At the risk of a minor thread hijack
Quote:
Originally Posted by InOne
(Post 2615825)
A man coming back from the dead.
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I am assuming you are referring to the resurrection of Christ. According to
1 Corinthians 15:12-19 this is key to the Christian faith. The Bible teaches that Christ took all the sins of the world upon him when he died, and his resurrection was so there could be forgiveness of sins so people could be saved from their sins if they came to Christ.
Ideally a study of the system of sacrifices the Jews had in the Old Testament might give an idea of how this work, as it was a shadow of what was to come.
A good summary can be found sort of in
Hebrews 9, particularly
Hebrews 9:22.
In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.
Unfortunately this may be hard for some to understand here, and the Bible does recognise that fact.
Quote:
Originally Posted by InOne
(Post 2615825)
The contradictions in all the gospals when they tell of the birth of Jesus.
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Actually there are only two gospels which detail Jesus Birth. Matthew and Luke. Matthew was aimed at Jewish Christians and Luke at gentiles. They come at this story from different angles and at different times. The common nativity play some may have had to perform at school bear little relationship to the actual gospel account. My favourite bug bear is the portrayal of three kings visiting a baby Jesus along with the shepherds while he is in the stable.
WRONG!
That is not what the Bible actually said. The number of magi or wise men is not stated. Only three different gifts. When they came to him, he was in a house, not the stable and Herod slew male infants of two years and under, giving some indication of time. Jesus was two when the magi visited. This is not the fault of the Bible, but of people's misconception of events. Luke takes place around his birth. Matthew starts at the beginning, but jumps forward in time, so you can see both gospels not only are aimed at different groups but also recount events in two different time frames.
Quote:
Originally Posted by InOne
(Post 2615825)
The fact that the idea, of the son of god and resurrection is ridiculously similar to the Egyptian religions.
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I am assuming you are referring to the legend of
Osiris. If you compare the two stories of the resurrection of Osiris and that of Christ. You will find a wide gulf between them.
Osiris after being murdered by Set was bought back from the dead so Isis could get pregnant and give birth to Horus, and then Osiris died again.
In Christian theology, Christ laid down his life and died on a cross, executed by the Roman authorities. He then rises from the dead and continues to live at the right hand of the father.
Totally different from the Egyptian mythologies
Quote:
Originally Posted by InOne
(Post 2615825)
Also the NT was written about 50 years after Jesus's death, and longer in some cases.
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Compare that to other historical documents from antiquity. The times between the event and the first time it is written down is considerably longer. In historical terms the time between the events of the New Testament and it being written down is
quite short. Also we are not limited to the New Testament as we also have the writings of Flavious Josephus and Tacitus
Quote:
Originally Posted by InOne
(Post 2615825)
What is in the bible today is what the Catholic chuch decided, why choose some gospals and not others?
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The Cannon of scripture at this point should be split into two parts the Old Testament and the New Testament.
By the time of Jesus, the cannon of the Old Testament had been fixed by Jewish scholars. It was decided long before the existence of the Roman Catholic Church.
As for the New Testament, a cannon had emerged and the Conference of Nicea in 325CE merely just ratified what already known.
There is of course the argument that there are other books not included. First with regard to the apocrypha. None of those books were ever quoted by Jesus and were always considered to be uninspired.
The other texts like the Pseudopycrypha and the gnostic gospels were written by known heretics.
If you study them, they had some really odd passages which are at total variance with the rest of the New Testament.