BE:
-This consideration bears even more weight when one considers that
-the divinely inspired work in question--the New Testament--was
-written by several persons, and these repeated passages are found
-spread over their writings (e.g.  the Gospels).  God must have
> Which, when read horizontally and comparatively show marked
> differences in matters of stated 'fact'.
Not all of them.  For example, check out Mark 6.1-6 and Matthew
13.54-58.  But clearly you would be right about Luke.  Luke at
4.16-30, while covering some of the same material as found in
these other two passages, greatly expands on them, directly
implying with quoted text that Jesus actually read a passage out
of Isaiah at the Synagogue.  Of course, because this expansion
is not found in the other accounts, it must be considered either
a forgery, a later interpolation, or a simple invention by Luke.
But it may also be faulted on the Fundamentalist ground that the
authors of the Gospels were divinely inspired.  If God inspired
Luke to write that expansion, come He did not inspire Mark and
Matthew to do so?  Clearly, this was not an accident.  God must
have had second thoughts.  The Lukan expansion, on Fundamentalist
grounds, must therefore be weak evidence of God's inspiration.
BE:
-inspired them all to write those same passages.  But His
-inspiration must have been weak, where a passage occurred only
-once and in only one Gospel.  If God reached Mark, but not Matthew
>Ah..."Weak inspiration".  That's nice.  (My responses are rhetorical
>and not necessarily directed at you personally. ;>)
BE>and Luke, His failure must have been deliberate.  He must have
>Sounds an awful lot like lying to me...
BE:
-intended that Matthew and Luke not write the passage in question,
-notwithstanding that all three authors were writing about the same
-things.
>So the 'divine inspiration' wasn't good enough to make them
>consistent.  I see.
BE:
-The content of Mark 16.18 occurs only once in the Bible.  In
>Indeed.  There are various responses to this by inerrantists; one
>of the most interesting of which is the contention that it doesn't
>really belong in the Bible at all.
Is that a response of an inerrantist??
This is the judgment of the critical scholar, not the
inerrantist.   The inerrantist is going to believe that Mark
16.9-20 is genuine Mark (and therefore does belong in the Bible)
no matter what the argument about the issue is.
The idea that 16.9-20 does not belong in Mark is a conclusion
almost exclusively expressed by critical scholars.
BE:
-Obviously, the passage at Mark 12.30-31 was MORE divinely inspired
-than the one at Mark 16.18.  Mark 16.18 is therefore less divinely
>Now I see!  Some of it MORE divinely inspired!  That's how some
>parts can be 'trusted', and some ignored!  How wonderfully
>convenient!  That does, however, cast more than a shadow of doubt
>on the 'omnipotence/omniscient' issue.
BE:
-the divinely inspired Matthew and Luke did not repeat it is pretty
-good evidence that God had second thoughts about Mark 16.18.
>Ah.  "Second thoughts".  Got it AFU the first time, eh?
BE:
-Of course, none of this implies that God exists.  What we're
>Sure it IMPLIES it.  None of it is any *evidence*, though.
I merely meant to make a remark about what the Fundamentalist
should believe about his Bible, if he really does consider it to
be divinely inspired.
BE:
-addressing here are the rational grounds on which the
-Fundamentalist SHOULD believe that some passages of the Bible are
-more reliable than others, notwithstanding that all of them are
-assumed by him to be divinely inspired.
>Well, somewhere in the world, there may be someone with the
>insight and ability to tell what kind of neural misfiring takes
>place in the minds of fundamentalists, but I don't claim to be
>one of them.
Actually, if you argue with fundamentalists fairly closely,
sticking to internal questions about how they analyse texts (as
opposed to constantly raising external questions as to whether the
texts are true), you will discover that they do not really accept
the words they read in the Bible.  In fact, they merely use the
Bible as a kind of meaningless incantation to which they attach
their personal meanings and philosophies.  They in fact do not use
the Bible as a source of data to measure their own beliefs.  In
fact, they almost never treat the Bible as divinely inspired, even
though the hypothesis that it is so inspired is part of their
abstract doctrine.
BE:
-How, therefore, should WE interpret such a fact?  My answer is
-that the Fundamentalist position is in fact INTERNALLY incoherent,
-i.e., where his assumptions about God and God's inspiration are
-fully granted.  The fundamentalist wants to regard the Bible as
-divinely inspired; at the same time, however, he ignores clear
-signs in the Bible that God's inspiration was not all the same
-through its texts.  That is to say, he ignores and rejects God's
-inspiration.
>When it is convenient.  Absolutely.
 BE> His position is therefore apostasy in its own terms.
>Yes.  Good post.
Bob
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