by MeDeFe on Tue Dec 05, 2006 7:05 am
jay, maybe you should actually spend some time reading the bible instead of web pages and pay some attention and use the common sense that people usually have. "Scientific accuracy" and "medical knowledge" as it's called is old news, it's impudent to believe that this knowledge could only be found in the bible. Far more likely this knowledge was written down and later became part of the bible than that someone was sitting around and was suddenly inspired by god and wrote down a sentence like "blood is life" and everyone went "aha! That explains why people die if the bleed".
Sorry jay, but you can't pass that off as divinely inspired wisdom.
The authors of later books of course knew about the older books and had read them, too. It's no big surprise if they correspond to each other and refer to each other. This is called "intertextuality".
There is also something I like to call "poetic freedom", this applies to expressions like "the stars are uncountable"as well as to sentences like "he hangs the earth on nothing".
And how long do you think a papyrus scroll or parchment lasts? Sooner or later will become unreadable, so it has to be copied regularly if you want to preserve the text. And do you have any idea how many errors and changes both intended and unintended find their way into a text when it is copied by hand and not by using ctrl+c, ctrl+v? I study linguistics and I can tell you this: lots.
An additional prophecy or a small change in the wording isn't hard to facilitate, we tend to see texts as something static, but they really change all the time.
If a person fulfills several prophecies that point to him as the messiah he might be doing it on purpose. If Jesus had a cause he thought it was worth to die for he might have staged the last few years of his life as the prophesied messiah and been using the subsequent attention direceted towards his person to propagate his ideals.
I mean, even today some people are prepared to die for what they perceive to be a worthy cause or a holy war.
The "Old" and "New" Testaments were both assembled over the same period of time, practically simultaneously with the Torah. The different religious groups wish to make a clearer distinction between each other certainly played a part here.
Before this the different books were literally separate pieces of writing on one topic. Like different textbooks on english grammar. They are different but they deal with the same topic.
A consensus within a major part of the christian movement on the order of the different books was only reached after several hundred years. And even then Catholics and Orthodox Christians didn't agree, if I remember my source correctly. I don't remember it all, but it's in the introduction to the King James authorized version of the bible, Oxford University Press. I'll add the editors and the year when I get around to check it. They also provide a nice list of books they used.
