Donating = Loving
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.
Log in or create an account to join the discussions on the Atheist Republic forums.
Donating = Loving
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.
Donating = Loving
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.
FREE E-BOOKS
Get the book "Why There Is No God" and one more book for FREE!
Sign up below for the Atheist Republic Newsletter to get the books.
Record Your Message!
Record your voice here for it to be aired on the Atheist Republic Voicemails Podcast.
Send us your views and opinions, your personal stories, messages of support, comments on recent news, or any comments you would like to share about your part of the world.
Note : By clicking record you are allowing us to broadcast your message on any of our platforms.
Affiliate Disclaimer
Links to atheist related books, shirts and movies and other atheism related products are affiliate links.
All proceeds will go to keeping the Atheist Republic website up and running; providing resources, advocacy, community tools and encouragement to atheists all over the world.
Everyone else seems to have understood what the thread was asking based on the comments. Why didn't you?
Clearly that isn't the case, since you felt the need to tell Chicken:
" I don't really care if you believe the bible, I care if it's the most effective method of communicating it's message"
We'd hardly disbelieve it if its method of communication was effective.
"The point of the thread is effectiveness not accuracy. "
Are messages that are meant to be true, but that are inaccurate, usually effective?
Breezy: "The point of the thread is effectiveness not accuracy."
The two go hand in hand. Even if a fiction, if you ain't accurate in your story, it ain't gonna be effective.
The only problem with the Bible is that is NOT accurate, nor is it effective.
rmfr
"You said that using writing style as proof of anything beyond the writers wit is a fallacy. The Unabomber was essentially caught because of his writing style."
Did his writing style make what he wrote valid? Why does a message from an omniscient contain obvious errancy?
Breezy, how is it you can draw the loosest of associations imaginable from a set of facts. You would take a build it yourself bike out of the box and make yourself a wonderful set of earrings. You are either completely dishonest or completely incapable of logical thought and reasoning. (STOP LISTENING TO THE VOICES IN YOUR HEAD AND LISTEN TO THE CHICKEN) /
"His brother noticed language being used in the letters in the press that matched the strange language his brother would use. Just subtle broken things, but things that go beyond what other posters here mention like "views on life" For example, he might write versa vice instead of vice versa. His brother also remembered giving him some money for medical reasons around the time that some activity had increased. His brother, fearing the worse, reached out to a lawyer and from there they reached out to the authorities."
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH NARRATION. NOTHING TO DO WITH WRITING. THE UNI BOMBERS BROTHER RECOGNIZED HIS OWN BROTHER'S LETTER FORMATION AND THE WAY HE TALKED / WROTE IN HIS LETTERS. (IDEAS ABOUT LIFE.) This is so far away from the topic of "Narration" as to be psychologically Bizarre interpretations on your part. Did you forget to take your little blue pill this morning?
Duh it has nothing to do with narration. Congrats on figuring out water is wet.
OK, granted that different witnesses of the same event may have different perceptions on what happened, this is not what happened with the bible. The passages of the bible were written by unknown authors at least a hundred years AD.
What we are dealing with is not different accounts by different witnesses, but rather "Chinese whispers", also know as the telephone game. When a tale is passed along orally, it DOES change as it passes through different people. That is why this hearsay is never admissible in court.
This hearsay is also the reason why there are inconsistencies in the bible. By the time an event reaches a writer a hundred years later via the oral method, there are multiple tales of the same event.
I don't think that's what's happening here; however it is something that we can easily test. We have the gospels available, do you think if we played a game of telephone with them, we would get the type of variation that exists among them? For example, ask somebody to read or memorize the entire gospel of Matthew, and then see if they are able to rewrite it, such that the difference are similar to those of Mark?
Or in what sense do you think the game of telephone occurred?
"I don't think that's what's happening here; however it is something that we can easily test. We have the gospels available, do you think if we played a game of telephone with them, we would get the type of variation that exists among them?"
We can not test this hypothesis because we have no knowledge of what the original event was. We know what the final script is, it is written in the bible. But we have absolutely no idea what the original event was. No one can prove that it was a genuine miracle or just some dude stubbing his toe. You can not reverse engineer a story to discover the original tale. Especially one thousands of years old and all the participants very dead.
But it is an established fact that with the telephone game that the original message does get garbled.
"Or in what sense do you think the game of telephone occurred?"
There were eyewitnesses to some event. People recounted what happened via oral transmission through multiple people until at least a hundred years after the event someone put a tale to paper.
One must also be cognizant that when one wishes to tell another a story, it can easily be embellished because no one tells or listens to boring stories.
The "original" doesn't matter. If your hypotheses is true, any of the gospels can become the parent document that can produce "gospel-like" variations.
Telephone games tend to garble messages in a fundamentally different way than the variation among eye witness. Primarily because one makes use of episodic memories while the other leans towards semantic memories. It doesn't go from "I saw one person" to "I saw two people," it turned to something like "I ate one Carson."
But again, we can do the experiment. My hypothesis is that by the time you read Matthew 2, you already forgot most of Matthew 1.
Are you attempting to claim it is not feasible to memorize some or most of the Bible?
There's a difference between memorizing and remembering what you read. Theres no memorizing in telephone games generally. But asking someone to memorize one of the gospels and write it from memory does give another good experiment.
Have you ever heard a story, then tried to retell it? You definitely don’t garble words like in a telephone game. You just retell it in different wording, because you understand the plot of the story, just not the exact wording used. Sometimes you forget about one character, sometimes you put emphasis on a specific part of the story that stood out to you. It all varies per person, but if you claim that it’s exactly like a game of telephone then you weren’t thinking of how it would play out in reality. The game of telephone is just a point of reference to the passing on of stories orally while messing them up a little as they pass from person to person.
No one memorized shit in "Oral Cultures." It did not happen that way. Reference Bhart Ehrman and Richard Carrier.
Relaying exact information was not necessary until the creation of writing. With writing came the idea of "Books" and with "Books" came the idea that my book should be the same as your book. NO effort was made to be consistent in content or message in oral cultures. NONE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLYNtPxN29E
Nothing in Oral tradition was consistent.
Good, so we can throw out telephone game as an explanation of the variation.
***facepalm***
Oh the idiocy...
***still facepalming***
rmfr
@ʝօɦn 6IX ɮʀɛɛʐy
"My hypothesis is that by the time you read Matthew 2, you already forgot most of Matthew 1."
Then your mind is a colander and can not properly retain memories. In all seriousness, I suggest you get medical treatment for what appears to be a serious memory disorder.
My memory appears to be just fine based on the research. I suggest you begin diving into the literature. The funny ones are those that ask people to read a chapter, and they are periodically interrupted and aske to report what they just read. Lo and behold, people usually have no idea. They zone out while reading and go into autopilot.
@ Breezy
"these are disparities you would expect to see, and do see, when people who experienced the same event retell their stories later.
No, this a well travelled route...the synoptic gospels were all COPIED from Mark. Not one of the gospels are eye witness accounts. The errors are because all the authors were trying to appeal to a different audience, Luke contains the exact same errors as Mark when it comes to Jewish practice, they are corrected in Matthew because it was directed at a jewish audience.
You are aware that both Matthew and Luke both did not have the whole virgin birth thing in some texts? How does that jibe with the whole eye witness account? Never mind the disparities in the stories that do make it in to the Pauline versions?
Sorry Breezy, Fail on this one. Been debunked many many times.
ʝօɦn 6IX ɮʀɛɛʐy,
" I don't know to what extent you think things like the gospels were fabricated and written years after the event by people that weren't there, vs written by the people that were there."
How have you gotten through school when it is evident that you simply can't think? Who in the hell was there to write about events that happened when there was just one character in the scene? Was there a stenographer flying around the sky with Satan and Yeshua recording their words and actions? Who saw Jacob wrestle God? There are countless other examples of stories involving single characters. So who wrote the dialogue and action? If someone wrote a story about what you did today would you believe it because it is in narrative form?
@ʝօɦn 6IX ɮʀɛɛʐy
"Its proof that it is written by someone that is recounting an event, as opposed to fabricating it. I don't know to what extent you think things like the gospels were fabricated and written years after the event by people that weren't there, vs written by the people that were there."
Get it through your head that nothing in the bible is a first person account that was documented immediately after the event. All of it was verbally passed from person to person for the first hundred years AD. And by the time any event was put to paper, all of the original witnesses were very dead.
How do you verify your hypothesis? Anything passed down orally leaves no evidence. Moreover you already said we don't have the original documents, so how do you know when they were written?
@ʝօɦn 6IX ɮʀɛɛʐy
"Moreover you already said we don't have the original documents, so how do you know when they were written?"
OK, let me run this past you again because you are either trolling or your memory is really fucked up.
Whatever happened with this jesus dude was witnessed. Those witnesses did not put their recollections to paper but just passed along their tales to others. And so those verbal tales spread person to person at least to one hundred years AD. Finally some authors started to put those tales to paper.
I have no issues with what you're saying, I'm asking for your evidence, since you seem to know a lot about who told what to who, before it was written down. Luke says he compiled such narratives and wrote them down in the way you described, but I'm not the one that casts doubt on such accounts, because John claims to have been there.
@ʝօɦn 6IX ɮʀɛɛʐy
"I'm asking for your evidence, since you seem to know a lot about who told what to who, before it was written down."
Sheesh, I don't, and no one knows who told what to who, before it was written down. That is the main point that is obviously sailing over your head. How many times do I have to say "verbal" before it sinks in.
So, when I argue that the disimilarities across the gospels are like those we see among eye witnesses. I'm supposed to get it across my head that no, they were passed down verbally before they were written down by others. Yet if I ask for evidence of that, you don't have any. Correct?
Provide any proof that any accounts of the things that happened to jesus were recorded by a witness who was there.
What do you think I was doing when I compared the variations between the gospels, to the variation between eye witness accounts; as well as contrasting them with those of a telephone game as you suggested?
Pages