Oldest Known Fragment of the New Testament Found

The only book in the Bible I enjoyed was Esther. That was a badass story with very minimal God involvement.

Oh, and Daniel getting chucked into the lions' den was alright too.

Amphibianist.

Because it is what I believe. Do you tailor your belief systems in a way to maximize acceptability?

Why?

For one, to me the Bible being literally "bookended" by symbolic accounts of literally the beginning and end of the world makes an orderly, logical sense.

For another, a science fiction short story years ago in an anthology which was about Moses and Aaron talking. Moses is dictating Genesis to Aaron and starts off with "In the beginning, approximately 14.7 billion years ago".

To which Aaron informs Moses that he has only enough papyrus to describe God creating the world in six days. So begrudgingly, Moses edits the story of creation down to the well known six day account.

My father in law (who has been a Baptist minister for decades) when he heard me summarize the story said "Could have happened that way"

In my opinion, more Christians should read science fiction. All sorts of concepts become more understandable if you know science fiction. For example the question of free will vs. an omniscient God is more understandable if you are familiar with the concepts of alternate worlds and alternate realities.

Well, smacking around the Old Testament really doesn't affect the New Testament very much, and at one point Christianity almost ditched the entire Old Testament as a bunch of Jewish fairy tales. Many Christians still think the OT should be dumped, along with the Book of Revelations (which must have been inspired by some divine weed). The stance of most Christians is that the OT was superseded and is just kept for a bit of background. Some scholars have made a good argument that the two books don't even belong together at all, and that the God in the Old Testament isn't remotely the same as the God in the New Testament.

Except insofar as they're both dangerous lunatics who shouldn't be trusted to manage a Taco Bell, let alone serve as any kind of deity.

Contrasting the Priestly Writer's god (Elohim) with the Jahwist's (Yahweh) is more interesting.

The Priestly Writer is a derivative hack compared to the Jahwist, although I wonder if the Jahwist went with Yahweh as a stab at whoever was running around claiming the big god was Elohim, because the Jahwist uses Elohim only to refer to angels, so the Jahwist was indirectly saying that Elohim were flunkies and servants in the grand scheme of things. But once the original text is canon, there's not much anyone else could do to poke back at the Yahweh name but to textually insist that he was Elohim all along.

Have you heard of a book called In the Day? It is the text attributed to the Jahwist (and has a much larger part B).
Oddly enough "In the Day" was probably the original title of the work that spawned it all, as they hadn't invented separate titles yet and just referred to a text by the opening line of each a scroll or body of scrolls, and the Jahwist starts out with "In the day..."

I can agree with that, but that seems like a strange position coming from one who's a member of the COC.

Not just a fake beard but she had to walk around saying "Hey, how about those Cubs this season?"
And saying "I would destroy that chick!" every time you see or hear Selena Gomez.

I don't tailor my "belief" system to "maximize acceptability," by any stretch of the imagination. If I did, I damned sure wouldn't be an atheist living in Assrape, TN. (Where there's a church on every block, and a girl's a virgin as long as she can run faster than her male relatives.) I accept, as fact, what science determines to be accurate. That is not a "belief system," that is a recognition that you can have a system by which you can test ideas and see if they're true or not. Additionally, the conclusions can be independently verified, so if one person makes a mistake, there's a good chance it will eventually be corrected. Call me when you've got hard evidence of Jesus having been nailed to the cross and that there is an afterlife.

Now, are you ever going to answer these questions:
http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/2689445/

http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/2689463/

Don't tell that to Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson • Rev. Joseph Bracken, SJ • Marc Brettler, PhD • Rabbi Sharon Brous • Philip Clayton, PhD • Alan Dershowitz • Rabbi Elliot Dorff, PhD • Rev. Kim Dorr-Tilley • Father Michael Duffy • Reb Mimi Feigelson • Francis Cardinal George, OMI • David J. Gilner, PhD • David Gushee, PhD • Ken Ham • Governor Mike Huckabee • Rabbi Lewis Kamrass • Rabbi Vernon Kurtz • Rabbi Asher Lopatin • Richard Mouw, PhD • Rabbi Elazar Muskin • Tammi J. Schneider, PhD • Jenna Segal • Jim Showers • Erick Stakelbeck • Bill Sutter • Bishop Kenneth C. Ulmer, PhD • Chezare A. Warren, PhD • Rabbi David Wolpe

All of whom think that Genesis is vitally important for America.

Didn't they play for the state football title just three years ago?

So, you're not going to answer the questions are you?

Depends. Am I obligated to answer questions not asked in good faith?

Yes.

^ Well it is possible that some 3 million people wandered around the Sinai for 40 years. They were not lost. God led them there and basically kept them out there to die because they repeatedly turned against him.

Of course, looking at the general tone of the accounts of the Jews during the death of the first borns, to me it implies that not all Jews journeyed with Moses and the others so it is quite possible that numbers vary by a wide number.

You're not obligated to do jack. However, if everyone dodged questions they found inconvenient by declaring them to be "not asked in good faith," we wouldn't have much of a discussion board.

Indeed.

Do we now? You do not have to answer that but it might be worth considering.

@Dayton3 are you trying to add more material to the Dayton's Greatest Hits thread?

It's his only immortal legacy.

No. It won't be around forever.

I was thinking if we compiled and edited it, it would make a good coffee table book.

Talk to Garamet.

But that won't happen.

You may be right. I don't know how the intellectual property stuff would work.

Technically, I think I own one quarter everything posted on Wordforge. Therefore, a coffee table book sounds like a fantastic idea, assuming Dayton's posts are within my fourth. Maybe we can buy volpone a gay wedding with the proceeds.

So would this proposed volume be considered a memoir or fiction?

Expose'.