Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: phys-bb@garnet.berkeley.edu Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: inconsistencies in the Bible (digest of postings) Message-ID: Date: 15 Dec 89 06:39:37 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 41 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I just want to put in my 2 cents worth into this discussion. It doesn't matter to me if the Bible has little warts on it here and there. It's better to take book as an organic whole, not as some type of computer code where if one little comma is left out you get major screwups. My faith rests on the historical fact of the resurrection and emanates from that. All this having been said, I think a lot of people are too quick to say that there are inconsistencies in the Bible. They don't think deeply enough about the specific passages in question. Also, part of the problem is that we can't precisely reconstruct the contexts in which these various passages were written. I applaud Dave Mielke's comments on specific problem passages (sorry, I forgot to include his article), like the two accounts of the early life of Jesus, the 'no man has seen God. . .' passage, etc. Here is another 'contradictory' pair. Let no one say these are contradictory passages without considering these thoughts. Matthew and Luke give two different genealogies for Jesus. The discrepancy sticks out like a sore thumb; thus the Bible compilers must have known about it, and they don't seem to have been too troubled by it. The standard answer to this 'inconsistency' is to say that one list is Jesus' ancestry through Joseph and the other through Mary. But both go through a man named Joseph. So what do we think. Well, there were more than one Joseph around in Jesus's day. In fact, ancient traditions have Joseph, Mary's husband, dying early in Jesus's life, so that Jesus came under the care of Joseph of Arimathea, who was Mary's uncle. This is why Luke says that 'it was supposed' that Jesus was the son of Joseph; it's talking of Joe of A. Matthew can only say that Joseph was the husband of Mary, since Jesus had no physical father. So Luke actually does go through Mary's bloodline. phys-bb@garnet.berkeley.edu ". . .into the narrow lanes, (John Warren) I can't stumble or stay put. . ."