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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (544269)	2/23/2004 4:59:21 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

I've always wondered if Adam and Eve had any daughters.....and did they all reproduce without incest....

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (544269)	2/23/2004 7:11:41 PM
From: Johannes Pilch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Well if this is your "grand problem" you ought to just accept the truth of the Scriptures right now. This is nothing. I think you simply misunderstand the concept of inerrancy. When I was a heathen, I looked into this matter and the answer I received made quite a lot of sense. The theologian to which I spoke took a bible from his shelf. He opened it to reveal that it was missing whole sections of books, some pages were even upside down. The systems that copied, collated and bound this text had malfunctioned. We knew this because we had other texts elsewhere that more accurately represented the original content. We call such texts "witnesses." A witness text can be any copy of a canonical text that addresses a region of Scripture in such a way that when cross-referenced it reveals the content of the original. We do not have the exact texts penned by the Patriarchs and the Apostles. But we have many thousands of witness texts of these originals, copies that are nearly miraculous in their mutual testimony of the original content. My theologian friend and I were able to use witness texts to get to the bottom of the flawed text from his shelf, and we are able to do it with the text you mention here. Merely because a character is missing in a biblical text is no reason to declare the Bible "wrong." It is instead reason to find witnesses or deductive approaches to get to the truth of the original content. The literal pages and characters in the Bible are not magic, and few Christians think of them as such, not even fundamentalists. Innerrancy means that the original content, verifiable with textual witnesses or where incomplete - accepted on faith, were without flaw despite the minor errors in their copies. Here is how we know without any reasonable doubt at all who the Scriptures declare killed David. 1st Samuel 17:50 claims: "Thus David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, and he struck the Philistine and killed him; but there was no sword in David’s hand." 2nd Samuel 21:19 claims: "And there was war with the Philistines again at Gob, and Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim the Bethlehemite killed Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam." We see two different battles described in two different verses. But Goliath dies in both battles! We already know Goliath was dead by this second battle at Gob, so then clearly there is a copyist error here. Now it is time to take a look at the early texts to find how such an error was made and who really did kill Goliath. What we find is that the error was very small. We see that in the 2nd Sam text, the symbol of the direct object was '-t. The copyist mistook it for b-t ("Beth") and thus made it Bet hal-Lahmi ("the Bethlehemite"). He erred on the word for "brother"('-h), taking it as the sign of the direct object '-t right before the word for "Goliath". So then "Goliath" became the object of "killed", instead of the "brother" of Goliath. (see G. Archer's "Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties," page 179. Now you are asking 'how do we even know that the "brother" of Goliath was intended in the first place?' We know this without any doubt at all because we have a textual witness separate from 2nd Samuel that testifies to it. In 1 Chronicles 20:5 we see the following: "5 And there was war again with the Philistines; and Elhanan the son of Jair slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite, whose spear staff was like a weaver’s beam. We see here the same event as described in 2 Sam, using even the same words and containing greater detail. This is why when theologians release translations of the 2nd Samuel text, the words "brother of" are inserted and italicized, and we can be very sure the words are without any error at all.