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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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Tin-Man
Lol....always a pleasure to hear from you.
Now that you mention it, I thought I just had to go poo but eww...now I'm wondering if there is a hand up there instead.
I'm still gonna flush down whatever is up there.
@In Spirit
Now you're a jew? Weren't you the one who cast aside all beliefs and found the spirit of love?
Also, fiat has no idea what belief system he is beholden to. One moment he's a theist, the next he's questioning theists and their faith. It seems that attempting to engage him in any form of conversation only pushes him further from engaging. Good luck.
Terraphon
Allow me to explain. I am Jewish only by lineage from my mother's side which I became aware of only when I was in my 30's. I don't consider myself Jewish as designed by their faith. When I was younger I pondered in many temples, churches and synagogues without ever feeling comfortable in any of them
@In Sprit
ok, so ETHNICALLY Jewish but not theologically Jewish.
Gotcha.
Peace
When I was young the Catholics were saying the Mass in Latin. No one knew what the priest was saying, Switching to English did not make much difference.
When someone says to me that the Bible constitutes "great literature", I am left wondering if that someone has read the same book.
To take one example, Leviticus 13 (especially the translation in my copy of the NIV) reads like something written as a spoof to be included in The Life Of Brian. Read it out loud, and imagine whilst doing so, the words being intoned by the voice of one of the cast of that movie, and the end result is hilarious. It reads as if the authors intended future generations to take the piss out of it.
The fact that the first ten chapters of Leviticus, are devoted to all manner of weirdly intricate ways of setting fire to small furry animals in order to please Magic Man, doesn't really strike me as a foundation upon which literary merit can be built. After a while, all the bizarre procedures involving bits of entrail, and the exact manner in which they are to be barbecued, starts to take on the air of a perverse cookbook written by Dennis Nilsen or Jeffrey Dahmer.
Then of course, there are all those various accounts of Bronze Age Lebensraum conquests, each of which contains its own heavy leavening of shudder-inducing psychopathy. Genesis is basically one grand farce consisting of numerous lesser farces, and much of the rest of the OT I find to be a weapons-grade insomnia cure.
"the rest of the OT I find to be a weapons-grade insomnia cure."
Quality, made me laugh.
I like Clive James (If memory serves) quote about the memoirs of an ex Soviet leader. "Here is a book so dull, that birds would fall unconscious from the sky if it were to be read aloud in the open air."
Calilasseia,
"When someone says to me that the Bible constitutes "great literature", I am left wondering if that someone has read the same book."
The intent of the stories is to teach complete obedience and total loyalty to the Boss in all things great and small. That way when a person is told to invade a town and to kill everyone that is exactly what he will do. A true believer doesn't get to pick and choose what he will do or how he will do it. He will simply do as he is told to do in all matters.
In short, it's the operating manual for a personality cult.
Setting fire to small furry animals??? I think I want to give this Christian shit a try!!!! Hey Rat Spit!!! Come here!! I have something I want to show you!
When god appears in reality, I will start reading it again. until then, I seem to be coping fantastically with life, reading the Atheist Republic.
I have read the entire Protestant bible and I am nearly finished with the deuterocanonicals in the Catholic bible I'm also reading through the Church Fathers as well as Denzinger. I've read from a facsimile 1611 KJV with apocrypha NIV, ESV, RSV, NASB, NABRE, and I prefer the RSVCE 2nd Edition.
I've read the New Testament in it's entirety three times and certain books several times. I've read parts of the Old Testament a few times through. Proverbs is particularly entertaining.
catholicray,
"I have read the entire Protestant bible and I am nearly finished with the deuterocanonicals in the Catholic bible I'm also reading through the Church Fathers as well as Denzinger."
Do you know how the Protestant Bible came to be?
catholicray, do you follow what is in the bible literally and to it's fullest?
I do not follow the bible in any sense as you suggest. I am always learning and amending my understanding.
@Diotrephes
The Question is not explicit enough. Do you mean how a particular version came to be or are you referring to the canon of scripture?
catholicray,
"The Question is not explicit enough. Do you mean how a particular version came to be or are you referring to the canon of scripture?"
As you mentioned you have read the Apocrypha. The Protestant Bibles don't have those books. The question is "do you know when and why those books are not in the Protestant Bibles but are in the Catholic Bibles"? Are they something that the Catholics added?
Thank you for clarifying. First Catholics refer to the books missing from Protestant bibles as Deuterocanonical. Protestants call them Apocrypha. A facsimile of a 1611 KJV actually includes these disputed books between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Second Catholics accept the Old Testament canon of the Septuagint which includes these books. I’m not 100% sure on dating but the Jewish leadership met shortly after the beginning of the Christian movement and dogmatized their Old Testament canon and removed those books.
Prostestants accept the canon of the Jewish leadership as concerns the Old Testament. The Catholic canon of Scripture was not dogmatized until after the Protestants decided to print bibles without those books in them.
I can share more details if you like but that covers the general knowledge.
@ catholicray
Your own Catholic Encyclopedia seems to disagree with you Ray: The Catholic Encyclopedia states that:
At Jerusalem there was a renascence, perhaps a survival, of Jewish ideas, the tendency there being distinctly unfavourable to the deuteros. St. Cyril of that see, while vindicating for the Church the right to fix the Canon, places them among the apocrypha and forbids all books to be read privately which are not read in the churches. In Antioch and Syria the attitude was more favourable. St. Epiphanius shows hesitation about the rank of the deuteros; he esteemed them, but they had not the same place as the Hebrew books in his regard. The historian Eusebius attests the widespread doubts in his time; he classes them as antilegomena, or disputed writings, and, like Athanasius, places them in a class intermediate between the books received by all and the apocrypha.
In the Latin Church, all through the Middle Ages we find evidence of hesitation about the character of the deuterocanonicals. There is a current friendly to them, another one distinctly unfavourable to their authority and sacredness, while wavering between the two are a number of writers whose veneration for these books is tempered by some perplexity as to their exact standing, and among those we note St. Thomas Aquinas. Few are found to unequivocally acknowledge their canonicity. The prevailing attitude of Western medieval authors is substantially that of the Greek Fathers. The chief cause of this phenomenon in the West is to be sought in the influence, direct and indirect, of St. Jerome's depreciating Prologus
Nope not until a thousand years after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was the Masoretic text adopted.
This from Wiki: the deuterocanonical books (from the Greek meaning "belonging to the second canon") are books and passages considered by the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church to be canonical books of the Old Testament but which are considered non-canonical by Protestant denominations. They are books from the Septuagint, the standard translation of the Hebrew Bible in the Hellenistic period, written during the reign of Ptolemy II (283–246 BCE) and referenced extensively in the New Testament, particularly in the Pauline Epistles. With the rise of Rabbinic Judaism at the end of the Second Temple Period, the Hebrew Canon was in flux, until the Masoretic Text, compiled between the 7th and 10th centuries, became the authoritative text of the mainstream Rabbinic Judaism.
catholicray,
"I can share more details if you like but that covers the general knowledge."
I'll give you a grade of "C-" for your answer.
The reality is that the Bible contained the Apocrypha until 1881-1885 when the English rewrote it with their English Revised Version at the urging of two malcontents , Westcott & Hort. You can Google them and get background information about them. So the Protestant Bible versions have only existed for less than 138 years.
"While Noah Webster, just a few years after producing his famous Dictionary of the English Language, would produce his own modern translation of the English Bible in 1833; the public remained too loyal to the King James Version for Webster’s version to have much impact. It was not really until the 1880’s that England’s own planned replacement for their King James Bible, the English Revised Version(E.R.V.) would become the first English language Bible to gain popular acceptance as a post-King James Version modern-English Bible. The widespread popularity of this modern-English translation brought with it another curious characteristic: the absence of the 14 Apocryphal books.
Up until the 1880’s every Protestant Bible (not just Catholic Bibles) had 80 books, not 66! The inter-testamental books written hundreds of years before Christ called “The Apocrypha” were part of virtually every printing of the Tyndale-Matthews Bible, the Great Bible, the Bishops Bible, the Protestant Geneva Bible, and the King James Bible until their removal in the 1880’s! The original 1611 King James contained the Apocrypha, and King James threatened anyone who dared to print the Bible without the Apocrypha with heavy fines and a year in jail. Only for the last 120 years has the Protestant Church rejected these books, and removed them from their Bibles. This has left most modern-day Christians believing the popular myth that there is something “Roman Catholic” about the Apocrypha. There is, however, no truth in that myth, and no widely-accepted reason for the removal of the Apocrypha in the 1880’s has ever been officially issued by a mainline Protestant denomination."
https://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/index.html
http://rockingodshouse.com/why-were-14-books-apocrypha-removed-from-the-...
If you do a Google search of this topic you will find an article repeated on several sites that claim that the books were deleted in 1684. That information is wrong.
BTW, you are most likely reading an updated 1769 KJV instead of a 1611 version.
"The only way to obtain a true, unaltered, 1611 version is to either purchase an original pre-1769 printing of the King James Bible, or a less costly facsimile reproduction of the original 1611 King James Bible. A first edition facsimile reproduction of Blaney’s 1769 Revised Oxford Edition of the 1611 King James Bible is also available, which exemplifies the 20,000 spelling and punctuation changes and over 400 wording changes made to the original 1611 to 1768 King James Bible, when compared to King James Bibles published between 1769 and today."
https://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/index.html
I did indeed purchase a facsimile 1611 KJV and you can view photos of the original online. Used to be a KJV only Christian.
The Catholic Encyclopedia is accurate in it’s overview. As I said the Catholic canon was not dogmatized until after Protestants removed those books.
St. Jerome did not support those books as canon but he added them to his translation.
Canon was discussed until it was dogmatized. Regardless those books were included in Catholic bibles.
You’ll have to forgive an old brain and it’s memory.
“When the Christians claimed that they had written new scriptures, Jews from a rabbinical school in Javneh met around year 80 and, among other things, discussed the canon. They did not include the New Testament nor the seven Old Testament works and portions of Daniel and Esther. This still did not settle the Pharisee canon, since not all Jews agreed with or even knew about the decision at Javneh. Rabbis continued to debate it into the second and third centuries. Even today, the Ethiopian Jews use the same Old Testament as Catholics.
If anything is certain, it is that there was no common canon among the Jews at the time of Christ.”
“At the Council of Rome in 382, the Church decided upon a canon of 46 Old Testament books and 27 in the New Testament. This decision was ratified by the councils at Hippo (393), Carthage (397, 419), II Nicea (787), Florence (1442), and Trent (1546).”
“Early Christians read the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. It included the seven deuterocanonical books. For this reason, the Protestant historian J.N.D. Kelly writes, “It should be observed that the Old Testament thus admitted as authoritative in the Church was somewhat bulkier and more comprehensive [than the Protestant Bible]. . . . It always included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the so-called apocrypha or deuterocanonical books (, 53). The authors of the New Testament quoted freely from the Septuagint—over 300 times.“
If you’d like the full article visit:
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-defend-the-deuter...
@ CR
I wondered if you were going to bring the mythical "Council of Javneh" into the discussion. I had a full on argument with my great friend, a Jesuit, about this,many years ago, and he finally agreed it was a story to bolster (like so many other stories) the authority of the church and it's 'approved' texts. The church loves to try and trace its origins back to 33CE and attempt an unbroken line of texts and authority. Of course that is just not true, it never was true, only nowadays we can, without fear of burning, point that out.
From Wiki: The Council of Jamnia, presumably held in Yavneh in the Holy Land, was a hypothetical late 1st-century council at which the canon of the Hebrew Bible was formerly believed to have been finalized and which may also have been the occasion when the Jewish authorities decided to exclude believers in Jesus as the Messiah from synagogue attendance, as referenced by interpretations of John 9:22 in the New Testament. The writing of the Birkat ha-Minim benediction is attributed to Shmuel ha-Katan at the supposed Council of Jamnia.
The theory that Jamnia finalised the canon, first proposed by Heinrich Graetz in 1871, was popular for much of the 20th century. However, it was increasingly questioned from the 1960s onward, and the theory has been largely discredited.
My bold....like most of the historical assertions by the Catholic church, it is just another falsity.
That’s as far as I’ve read but the article I shared corrected my original statement that the Jewish canon was finalized.
Regardless there are other reasons to defend those books. One reason being that the earliest Christians followed the oral teaching of Apostles and councils not the New Testament. New Testament Scripture was a development. What one can say is that those books were preserved and included in the Christian scriptures regardless of debate. Furthermore disagreement among Christians does not constitute Dogma. Otherwise circumcision would be required of gentiles. See Acts Chapter 15.
The Church early on kept those writings and later finalized the canon.
@ Catholicray
No one cannot assert that. In fact we have no idea what the early texts looked like or what they contained. We do know that the early copies of both 'Matthew' and 'Luke' used by both Jewish christians and a major sect of the gentile in the late 1st century CE did not contain the contradictory birth narratives.
The earlies scrap of the gospels is John dated at the very earliest to 125CE, P52, the Rylands fragment, The earliest fragment of the synoptics is dated to 160CE at the earliest, P137 a fragment of 'Mark'. To claim absolute preservation of those texts from the earliest examples to the present is a nonsense. We know they have been altered, that insertions were made that sections were deleted then restated.
We do know the gospels are all anonymous, claims for authorship not made for at least 98 years after some were circulated.
Further we know for a fact that different sects used different versions of the gospels, and yet other gospels that are no longer preserved (by order of the dominant sect). An example of this is the Gospel of Thomas, recently rediscovered but known to have been in common use at least in the middle of the 1st century CE and used to convert and establish churches in India in the Syriac tradition.
We do know that circumcision was required of all converts to christianity until 'Paul" realised the profitability of preaching to the gentiles. Something that he was censured for by the early christians, and was declared apostate by some..
Circumcision and observation of the jewish rites was the hallmark of several major christian sects right up until the 7th century and their final destruction at the hands of the Church Triumphant (the Pauline/Roman meld).
Please refrain from using your holy book as evidence for a claim. The book is the claim. If it is not corroborated by third parties it is only a claim. In this case corroboration is available for the declaring of Paul apostate by the Ebionites Temple in Jerusalem, not the account given in Acts, which is self serving as most of the genuine epistles seem to be.
(edit grammar)
Sources?
@ CR
Regarding the fragments of the gospels that we have: Google P52 Rylands fragment and P137 Gospel of Mark you will find plenty of unimpeachable sources for my assertions. They are historical fact. That is what I deal in.
Similarly google the Ebionites, in fact I wrote an article on these forums regarding them. http://www.atheistrepublic.com/forums/debate-room/history-food-debate-2-...
You will find my OP and the debate with a catholic very interesting and contains much more detail than I have bothered to type here.
I am currently researching another article which I will publish on these forums dealing with a major sect in the 2nd Century.
As regards sources for information: any of the early christian critics of rival sects gives us wonderful (if biased) corroborated evidence of their existence and practises. Even though the Pauline/Roman church attempted to eradicate them from history it is from the very criticism of them, that we can rebuild much of what the other sects believed and practised.
I suggest you read Eusebius, Ignatius and the other critics of the time, red in tooth and claw (all with their own agendas) but please use it to find about their rivals. Fascinating exercise.
Those are my sources, but not limited to them. There is a plethora of material scattered through the world and now freely available from the great centres like the British Museum, Berlin, St Petersburg, University of Tel Aviv, the Smithsonian, Cairo Institute of archeological Studies to name but a few major sources.
Also I follow the publication of the Nag Hammadi Library...more fascinating resources there and keep up with the translation of the Codes Sinaiticus...fascinating the way minor changes in the text from then have perpetrated such errors we experience now in modern versions of the canons.
Also wouldn’t dating of fragments support that Acts was written well before the 7th century? There were many “Christian” sects and much dispute. This is well noted in the Church Fathers. I’m not suggesting the history is easy. There were sects before the apostles died.
But I don’t want to argue. I’m willing to learn.
catholicray,
"Also wouldn’t dating of fragments support that Acts was written well before the 7th century?"
Do you have images of those fragments of pre-7th Century Acts??
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