The beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?
mdibbets,
Thanks for the contribution. I know that there are more discrepencies within this portion of Matthew - his book seems to be just loaded with them. My goal with this thread is to highlight a fair number of the fairly obvious ones, to help the people who wish to apply their own critical thinking to the notion that the bible might be 'the inerring, literal, perfect word of God.' Sort of a natural extension of the activitiy that began back with the Reformation when enlightened souls began to demand a bible that was written in their native tongue. The church didn't have to defend these positions back in the good old days when everything was in latin.
I also agree with ya on the whole rules thing. I get distracted too easily.
As to Moderator Aineo,
I agree with you that a large part of Matthew's intent was to show that Jesus was a descendant of David - thus he had the potential to be a Messiah, unlike the Maccabean dynasty (some of my favorite books of the OT, those guys fought the good fight for their peoples.) Yet whatever tragic ignorances or insolant prejudices afflict me, I'm not sure why even these first few inaccuracies don't knock down a dogmatic house of cards.
My purpose is not to convince others to forsake religion - that's a personal and very self-destructive act; relationships, family, work, everything will be threatened by such a choice - I had to to do it, but I don't go around advocating it.
My purpose lies in helping those that want to dwell in a black & white world where the Bible is perfect and those who quote from it can be assumed to speak with a higher authority than say, a scientist who has studied biology for the last thirty years.
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You tell me that Judah's last four kings were all sons of Josiah, I'm looking at several resources right now that say otherwise. Jehoiachin was the son of Jehoiakim, who was the son of Josiah. So we could spin our wheels all day on that, but still you have the fact that Matthew refers to fourteen names where there are only thirteen, or the sundry other gaps in his genealogy. If the Bible is perfect, then where it says fourteen there should be fourteen. If a name got lost here, then an omnipotent force is not protecting its 'inerrancy.' If something got lost here, how much more got lost somewhere else?
I've been scanning my previous posts for some mention on my part that I thought Matthew was the first book of the Bible. I'd have to say that's been your most disrespectful slam yet. Even if I did mistype something somewhere. . . I'd have to say that the folks who don't know that the Bible begins with Genesis are probably the same folks can't figure out how to turn on a personal computer. Can't give me the benefit of the doubt?
If you want to bring up Genesis, however, well there are the same problems in the first few hundred words of that book as well. I don't usually like to make such a focus on that, since most folks believe that the early parts of the OT are the oral history of the Israelites written down many hundreds of years later. At my confirmation interview, the deacon explained to my youthful questionings that much of Genesis is agreed to be the legends and mythology of the early Jews.
The first line of Genesis begins with one tale of creation, by Gen 2:4, however, the book begins a second, and significantly different version. Scholars often refer to these as the P version and the J version. Perhaps there is a fundamentalist apoligetic out there whose equivocations find a means of rationalizing this, but I'd argue (along with the majority of scholars) that what this represents is a written historian recording both of the major myths of his people. Myth P is very simple and straighforward, J begins to include some concepts such as annointing with oil and having a court that were part of the later kingly history of the Israelites. Is the notion that a nomadic peoples would have a god that made sense to their worldview and that a society organized under a monarchy would have a god that parralled that system such a leap of logic? Is that not the cleanest, most common sense answer?
That answer appears to fulfil all the unpleasant questions, but it be completely incompatible with the notion that the Bible is the embodiment of 'the inerracy of Scripture.'