Quotable Quotes

[Shiftless2]

"There's nothing like what has happened in the last 10 months." ~ Trump

 

[Shiftless2]

If such stories were witnessed when they occurred, and then remembered and recounted until they were recorded, that's "hearsay".
....
It's inadmissible as evidence, yet we can accept it as the divine inerrant word of god?

And those stories were passed down orally for generations before being written down and anyone who's played the child's game "telephone" (sometimes called Chinese whispers) knows how stories change in the telling.

The issue of "witnesses" isn't restricted to stories in the Old Testament. The gospels were written years (decades actually) after the supposed date of the crucifixion and then by unknown authors who had never met Jesus.

* The events may have occurred millennia ago, but were substantially undocumented. BUT !
The wording in holy scripture is today.

Actually it's worse than the "telephone" comment sounds because we don't have the original manuscripts from when they were first written down. We don't even have copies of those manuscripts. What we have are copies of copies of copies of copies of .... you get the idea. And every time a copy was made it provided an opportunity for copyist errors to creep in. Especially since, in many cases the copyist didn't speak the language they were copying. Worse yet it provided the copyist an opportunity to "amend" the text to agree with their own personal orthodoxy.

A couple of the more obvious ones:

1) Everyone knows the story of Jesus and the adulteress ("Let he who is without sin ...."). Great story with an important moral but it doesn't appear in any version of the Bible before the 12th century;

2) In the oldest Bibles in our possession the Gospel according to Mark ends with Mark 16:8. Everything afterwards (Mark 16:9-20) was added at some later date, probably to make it agree with Matthew.

And then there's the issue of translations. I was always told that the story Jesus told that compared the difficulty of a rich man entering heaven to a camel passing thru the eye of a needle was a mistranslation. The words for camel and rope were similar and the copyist confused the two. I've since heard that the needle referred to a narrow gate into Jerusalem that a camel could only pass thru on its knees (this gate being used at night when the main gates were closed). Two problems with this version - there never was such a gate and camels can't walk on their knees. So .....

And then there are cultural issues - how to translate something to a modern language when the very concepts the words applied to don't exist today. A simple example - think about a future archaeologist whose native language is not English and who has not grown up in today's culture. And he's faced with translating something that contains the words "horseplay" and "pony play" - I'm sure he could be forgiven for assuming that they mean the same thing. (If you don't understand the difference google is your friend.)

Fact is, the major religions can't even agree on how many books are in the bible. Restricting our attention to the Old Testament for a moment the major religions can’t agree on how many books there should be. The Jews have 24 books, the Protestants 39, the Catholics 46, and the Eastern Orthodox have 51.

The list goes on ....