Serpent-Handling' West Virginia Pastor Dies From Snake Bite REDUX
tredzwater
2012/05/31 11:50:16
I noticed this thread and also noted that there were no responses from Bible believers (as far as I got). It could be just that biblicists see this as a losing cause or it could be because the author blocks so may people, so I thought I'd offer this up, open to anyone, and see if any Christians want to respond. If you do, you will not be blocked.
If you don't...that's cool.
I would like to comment that the passage in Mark about poison or snakes or "tongues" isn't in the earliest manuscripts. In the early ones, Mark ends at 16:8. Later forgeries (aka "apocryphal additions") are the ones that talk about snakes.
How sad to die for a hoax.
atheist humanitarians there if I make it. As for what the early bible looked like. Who from then
is around to say its the same or diffrent? Nothing can be proven sonothingshould be forced.
"Noone thought up being he who thinks he has step forward" Jim Morrison.
My thinking is that if you don't try to make your little corner of the world better, just a tiny bit better, than it would have been without you, from womb to tomb, your life is a waste.
If I'm right about your meaning, it appears you think the forgeries were judged on how they look and that just isn't the case. Biblical scholars use carbon dating, handwriting and word usage to judge a manuscript's date. For example, if a manuscript refers to King Herod but is claimed to be written at a time before Herod was born, scholars know it was written much later than is claimed for it.
If an original is written in one handwriting and a copy is in a different handwriting and contains added words, we know that those words likely didn't come from the original. Especially as handwritten script changed over time, as it still does. So, if a document is written in, for example, a script called "Scribal A" and another is written in "Scribal B" but "Scribal B" wasn't invented until 200 years after "A", we know which was earlier and which was later.
The Markian addenda fail all tests and are likely just one sect's, or even one writer's, beliefs making it into the Bible.
It's a forgery and a man died for it.
Besides the snake-handling, this "tongues" thing is vastly amusing. The Greek for "tongues", in the Greek Testament means, as we also use it, "languages". That la_la_ila_bibbity_bobbity_boo stuff the Penties pull is not a "language". It's called "echolalia" and is completely made up. IOW, they are faking it.
Pentecostal dogma is that if you can't speak in tongues, the Holy Spirit hates you so there is a huge amount of pressure to learn the trick of it. While I do concede that some borderline psychotics actually think they are speaking a language, most of them know that they are just copying what the others do.
They're phonies.
According to the Bible, the purpose for the Apostles being given the "gift of tongues" was to enable them to go into all countries and preach...vastly easier if you speak the language. Imagine the Pentecostals trying to convert, say the Danish or the Egyptians, with that bibbitybobbityboo nonsense!
I had a neighbor who used to be Pentecostal and became a Deist. She said that, as a girl, once she realized she'd get perks and attention, she'd go into the woods and practice until she got it right. She said that the attention she got actually started her on the road toward unbelief.
She was 11 or 12 at the time and she said everyone was going nuts over her "overshadowing" by the "Holy Spirit" and the "sisters" standing up and "translating" her nonsense. She said to me, "Tredz, I KNEW that it was me. I had practiced for hours. So I started wondering if the rest of them did the same thing." Once that fell, everything else followed.
Now she thinks that there probably is a creator being of some sort but she says that she doesn't care.