Religion acting like a giant game of telephone?

Rotaretilbo wrote:Ironically, most of the "accounts" that were written 300+ years after Jesus' death were not included in the Bible, because they weren't universally recognized as canonical. The Gnostic Gospels aren't exactly a good example to use when trying to say the Bible was written much later, when they weren't part of the Bible.

Maybe the Church wanted to leave certain things out? Or add others in? Remember, back then, the Church was all 'heresy' and 'word if God'. People simply believed in it because they had to, even if some accounts were left out. And so, the Bible is similar as it is to today's Bible, and some people go 'WTF' when they hear not all of Jesus' divine accounts were in the Bible.

That's probably because the "divine accounts" left out weren't give out by Jesus, but rather were written hundreds of years after his death and, in places, directly contradict stuff that Jesus said.

CivBase wrote:

ReconToaster wrote:

rot wrote:It would be like saying that World War II veterans writing about their experiences in the war today would be inherently inaccurate.

If those WWII veterans were the only ones writing about it, and there weren't any other documentations of a "World War II," we'd probably think they were pretty crazy.

But they wouldn't have been crazy.

Well sure, but you wouldn't have any reason to think that. From the rest of the world's perspective, they'd just be a bunch of senile old men.

Hmm... I was going to leave this be but fine. I was exaggerating a bit, as yes, the four gospels are estimated to been written between 65-110 AD, so at the very least 32 years after Jesus' death.

While there were probably were still first hand accounts of Jesus from people who saw met him, and probably some written account that have been lost. Life expecantcy was not very good in those days and it could have been a very 'chinese whipsers' style of word and mouth story passed between people, each time the details becoming altered or exaggerated over time.


While the earlier gospels of Mark and Mathew and even Luke are as close to the truth as possible, as they all share similar incidents and teachings, while the Gospel according to John which was written around 70 years after his death alters greatly from the others.

Rotaretilbo wrote:

Ringleader wrote:A lot of the old testament is based on earlier Babylonian writings and legends like Noah's flood.

Interesting fun fact: a legend of a world wide flood is noted in cultures that were not in communication, and generally speaking, many historians believe that there actually was some sort of cataclysmic flood. Whether or not it wiped out all life on Earth is obviously called into question, but the people of Canaan, Sumer, Ur, Babylon, and the Native Americans all note a horrible flood in their ancient teachings.

Link to an article or two on this information?

The Epic of Gilgamesh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth

The dates of Flood Myths across early Mesopotamia, Babylonian legend predates Hebrew legend by 11 centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Hebrew_bible.2C_early_Jewish_literature.2C_and_Quran

WWII vets, along with virtually everyone else on the planet have a tendency to skew information in their favor or change information to make more sense, it's just human nature to do this.

False memories result from persistent beliefs, suggestions via authority figures, or statements of false information. Repeated exposure to these stimuli influence the reorganization of a person's memory, affecting its details, or implanting vivid false accounts of an event.[55] This is usually accounted for by source-monitoring error, where a person can recall specific facts, but cannot correctly identify the source of that knowledge because of apparent loss of the association between the episodic (specific experience, or source) and semantic (concept-based, or gist) accounts of the stored knowledge. An example of this is cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, where a one duplicated a work that they have previously encountered believing it to be their original idea.[56] False memories can also be accounted for by the generation effect, which is an observable phenomena where repeated exposure to a belief, suggestion, or false information is better remembered with each subsequent generation. This can be seen with the misinformation effect, where an eye-witness account of an event can be influenced by a bystander account of the same event, or by suggestion via an authority figure. It is also believed to influence the recovery of repressed shocking or abusive memories in patients under hypnosis, where the recovered memory, although possibly a vivid account, could be entirely false, or have specific details influenced as the result of persistent suggestion by the therapist.

Nocbl2 wrote:
And while we're at it, for some odd reason, those really really old Bible copies may be hoaxes or not written around the time of Jesus' death.

Yeah, because dozens of hoaxes all say the same thing.
As for being written later than we think, archeologists have gotten pretty good at dating crap, y'know?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_methodology_%28archaeology%29

Nocbl2 wrote:And they may have been mistranslated, or misunderstood. And you obviously have never played a game of telephone. It IS like telephone. The previous knowledge is still retained by the people that have it, it's just not passed on.

It's like telephone because you WANT it to be like telephone.
Unlike telephone, it's not "Hear once and repeat once." The people doing the repeating can read the original work to check their accuracy. People doing the hearing can check with older editions to figure out if they're getting the true version. And it's not one person at a time doing the hearing and repeating. It's hundreds of people. Then thousands. Then millions. All checking each other for accuracy.

If I wanted a better way to preserve something like the Bible, I can't really think of it.

Nocbl2 wrote:

Rotaretilbo wrote:Ironically, most of the "accounts" that were written 300+ years after Jesus' death were not included in the Bible, because they weren't universally recognized as canonical. The Gnostic Gospels aren't exactly a good example to use when trying to say the Bible was written much later, when they weren't part of the Bible.

Maybe the Church wanted to leave certain things out? Or add others in? Remember, back then, the Church was all 'heresy' and 'word if God'. People simply believed in it because they had to, even if some accounts were left out. And so, the Bible is similar as it is to today's Bible, and some people go 'WTF' when they hear not all of Jesus' divine accounts were in the Bible.

You're thinking of the church from the Renaissance. That's quite a few centuries off.

Oh well, here to defend Islam...


The accuracy of the texts imo are ordered from least to most:

Torah, Bible, Quran

Reasoning:

Torah:

The torah was written (speculation) from 4000 B.C. to 3000 B.C. with no single author or general time period.
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Bible:

The Bible was written with the first five books of the Torah (Ex. Genesis) more than 4000 years after those were already written. Thus the first five books of the Bible cannot count as accurate when comparing them, only truly to the Quran.

All of the accounts of Jesus were done by people 30-300 years after his death. The average life span of people back then was about 30-50. And even these stories were changed up and even passed down within these years. There was NO documentation, so the "telephone" effect was there, but it was still minimal.

Also, the orginal language of the Bible is not what is used to copy from. The Bible has been translated into different languages from other translated languages. Thus words that are not in other languages may pop and translated on to the other ones. Or words could have been lost.

Now lets pass 2000 years of time, add over 2,287 different language translations, and almost 300 different translation for English alone.
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Quran:

Mohhamed came down with all of the Quranic verses memorized at the age of 40 in the 600's and recited them in gatherings. People in these gatherings wrote them down on animal scraps, papyrus, and basically anything they could find. After his death, and the creation of the Muslim empire. A person came and compiled it into the Quran.

There was no downtime in which the "telephone" effect came into place. And if any scraps were missing, there wouldn't have been exactly 114 verses. The only problems would have been in the legibility in the writing or mix up in the words or how they were said.

And after 1400 years, each Quran is copied and distributed seamlessly with no Quran varying in even the accent marks above the words.


And while there are translation into other languages, those are not taken as proper or holy. And most importantly, all Qurans are copied from Arabic Qurans. Thus there is no loss the words that cannot be expressed in other languages.

ReconToaster wrote:
That's not how I read it. Dud said that the Gospels were first-hand accounts. Vigil then pointed out that some of the accounts of Jesus were written upwards of 300 years after his death.

T-nine was not necessarily supporting either argument. He was, however, pointing out the fact that Vigil's post was irrelevant, as dud was NOT referring to the accounts written 300+ years later, but of those who were supposedly alive at the time of Jesus' life.

I think T-nine was mocking Vigil for acting as though dud was referring to accounts written 300 years later when he was instead referring to firsthand accounts.

Either way, how fucking appropriate for us to be having an argument like this in a thread about Telephone.

Correct.