quoted from the Old Testament quite a bit on many other occasions. And in John 8:8, Jesus wrote something on the ground (though the text doesn't say what it was -- one copyist's guess was that He wrote down the sins of the people standing around Him at the time). So I think there's more evidence that Jesus was quite literate than that He wasn't.)
G: "A lot of these little nitpicky contradictions become irrelevant if one simply accepts that the Bible was written by fallible human beings who got some stuff wrong."
Well, I agree that quite a few of the SAB's objections are rather nitpicky, and the one about the size of the mustard-seed is one example. Jesus was speaking in a predominantly agrarian society, not to a botanists' conference.
G: "It's simple logic that one cannot reasonably argue with:"
Watch:
G: "Human beings wrote the Bible. Human beings are imperfect and make errors sometimes. Therefore, the Bible can have errors. The argument I generally hear against this is, "Yes, but they were inspired by God, who is perfect, and therefore the Bible is perfect.""
My argument is different (though I do believe that the human producers of the original Biblical text were specially inspired by God). It's simply that your premises --
(A) Human beings wrote the Bible,
(B) Human beings are imperfect and make errors sometimes, and
(C) Therefore the Bible can have errors --
do not actually imply the existence of any errors in the Bible. They only point out a scientific possibility. By the same approach, (A) Roger Bannister was a human being, and (B) human beings are rather slow and often, even at their best, run at a rate of less than a mile in four minutes, and (C) therefore, it was possible for Roger Bannister to run at a rate of less than a mile in four minutes on the day that he ran a mile in less than four minutes.
Again: the syllogism only shows the way to one possibility without precluding the opposite possibility. Dictionaries, science textbooks, and mathematical primers also are produced by human beings, but that does mean that they necessarily contain errors.
Yours in Christ,
Waterrock
