Hundreds of years? Most of the books in The New Testament were written well within the first century of the crucifixion, and some only ~50 years after.
My only guess at why you picked those fragmented pieces of old testament is to be further misleading. Were you nitpicking old testament verses to try to show they somehow preclude the existence of Jesus Christ?

Old testament prophecies:
Messiah born in Bethlehem: Micah 5:2
Messiah born of a virgin: Isaiah 7:14
Messiah was to be a prophet like Moses: Deuteronomy 18:15,18,19
Messiah to be rejected by his own people: Isaiah 53:1,3 Psalm 118:22
Messiah to be tried and condemned: Isaiah 53:8
Messiah to be struck and spat on by his enemies: Isaiah 50:6
Messiah to be mocked and insulted: Psalm 22:7,8
Messiah to die by crucifixion: Psalm 22:14, 16, 17
Messiah to suffer with criminals and pray for his enemies: Isaiah 53:12
Messiah to die as a sacrifice for sin: Isaiah 53:5,6,8,10,11,12
Messiah to be raised from the dead: Psalm 16:10
Messiah no at God's right hand: Psalm 110:1

 

and of course they havent changed one bit thru translations, edits, etc...

its the same words as the were written at first right..

you are a ****ing idiot, you better hope to god that i never become world controller and rule the universe with my super powers and legion of midget warrior ninjah robots......

 

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lethalpsi, your vitriol clearly shows you have an agenda... what is it?

 

Biblically documented teachings of Jesus Christ clearly show that Jesus is a Liberal. His philosophy, based in compassion, equality, inclusion, forgiveness, tolerance, peace and - most importantly - love, is 100% Liberal.

So will you explain again HD just how this "faith" thing you think you have going works towards salvation?

 

I heard Jesus was a Jew!!!

 

I have a question I'd like you to consider HD. What, if anything, from the scientific community could lead you to determine that there is little or no truth in the Old and New Testament to support your faith? Would you say it is possible that you would lose your faith in the Gospel but not int he existence or nature of God? Or are you unwilling and/or unable to examine your beliefs with a critical eye open to changing them? I'm not being accusatory, this are jsut questions that I don't often get to ask of people with strong faith and its always something I'm curious about.

 

There are always people that will rebel and/or be suspect of everything they've been taught. I don't know if that's human nature or what, but people often think they know it all or have some unique ability to think more critically than those before them... but they don't. This enlightenment that you feel is actual idiotic naivety. You don't know it all, and actually will never know whether historic record is skewed for political or purpose or otherwise. For you, I suspect you have no faith because you don't even believe what is commonly held as fact.

The only thing that we do know is that much of our society accepts the Bible as historic record. The Jews, Christians, and Muslims all agree about our common lineage in Abraham. Many of the Bible stories are evidenced by archeology and science. For instance, remember the story of Jericho where "the walls came tumbling down?" I just searched for Jericho and found this :http://www.answersingenesis.org/crea...i2/jericho.asp
How about sodom and gomorrah? I was watching discoverychannel and scientists found proof that the freaking place was totally charred... search for yourself. You can spin it any way you want, as I'm sure you will .

Hope to see you on the other side, but not any time soon.

 

So, your answer is no, you cannot be swayed from your belief in the Bible as fact?

 

...

 

Wow.. why would you hope that?

 

I believe at least most is fact, and even considering what's known about how those that have twisted religion for political/other purposes (look at the Catholic church and its power), I think that taking it as fact is the faithful thing to do. If you believed that Jesus Christ was your savior, do you think he'd want you to take it as a whole or throw it away? I believe that taking it as a whole is what's right, and that's my personal faith.

But here's the catch... if you believe the New Testament (Gospels in particular) then you don't have to give a care about the old testament (or rest of the Bible), because under grace, only faith in Jesus is what matters.

 

The substantial contents of the bible, meaning the things that one is supposed to take on faith such as Jonah and the whale, King David, Noah's Ark, the story of Genesis, etc. have no physical evidence supporting them. None. Many of them have substantial evidence to the contrary, but most are simply totally uncorroborated by archaeological evidence. There is no indication outside of the Bible that Abraham, Moses, Jewish slaves in Egypt, King Solomon, King David or many others central to Christian faith ever existed. There is decent evidence that a man named Jesus existed when Christ was supposed to have done and was crucified. There is even evidence that Jesus' tomb was empty 3 days after he was crucified, but again that's circumstantial evidence at best. This does little to argue that therefore he is the Messiah and was resurrected however. It would be hard to preach the Gospels if somebody had found dead Jesus in there a few days later...

I do not see how my lack of blind acceptance of what is essentially a collection of old wives' tales and bedtime stories (from a skeptical point of view) makes me inferior to you. In fact, all of human history is littered with constant changes in collective thought. Are Earth, Water, Wind and Fire still the only physical elements of matter in existence? Or is our modern periodic table much closer to the truth? Is lightning the weapon of Zeus, or the Will of God, or the simple manifestation of static electricity brought about by the interaction of dust, air, water, and sunlight? Is the Earth flat and orbited by the Sun, or is it roughly spherical and part of multiple systems of celestial bodies moving around a fixed point far off in space? What is the age of the Earth? Have all species of creatures been in existence since the dawn of Time, or do some of them arise from old ones? The very belief that there is One God is EXACTLY the same kind of thinking that you are chastising me for. When Moses came down from the mountain claiming to have spoken with the one true god, what did everybody else think? They thought he was a nutjob and/or a heretic because he was contradicting the current accepted understanding of the supernatural!

My point is, you can't say "well, some of the bible is factual and literal and some is not." It's all or nothing, and given that so much of the Bible is completely at odds with what we know of the natural world, indeed the universe, it's no wonder that people who profess to have faith can't ask certain questions with a fair and open mind regarding the answer, and those who do ask those questions cannot readily accept religious teachings by any sanctioned western religion. So we come back to my point from the second post of the thread. Does one have to believe in God to believe in the New and Old Testament? Absolutely. Does one have to believe in the writings of the New and Old Testament to believe in God? Of course not. Personally, I do not find individual faith in God, even as Christians understand Him to be, at all irrational. I do find a steadfast belief that the Bible is the true Word of God and contains no fallacies or fiction to be silly. As I said, we can contradict and disprove the assertions made in the Bible all day long, and it only affects human understanding of God, not His existence. Do you think Copernicus or Galileo or da Vinci or Newton were atheists at heart? Do you think Charles Darwin pursued his work on The Origin of Species because he believed no god existed and wanted to prove that? No. Darwin in fact said he felt more asured that God existed when he had come to understand his theory of evolution. All of those men along with other giants of science like Einstein did not generally lose their faith in God even after completing their most famous works. They contradicted or differed from the Bible in most cases and sometimes lost their lives because of it, but so what? Does God exist because we wrote some books about him? Or did we write some books because God exists, and maybe didn't get the facts straight yet?

You answered this in part yourself with the last part of your post. As for faith in the miracles of Christ as set forth by the apostles, well... how many could be disproven and still leave you with faith that Christ was still the Son of God and your salvation for eternity? One? Half? All BUT one? If someone proved tomorrow that Jesus didn't walk on water, would you say "well, but he still cured the blind and turned water into wine."? Or would you still believe in Christ as your savior even if you no longer believed He performed miracles while on Earth at all?

I cannot accept the book of Genesis to be in any way factual or true. No "interpretation" or "well 7 days for God is like millennia for us" or any other such nonsense. Hell, the contradiction of the Creation of Woman is enough to discredit that Book. And I also cannot take the rest of the Old or New testament on faith, because the requirement to do so is the same as the requirement for Genesis- "a long time ago, some guys who were there(or maybe just knew someone who was) saw this happen. They tell us the truth and we must believe accordingly." So why would I believe John, Paul and the others but not the ones who wrote Genesis and others?

Now, can I accept the existence of God, who created the natural world around us, which has been in motion since the beginning of time and which we are slowly beginning to understand how it works? Sure. Do I have to believe that people before me figured it all out first? No.

Quite correct IMO. Or rather, that is how I interpret the New Testament. The coming of the Messiah fulfilled the obligations of God set forth in the Old Testament, which made it obsolete. But boy, that sure opens up a whole new can of worms with the way American religious conservatives think we should be doing things.