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njlauren -> RE: Do Liberal Christians Hate The Bible? (7/16/2013 10:44:03 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
quote:
ORIGINAL: Powergamz1
And there is very little proof that the vast majority of those co-opting the name of Christ, act or believe anything like the Apostles did.
At least not the large number that appear to be going against the letter and the spirit of the Bible.
Asserted without evidence. Do you have any besides your assertion?
I would assert that there is significant evidence. The vulgate bible. The councils of Trent and Nicea. An unbroken line of popes going all the way back to Peter.
I will readily agree that people err today. And that we as Christians do not act as we should. But I do not think this is anymore true of christians than atheists - to the contrary.
Okay, as someone who is a liberal Christian, I like these last ones, because they are more evidence that the Orthodox line is of questionable veracity:
-The vulgate bible. St. Jerome was a scholar, but by the time he put it together around 400ce, he was faced with a problem that continues to this very day, with the NT texts that the Bishops decided were to be in the bible, there are no original texts, Jerome was writing 350 years after Christ died, and by then there were literally hundreds and hundreds of greek texts of the canonical gospels, and they were all over the place. Fundies love to think the KJV Bible dropped out of the sky fully formed, but it didn't, there is more claim to veracity of the Mormon story of Joe Smith and the Golden plates then there is to claim the NT texts are 'totally true". Jerome worked with what he had, but he didn't have original texts, they didn't exist.
Don't know if you know it, but there were no scribes, there were no 'official texts", the texts were copied hither, thither and yon, often the copying was carried out by illiterate slaves, copying the characters one by one, and the text itself was written on both sides of parchment, with no spaces, punctuation, indents, etc, to fit as much on the page as possible.....try copying ancient greek like that, or even type written english, and see how good your copies are. Only thing it is evidence of is someone wrote a bible
The vulgate bible was 'locked down', but its sources were imperfect, as all biblical sources are..or are you like the 65% of fundamentalists who probably think that the KJV was the bible written back then?
-Nicea? It was called by Constantine to decide among the hundred or so Christian sects what/who Christ was, whether he was a Jew reforming the religion, a prophet revealing inner truth, a man, God, or some mixture....and he did it, not because he believed, but because he wanted to stop the bickering that was another tension in the already decaying empire (there actually were two councils of Nicea, but whatever). It was from Nicea that the concept of Christ the trinity was decided (since Scripture doesn't say), but there is another side to that, and that is some trickery was involved, reputedly, the claim that it was unanimous that Christ was the trinity isn't true, that the Proto Orthodox Bishops pulled a fast one, convinced the dissenting bishops the council was done, and then met in secret and said "aha, unanimous truth".
-Trent was much later,in the mid 16th century, and it was the Catholic Church's response to the Protestant reformation and the Enlightenment that was starting to break the power of the church, it embodied what was known as the counter reformation, and in it the church basically strengthened its dogma and strongly rejected notions of the protestants, especially the idea of people reading scripture sola scripture to decide what God wanted, and it also strongly affirmed concepts like original since and the power of the Papacy through the line of apostolic succession.
It had something in common with Nicea, it was a political document, it reaffirmed the church's right and role in civic affairs among other things and declared only the church had the power to decide what God wanted. It didn't really do what it was supposed to, the church's authority and power continued to decline after this as the nation state took over, and the enlightenment spread, which among other things shot to shit the church's cute little power sharing arrangement with despots, also known as the divine right of kings and so forth.
-unbroken line of Popes, that is interesting..well, except for that little ditty the church still is trying to laugh off, when there were 3 Popes, 2 in Italy, one in Avignon, and thanks to the schism, it is really hard to tell if apostolic succession worked.
I don't know what this proves, other than the religion has survived 2000 years, none of those prove any one view is right, any one teaching is correct.
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