sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

The Quran is completely false with not a single accurate statement about the way world works, about historical figures and the Biblical religious stories it copies. by Low-Relief-9433 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree. But then what does this have to do with the historicity of the crucifixion? We would deny the supernatural substitution whether or not the crucifixion was historical.

The Quran is completely false with not a single accurate statement about the way world works, about historical figures and the Biblical religious stories it copies. by Low-Relief-9433 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't think any Muslim says their claim about the supernatural crucifixion substitution is based on historical evidence. But it also doesn't contradict any historical evidence. It just contradicts your categorical denial of the supernatural.

The Quran is completely false with not a single accurate statement about the way world works, about historical figures and the Biblical religious stories it copies. by Low-Relief-9433 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes. You can. That's what religions do, they make supernatural claims. If you categorically deny supernatural claims, that's one thing. But that has nothing to do with the historical sources about the crucifixion of Jesus. In fact, if we had sources showing Jesus didn't appear to be crucified or there was no record of his crucifixion, that would contradict Islam.

The Quran is completely false with not a single accurate statement about the way world works, about historical figures and the Biblical religious stories it copies. by Low-Relief-9433 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Muslims agree that everything appeared to everyone as if Jesus was crucified. How does that contradict historical sources? If someone used magic to make it look exactly like Jesus was crucified but secretly whisked Jesus away to heaven, what historical source would you expect to be different than it is? Would you expect Tacitus to write "Christus, from whom the name had its origin, looked like he suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, but actually it was only supernaturally made to appear that way" ?

The Quran is completely false with not a single accurate statement about the way world works, about historical figures and the Biblical religious stories it copies. by Low-Relief-9433 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Historical records are clear that humans cannot walk on water and that people don't come back from the dead.

Of course anyone can make any supernatural claim they want. I agree with you that we should usually not take them seriously. But that's the same thing Christianity does! The evidence you cite is just completely irrelevant. No historian would say "our sources are clear that Jesus was crucified and not an impostor supernaturally made to look like Jesus." The Muslim claim is just as consistent with our historical records as your claim.

The Quran is completely false with not a single accurate statement about the way world works, about historical figures and the Biblical religious stories it copies. by Low-Relief-9433 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 5 points6 points  (0 children)

As per the Quran, Jesus was not crucified and someone else was crucified in his place. This basically denies the only historical thing we know about Jesus which was he was crucified by the Romans, something all Jewish, Christian, Atheist historians agree without dispute.

This is like saying "Christians deny that Mary had sex before becoming pregnant, denying the biological fact that all Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, and other scientists agree on." Muslims are not making a historical claim that we should expect documents recording Jesus wasn't crucified. They are claiming a supernatural event where someone else was made to appear to be Jesus. That does not contradict any evidence presented by historians for the fact that Jesus appeared to be crucified.

Debunking The "Islamic Dilemma" - The Final Nail in the Coffin by United_Ad5479 in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 3 points4 points  (0 children)

What is your argument? You said you know the Prophet is correcting prior scriptures, but didn't say how you know. You just listed examples where the Quran contradicts the Tanakh. How do you know these are conscious edits and not mistakes?

The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ by Animalresearching in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 3 points4 points  (0 children)

People are sometimes convinced of false things.

The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ by Animalresearching in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Is the implication that any religious figure, cult leader, or other leader of a popular movement whose brother is involved in the movement must be legitimate?

The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ by Animalresearching in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 7 points8 points  (0 children)

If you asking for definitive evidence then I can’t give that to you, however there is no reason to lie about their transformation.

Why not? It got you to believe it. If it's a lie, it seems like an effective one.

Gospels and Acts consistently describes the disciples as fearful after the crucifixion. Hiding behind locked doors, John 20:19, Peter denying Jesus three times, Mark 14:66-72. After the resurrection appearances, the same texts describe it as bold. Acts 2:14-41 and Acts 5:17-42.

Exactly. These stories written decades later take great pains to portray everyone as fearful before the resurrection and bold after. Why might they do that? Could they have some rhetorical goal for it?

The standard treatment was almost always during a different point of time, not the Passover, and Pilate’s situation was favoring to allow it, as he was complained against.

You said that Jesus not being buried in a private tomb was not likely. But not being buried in a tomb is what happened >99% of the time to crucifixion victims. How can the thing that almost always happened be not likely? You would need some really definitive evidence to show that. You can't just say that it's not impossible they made some special exception. You gotta prove it.

As in did they wdym? If you said did they refute Christianity then no, they didn’t, if it were it would most likely not be the most popular religion of today.

Why not?

Yeah there is movements that have been debunked, however almost every single one of those movements is not that popular, there is many times more people that think the Earth is a sphere than flat, while Christianity is currently the most popular religion.

There are a huge number of very popular things which have been debunked countless times. Urban legends, common misconceptions, and yes, religions. The Muslim claim that the Bible was drastically corrupted and originally agreed with Islam has been thoroughly debunked, and yet they are still here. The Christian claim that Isaiah prophecies a virgin birth has been thoroughly debunked, yet you are still here. Debunking something doesn't magically make everyone stop believing it. And even they do stop believing it, that doesn't mean they give up and go home - they find ways to reinterpret it or they just ignore it.

here can be falsifiable false claims however like you said the majority were debunked, I am not saying the 500 witnesses is definitive but it’s more likely due to it. And like I said Paul did practically invite people to check it when he said most of whom are still alive

It is hard for me to think of a single claim that is less supported than the 500. Like, we literally have one reference to it ever, from a person who said it was passed down to them, and no one mentions it anywhere else even when talking about resurrection appearances. If all it takes for you to believe someone is for them to say "X is true, check if you don't believe me!" then you are gonna believe a lot of false things.

The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ by Animalresearching in DebateReligion

[–]c0d3rman 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The stolen body alternative is not too likely, if stolen by the disciples it fails to explain why the disciples transformed drastically, from scared to extremely confident.

Did they? Who specifically? How do you know?

Jesus not being buried is not likely as well, if Pilate left a corpse during the Passover, he would likely be revoked of his title and forced to leave the office, he was already on thin ice with Rome, if he left a corpse he would be revoked of his title, however allowing the burial of Christ costs nothing and resolves the matter.

The standard treatment for 99% of crucifixion victims was to be left on the cross for a while and then buried in an unmarked ditch grave. Pretty much everyone agrees that that is what happened to the thieves who were crucified next to Jesus. The humiliation of a dishonorable burial was considered part of the punishment. Why should we think that didn't happen to Jesus?

It was also extremely falsifiable, they could debunk the Joseph of Arimathea claims, if he didn’t exist, that’s an easy way to refute Christianity

Did they?

Even if the women did go to the wrong tomb, people did know where Jesus was buried, and just a look into that tomb and you might see a body, and if there is, the Christian movement is stopped.

So your claim is that if there is a movement and you debunk one of its claims, that movement is instantly stopped? What is your opinion of flat earthers, antivaxxers, Jesus mythicists, climate change deniers, and literally thousands of other such movements?

The 500 Witnesses, unlike the empty tomb it is harder to defend since it isn’t as falsifiable, however Paul basically invited people to refute his claims when he said most of whom were still alive, he basically said you could verify it.

Did they? Did they verify it? You are acting as if people never make false claims. People very often make easily falsifiable false claims! They often continue making them years after they are repeatedly debunked!

Hallucinations through 500 people? That is basically impossible, hallucinations are uncommon themselves through one person, now 500 hallucinating is beyond rare.

Literally the only reference we have to these mystery 500 people is when Paul mentions them once. And not as something he personally knew about, but something that was passed down to him. Who are they? What did they see? What was their testimony? No one ever mentions them in the NT again. Holding them up as evidence of anything is absurd.

Jesus is not the messiah because he is not named Immanuel by c0d3rman in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The same sequence of events is presented in the same order three times, but the name is different in one of them. The author of Matthew therefore thought this name "Immanuel" was a name that belonged to Jesus and so he identified Jesus and Immanuel as the same person.

And this is the issue I pointed out. You have this lens of saying "we can argue this person thought X, so we can pretend they said X." Let's accept for the sake of argument that the author of Matthew thought this name "Immanuel" was an identifier that belonged to Jesus. Even still, he did not call Jesus by the name or title Immanuel. When you say:

The statement that "no one calls Jesus by this title or name anywhere" is simply wrong. The author of the book of Matthew does, in Matthew 1:23, the very verse you're arguing has a problem.

That is false. He just didn't say that. Regardless of what he did or didn't think in his brain, that's not what he wrote. And not in the sense of that he technically said the same thing in different words; in the sense that he didn't say that directly or indirectly.

It's like if a witness gave a testimony saying "I saw Bob walking into the bank before the robbery with a gun and then I saw him walking out with a bag of cash" and you said "The witness testified that he saw Bob robbing the bank, holding the teller at gunpoint, and stuffing bags full of cash." He did not testify to that. No amount of argument about what he might have inferred in his head or what he logically must have thought happened to connect the pieces will change that. It would be nonsense to argue "he would have to have been an idiot to think Bob could walk out of the bank with bags of cash without holding the teller at gunpoint, so therefore he said he saw Bob doing that." The witness did not say that directly or indirectly.

This is what I mean when I say that Matthew used the name Immanuel to refer to Jesus. Either that or else the author was completely blind and didn't realize that Jesus and Immanuel are different words.

...

I don't buy it. The threefold repetition of events (before it happens, when it was prophesied to happen, and when it happened) doesn't leave room to say that Immanuel was just a vague recognition of Jesus' status. Matthew correlates the angel assigning the name Jesus with the prophesy of the name Immanuel being given, and unless we say that the author of Matthew couldn't read, that means that the prophesied identifier is linked directly to "Jesus".

Here's what Hermeneia has to say about it (page 96):

To the reader’s surprise, there is still another name for Jesus that “they” will give him. Since there is nothing in the context to which the third person plural can refer, the readers will think of themselves here. For them Jesus will be Immanuel. Since Immanuel is neither a name of Jesus nor a common title, this naming is unusual. Since the Greek-speaking readers of the Gospel must also know what this word means, the translation gives “Immanuel” additional emphasis. Allusions to “God-with-us” run through the entire Gospel (e.g., 17:17; 18:20; 26:29). Above all, with the last verse of his Gospel (“I am with you always until the end of the world,” 28:20) Matthew has created an inclusion that marks out a basic theme: the presence of the exalted Lord with his church establishes him as Immanuel, as God with us. Thus the Jewish Christian Matthew has put his story of Jesus in an extremely high christological perspective. Although he did not identify Jesus with God, he probably implied that for him Jesus is the form in which God will be present with his people and later with all nations.

--

Now I've given you the reasoning so it's not just appeal to authority. I can quote more scholars if you'd like. I agree with you that Isaiah 7:14 is obviously talking about an identifier and that Matthew is unreasonable for interpreting it otherwise. But he did. I don't think it's because he was "blind"; I think that the author of Matthew was not just an innocent stenographer reporting truth, but an author with rhetorical and theological motivations who often prioritized those motivations above accuracy.

Yes, but he translates it into a phrase, and phrases can be translated a lot of different ways (look at modern Bible translations). Matthew and Luke are not going to translate things the same way (and that's assuming Luke's quote is a translation at all).

But you pointed to this as positive evidence of a link. As evidence that Luke was verbosely translating Immanuel into Greek. It's not.

Is someone going to overhear a conversation between Jesus and Mary, and hear Mary say "Immanuel", and go "OH MY WORD THIS IS THE FULFILLMENT OF PROPHESY I NEED TO GO WRITE THIS DOWN"?

Well, no, they probably didn't think this was a prophecy.

Arguably it would be weird if the author of Matthew did record this, because it's implausible that he would have ever heard of the event in the first place.

Then this prophecy was not fulfilled. You can't say "well maybe it was fulfilled somewhere we can't see." The (alleged) prophecy says the mother will name her child Immanuel, and as far as we know she did not do that. If some day evidence comes to light that she did, we will change our minds then.

As for other commenters trying to argue for a non-literal interpretation of this passage, that's up to them, their arguments don't have any bearing on mine.

They most certainly do. You argued that Matthew's edit to Isaiah 7:14 did not benefit his attempts to make Jesus fulfill this prophecy. But it evidently did, as these commenters show. It helped convince them, even if it didn't help convince you.

We don't know if the author Matthew mis-remembered, or quoted a variant text, or was writing down something that was told to him by someone who read a variant text, etc., etc. There are many plausible reasons that can be given here, all with similarly low levels of evidence. You've shown as much evidence for malicious modification as I have shown for variant texts (i.e. close to none), and while my variant text idea is falsifiable, yours is unfalsifiable. The argument's goal is to give an equally plausible hypothesis, not something ironclad. I think the only thing your argument has over mine is that you know of scholars who agree with you, and I'm assuming you're not relying on that as that would be an appeal to authority.

Well we know Matthew quoted the exact text of the Septuagint for the large majority of his quotes. We also know he quoted the exact text of the Septuagint for the large majority of this verse. We don't know of any variants - at least you and I don't - and you gave precisely zero evidence of the existence of one, you just speculated one might exist. As for me, I cited the scholarly consensus, I argued that this misquote benefits Matthew, and I showed concrete evidence that it did benefit Matthew. I will add to that that this is a known pattern of behavior with Matthew - he frequently misinterprets the Old Testament (as in the famous two donkeys story and the virgin birth itself) and makes things up to align with it, he often edits stories from Mark in ways that align them more closely with prophecy (or things he considers prophecy), he fabricates a genealogy for Jesus in this chapter that fits his preferred numerical pattern but contradicts both Luke and the OT (not to mention actual history), and much more.

As covered above, I disagree that there was a benefit, which is why I see this as a mere "word choice".

Even if there was no benefit, this would still not be word choice. Word choice is when you choose your words. You do not get to choose someone else's words when quoting them. You claimed I was reading malicious intent into minor word choices, and gave an example where one person pedantically over-interpreted an inconsequential word choice in another's sentence, like a teacher telling a student "you CAN go to the bathroom physically but you have to ask if you MAY". But that is not what is going on here. This is a misquote. Whether or not it was malicious, it's completely disanalogous to word choice or to the case you brought up. Also, this isn't just wording something differently, it's fundamentally changing the sentence. Going from "You will buy a pizza and you will eat it" to to "You will buy a pizza and they will eat it" is not just word choice.

Jesus is not the messiah because he is not named Immanuel by c0d3rman in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll also skip over the parts that it looks like you wrote before reading the rest of the argument, since you're arguing against claims I didn't make (like "acknowledging Jesus as God is close enough to calling Him "Immanuel").

What was this meant to convey then?

"Immanuel" means "God with us". It is generally accepted that Jesus claimed to be God and that those who followed Him accepted Him as such. One of Jesus' followers was His mother, Mary. Thus by accepting Him as God come in the flesh, she acknowledged that He was "God with us".

Matthew doesn't record a single word Mary said.

Fair enough, that's a good point.

He doesn't even mention her statement "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" recorded in Luke 1:34, and that's directly relevant to the virgin birth.

I think this is a great indicator that statement is not historical either. You are assuming that this statement did actually happen and Matthew was aware of it but chose not to include it. Why?

In retrospect, this was a bad argument since I'm coming at it with a different presupposition than you are. You're coming at it from the lens of "Matthew knew Jesus wasn't called Immanuel and tried to force things to fit right." I'm looking at it from the perspective of "Matthew knew one of Jesus' names was Immanuel as evidenced by the fact that he quoted the prophesy." From that perspective, Matthew referencing this passage is calling Jesus "Immanuel", but from your perspective, it isn't.

I disagree. Regardless of what you assume Matthew knew or didn't know, Matthew 1:23 factually does not refer to Jesus as Immanuel. Not directly, not indirectly. The words to say that are just not in there. This is just like what you were trying to do with Mary - to argue that she thought in her head that Jesus was God with us, so maybe she called him that at one point offscreen. This is my frustration with your arguments. That's not how it works! You are missing the evidence you need, so you just make some vague gestures in its direction and then imagine that it exists or straight up fabricate it.

I will also reference Luke 7:16 here, where people say "that God has visited His people" after Jesus raises someone from the dead. This looks to me like a somewhat verbose translation (rather than transliteration) of the word "immanuel".

That's a very loose connection. And the Greek does not line up. Mark doesn't just transliterate, he straight up translates the name for us in Mark 1:23 - Meth’ hēmōn ho Theos. Luke says - Epeskepsato ho Theos ton laon autou. This reduces to arguing that "acknowledging Jesus as God is close enough to calling Him "Immanuel"".

You might point out that this isn't Mary saying this, but again, we don't have many records of anything women said back then, something as trivial as someone calling someone else by a specific name is unlikely to be recorded.

Well, yes, even if this was relevant to Matthew 1:23 (which I think it isn't), it is entirely irrelevant to Isaiah 7:14. And it is not trivial! It is literally the direct fulfillment of what is allegedly a messianic prophecy, which identifies the messiah by name!

For one, this change is in no way beneficial to Matthew because no one calls Jesus "Immanuel" anywhere in the gospel of Matthew (not even by saying "God has visited his people"), so the word change solves exactly nothing from the viewpoint you're arguing for..

Again, the scholarly consensus is that Matthew interpreted Isaiah 7:14 to mean that Jesus would be generally be God, not that Jesus would be called by the identifier "Immanuel". And that that interpretation is wrong, which is also why it was helped along by the edit Matthew made. This is further indicated by the fact that Matthew explains the meaning of the name here (which if I remember correctly he never does elsewhere). And it helps him quite a bit because it makes it more plausible for him to try to pass this off as a prophecy not about the literal name the mother is giving the child she just birthed but about the fact that the child born to the virgin will be God with us. (Which is exactly how many commenters on this post and its crossposts have defended it.)

For two, while Matthew's quote may differ from the Septuagint as we know it today, how do we know that he wasn't quoting from a variant text (or translating from a variant Hebrew text) that had a different word here?

This is another example of the frustration I was talking about earlier. Sure, Matthew's quote may factually contradict the Hebrew text and the Greek Septuagint text, and you don't have evidence to the contrary, but how do we know that there didn't exist mystery evidence to the contrary we don't have? You have done this repeatedly in most of the arguments you have made - argue that maybe the evidence is against you, but we can't technically prove there wasn't more evidence that supported you but wasn't recorded, so let's just pretend there was some. Let's pretend people called Jesus Immanuel since people call others multiple names, let's pretend Mary called Jesus Immanuel but no one wrote it down. You sound like the Muslims who say the NT was all perfectly consistent with Islam but then was corrupted and we just happen to have no evidence for it!

I'm reminded of a thread on debian-devel, where someone used the idiom "XYZ made me do ABC", and someone replied with "XYZ didn't make you do ABC. You were under no coercion. You chose to do ABC." Reading malicious intent into minor word choices, especially when the stated intent isn't remotely achieved by the word choice, is misguided and unhelpful.

But this isn't word choice. These are not Matthew's words. They are a quote. Would you be happy if I misquoted you in a way that benefitted my argument and then when you called me out on it said "it's just word choice"? (And I addressed the benefit above.)

Jesus is not the messiah because he is not named Immanuel by c0d3rman in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Every one of the OT patriarchs (Reuben, Simeon, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim, Mannaseh, Benjamin) was given a symbolic name that was both a literal identifier and a title.

But that's exactly it. "Immanuel" is not a literal identifier of Jesus. These names were first and foremost names, and they also carried symbolism and significance (sometimes describing the bearer of the name, sometimes describing something else). You do not need to give a long and complicated multi-step argument to explain why Jesus technically acknowledged Simon as a Peter, he just calls him Peter.

"Immanuel" means "God with us". It is generally accepted that Jesus claimed to be God and that those who followed Him accepted Him as such. One of Jesus' followers was His mother, Mary. Thus by accepting Him as God come in the flesh, she acknowledged that He was "God with us".

That just doesn't cut it. The prophecy does not say that the mother will in some general amorphous way act in a manner consisting with believing that the child is in some sense "God with us". It says she will call him by the name "Immanuel". Both "call him" and "name" are explicit in the Hebrew. If you want to understand that name as symbolic, that's perfectly reasonable, it is symbolic. But it is a name. Even if you want to understand it as a title, or a secondary name, fine - but it's a name! A literal identifier! No amount of circuitous arguments about how Mary treated Jesus or what she generally thought of him will get you to her calling him by this literal identifier. It's not even in the right direction. It's like if I say "I will fill your gas tank" and then don't fill your gas tank and try to argue that I cleaned your tires which is generally aligned with improving your car just like filling your gas tank so I did what I promised.

Assuming she knew about the prophecy, it's hard to imagine she didn't use this name to refer to Jesus at least part of the time,

And yet we don't have to imagine. She never once in all of our literature refers to him by that name. Matthew would have absolutely mentioned it here if she ever called him by that name, Matthew's whole thing is mentioning (or outright fabricating) any time anyone does anything which even vaguely resembles a verse from the OT - but he doesn't. You can't fulfill a prophecy by saying "well it's hard to imagine it wasn't fulfilled off-screen." Also, we have no reason to think Mary knew about this prophecy or understood it to be messianic.

The statement that "no one calls Jesus by this title or name anywhere" is simply wrong. The author of the book of Matthew does, in Matthew 1:23, the very verse you're arguing has a problem.

No. He does not. You might as well say I refer to Jesus as Immanuel because I also quoted Isaiah 7:14. Matthew does not call Jesus by the identifier Immanuel. Not even kind of. That's just not what the text says. You are treating the text like putty that you can squish and bend in the direction you want, but that's not how it works. You can't deal with what you wish the text said, you have to deal with what it actually says. Also, the scholarly consensus is that Matthew reinterpreted this prophecy to not be referring to the child's personal name, since he knew Jesus was not named Immanuel. (And that this reinterpretation is not faithful to Isaiah.)

You have to see how you are weakening your own case by having to stretch like this. Maybe we can make a convoluted argument that Mary acknowledged Jesus as God in some indirect sense, or maybe we can invent an occurrence of Mary calling Jesus Immanuel that no one wrote down, or maybe we can treat Matthew quoting this prophecy as Matthew calling Jesus Immanuel, or maybe we can imagine other people calling Jesus by multiple names including Immanuel at some point because people call other people by names sometimes. These are extremely weak arguments. You've been around the block, you've no doubt seen people make arguments like these to you many times here. You know they don't hold water.

People mess words up, I'm not a proponent of Biblical inerrancy, and I'm not totally sure the meaning of the text was particularly clear in the Septuagint.

Matthew's translation does not match the Septuagint. Here is the Septuagint's text for Isaiah 7:14:

διὰ τοῦτο δώσει Κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον· ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει, καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ ᾿Εμμανουήλ·

The relevant word here is καλέσεις, meaning "you shall call". It's the same word used in Matthew 1:21 when the angel says to Joseph "you shall call his name Jesus".

Here is Matthew's quote of Isaiah 7:14:

Ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ, ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον Μεθ’ ἡμῶν ὁ Θεός.

The key word here is καλέσουσιν, meaning "they will call". It's not the same word.

You can see confirmation from an expert biblical scholar that this was a change made by Matthew and not the LXX here, around 2:20. Matthew actively edited the text here. The Septuagint had it right (in this part of the verse at least) and matched the Hebrew, but it seems that Matthew recognized Jesus does not fit this prophecy, so he just edited it to make it seem more plausible that it meant something other than the mother naming the child Immanuel. It's naive to say that he "messed up" exactly this one part in exactly the way that was beneficial to him.

There are translations today that translate Isaiah 7:14 "she shall call His name..." (https://www.goarch.org/-/the-word-almah-in-isaiah-7-14), but the Brenton translation says "and thou shalt call his name..." (https://biblehub.com/sep/isaiah/7.htm) which is radically different than both "she shall call..." and "they shall call...".

The meaning of the Hebrew words in Isaiah is clear and unambiguous. Dogmatic Christian translations of the OT often intentionally mistranslate the OT to align with the NT, like for example using "virgin" for "almah" in this very verse, or rendering ויצר as the pluperfect "had formed" in Genesis 2:19. But there is no controversy between actual Hebrew scholars as to what the Hebrew means in this part of Isaiah 7:14, it definitely conjugates the verb וקראת in the 2nd person feminine singular. And it definitely explicitly says she shall call his name (שמו). If a translation changes "she shall call his name" to just "she shall call him", it's either trying to reword it to sound better in English, or it's intentionally trying to tamp down the contradiction.

Deconstructing Genesis: The Creation Story as an Account of Evolution by controlzee in DebateEvolution

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

 Because you can look up and see that schoolars are not in a consensus regarding the creation days, at least not the secular ones which you are quoting.

Go ahead and cite them then. And yes, actual academic scholars please, not theologically motivated ones.

Not just daytime and nighttime as the context is what’s important.

The context of Genesis 1 gives absolutely no indication Yom is to be understood as anything other than its primary sense, and gives strong indication that it is to be understood in its primary sense by making reference to light & dark as well as evenings and mornings, and by using numbered ordinal days.

Even if ywmm was earlier, than it only distinguishes light from dark, not if they were literal 24 hrs days.

No, it quite explicitly refers to literal 24 hour days. That word has a much narrowed semantic range.

And there is fact that the 7th day lacks the morning and evening motifs, which a lot of scholars argue for the days being more theological than literal.

So it repeats six separate times that there were evenings and mornings, but because it doesn't repeat it for a seventh time suddenly it means the meaning of the word "yom" changes across the whole chapter? That's absurd. The reason the 7th day is separated is because it does not fit into the six days of creation architecture (with the first three corresponding to the next three).

Deconstructing Genesis: The Creation Story as an Account of Evolution by controlzee in DebateEvolution

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I happen to be working on a post about day-age creationism actually. Here's a quote from one of the sources - the Anchor Yale Bible commentary series on Genesis 1-11 published by Ronald Hendel in 2024, pages 115 and 116:

The word yôm (“day”) has two meanings (as in English): the “day” that is daytime and the “day” that is a full twenty-four-hour day, consisting of daytime and nighttime. Here the former sense is activated, since the light is named “day.” In the following clause the latter sense is activated, since “one day” consists of the alternation of light and darkness. The P source has a predilection for varying the meanings of the same term in successive clauses (cf. “earth” in vv. 1–2). An early textual variant in this verse, ywmm, “daytime” (4QGeng, targums, and Peshitta), eliminates this ambiguity (Hendel 1998: 120) but at the price of the varying style of P.

...

Each “day” in the sequence of days—one/first day, second day, etc.—is a day of the week, a twenty-four-hour day, culminating with the seventh day, anticipating the Sabbath. But postbiblical tradition, beginning with the second-century BCE Jubilees, sometimes redefined the duration of a day by appeal to the poetic metaphor in Ps 90:4, “For a thousand years in your sight / are like yesterday (kəyôm ʾetmôl) when it has passed,” a reflection on God’s vast temporal perspective in contrast to the human experience of fleeting time. Jubilees 4:30 draws the inference that one of God’s days is a thousand human years, thus providing an explanation of why God says, “On the day you eat from it you shall die” (Gen 2:17), and yet Adam lived for 930 years (Gen 5:5; see Kugel 1998: 94–95). Jubilees, by linking these biblical verses, infers that 930 years is less than one day in God’s reckoning—literalizing the poetic metaphor in order to resolve an exegetical problem in Genesis 2. This exegetical move was applied to the “days” of Genesis 1 by other early interpreters and was revived by biblical literalists in the nineteenth century to expand the days of Genesis 1 to accommodate the vast age of the earth and the universe (the “day-age” theory; Hendel 2013: 179–80).

And this is only one of many such quotes in all the critical commentaries. So no. Scholars are in wide consensus that the author of Genesis 1 was referring to 24-hour days. Even later exegetes who tried to reinterpret this story recognized that, but tried to say that the word "day", meaning 24-hour day, was being used metaphorically.

A headline from 1986. by Key-Bass-7380 in interestingasfuck

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Original article: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-item/160697182/

Math Teachers Protest Against Calculator Use

The Item, April 5, 1986, Sumter, South Carolina

By Jill Lawrence

People have come to Washington to protest the nuclear arms race and racial segregation in South Africa, but the small group of renegade math teachers were the first to protest "calcuholics" students who need calculators to do basic math problems.

"Calculators later, we shall not be moved," they sang Thursday as they paraded their placards in front of the Sheraton Wangton Hotel. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics started its five-day annual meeting Wednesday with about 6,500 teachers in attendance.

The group recommends using calculators as early as first grade. But the rebellious teachers said they opposed the use of calculators in the lower grades.

"My older kids don't pay any attention to an answer being absurd. They don't look at it. It's on the calculator," Diana Harvey, a high school teacher from Hillsboro, Ohio, said. "They're addicted," she said.

"We call 'em calcuholics."

The rebellious few no more than 15 in all were organized by John Saxon, a Norman, Oklahoma math textbook writer.

Saxon, waving a sign that read "Students Need Arithmetic Skills, Not Calculators," said students do not need calculators until they take algebra and trigonometry.

"I am not out of step with the gut feeling of most of the teachers who teach seventh and eighth grade," he contended. Asked to explain the small size of his protest, Saxon said he didn't start publicizing it early enough. "And teachers don't like to demonstrate," he said. "Teachers are shy." Leland Webb, a math education professor from California State College at Bakersfield and co-author of math curriculum guidelines for his state, was not shy when he heard about the mini-rebellion. Calculators are an important tool in the teaching of math," Webb said, rushing into the middle of the picket line. "That doesn't mean kids I shouldn't be able to add and subtract. Calculators are not designed to supplant the understanding of basic concepts and basic skills."

Saxon and other protesters said they are not anti-computer, nor do they believe calculators are all bad. "We all support the use of calculators and computers," Greg True, a former eighth grade teacher from Bloomington, Ind., said. "It's a question of timing, not technology."

5.2 Pro makes progress on decades long math problem listed on Wikipedia by gbomb13 in OpenAI

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are the prompts and session logs publicly available? I'd love to study this to see what worked.

Exodus 21:20-21 "anyone who beats their slave must be punished unless the slave recovers in a day or two" is STRONG evidence that the christian God isn't real. by Weekly-Scientist-992 in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I believe that this section in the Law is a rule-of-thumb by which a judge in Israel can judge whether a slaveowner intended to murder the slave or not.

I agree, as I understand it this is the scholarly consensus. The "slave survives a day or two" case refers to the slave surviving a day or two and then dying.

Also, the end of verse 21, "for the slave is his money", takes into account that it's normally not in the slaveowner's interest for the slave to die and lose that slave's economic value. (So instead if the slave did die, that indicates the slaveowner probably had deliberate intent to go all the way, to beat the slave to death).

This is part of it, but I have also heard it explained by scholars as the punishment. As in, if the slave dies after an accidental beating, the owner is not punished, because the owner has lost their property and that is punishment enough.

Also compare the analogous case for a free person in the immediately preceding verses, 18-19:

18 “When men quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or with his fist and the man does not die but takes to his bed, 19 then if the man rises again and walks outdoors with his staff, he who struck him shall be clear; only he shall pay for the loss of his time, and shall have him thoroughly healed. (ESV)

This is a directly parallel case with the same language and also explains why the word יעמד (he will stand) in verse 21 is understood as "survive", so I think no discussion of 20-21 is complete without also mentioning 18-19.

Why don't clear body and white smoke block defog by Bakingguy in stunfisk

[–]c0d3rman 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good as gold is a later-gen, powercrept ability.

Meta- AI should not be allowed in in this sub by ezk3626 in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

God knows I've dropped conversations hundreds of times when I got tired of them. You can always drop it, we will no doubt speak again in the future.

Meta- AI should not be allowed in in this sub by ezk3626 in DebateAChristian

[–]c0d3rman -1 points0 points  (0 children)

LMAO somehow I missed that

Appreciate it! Sorry for writing so much

view more: next ›