Monday, September 18, 2017

The Holy Bible is perfect, but all people stumble (even in what they say)

Update: The Holy Bible can, I believe, indeed be said to be perfectly designed with conflicts between the words of the Lord Jesus and other words in itPlease see my Translator's Preface to The Christ Family Bible.

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Several years ago, in early 2012, I began researching how Israelites, Jews and Christians preserved memories. What is the primary example of this for Christians? Christ Jesus of Nazareth instructed His disciples to celebrate their meals together in a memorial to Jesus, with the two witnesses of bread commemorating Jesus's broken body and wine commemorating Jesus's spilt blood.


The research work led to the progressive realization that these communities followed memory traditions and very strict witness rules, which together explain the form of the Holy Scriptures. 

The two main rules for testimony were (1) No false testimony, and (2) Multiple corroborating witnesses required. Even Jesus of Nazareth is described as following these testimony rules. If He followed them, it is highly likely that His disciples did too. And that gives us a key for understanding a range of difficulties with the New Testament texts. 

In one and the same book, The Acts of the Apostles, an incident is reported in two conflicting ways. What is the best explanation for this? One explanation is that the book is assembled from different original texts: it doesn't have one author. If that were so, why wouldn't the editor(s) edit away the conflict between the two reports of St. Paul's encounter with the Lord on the road to Damascus (Acts 9 & 22)? If instead a single human author wrote Acts, and he followed the two rules of testimony that Christ Jesus did, we have an excellent explanation of why he preserved the conflicting testimonies:

(1) When Luke himself needed to record the history of St. Paul's conversion, he wrote it in Acts 9, in his own voice. 

(2) When Luke recorded the history of St. Paul's later speech in Jerusalem, he wrote it in Acts 22, and followed what St. Paul said.

(3) It is entirely acceptable and predictable that even St. Paul could have stumbled in his own words about a detail of the events on the road to Damascus (e.g. mixing up whether his travelling companions did not hear the voice or did not see the light; compare 9:7 with 22:9). This is because Holy Scripture itself tells us, when reasoning about why very few should be Christian teachers, that "we all stumble" in many ways, or a lot (James 3:1-2).

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