Tag: Bible

The Beatitudes and the Woes

I listened to all 28 chapters of the Gospel of Matthew one after the other today. Some parallels stood out like Peter’s denial and the betrayal of Judas. They both bitterly regretted what they did.

I remember well the beatitudes and the woes. However, I didn’t associate them with each other until now. The structure of this gospel is well crafted as one would expect. It was inspired by no ordinary muse, after all, but by the Holy Spirit Himself.

The Nine Beatitudes

Matthew 5:3-12 KJV – 3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

The Eight Woes

Matthew 23:13-31 KJV – 13 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
15 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.
16 Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!
17 Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?
18 And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty.
19 Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?
20 Whoso therefore shall swear by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon.
21 And whoso shall swear by the temple, sweareth by it, and by him that dwelleth therein.
22 And he that shall swear by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon.
23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.
24 Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
25 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.
26 Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.
27 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
28 Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
29 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,
30 And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.
31 Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.

The Rabbinic Deflation Hypothesis

If one compares the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 as they appear in the Masoretic Text (MT) – which is what most of our bibles use for these dates – with those in the Septuagint (LXX), one finds roughly a 1500 year discrepancy.

The LXX (or Alexandrian) Inflation Hypothesis explains this discrepancy by saying that the Greek translators of the lost Hebrew text of Genesis of their time (called the Vorlage) inflated the dates in the 3rd century BC to better agree with Egyptian history. The Rabbinic Deflation Hypothesis explains this discrepancy by saying that the rabbis in the 2nd century AD deflated the numbers to discredit Jesus as the Messiah.

In the following interview Henry B. Smith Jr of the Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) argues for the Rabbinic Deflation Hypothesis. It is long, so I have commented on it section by section with links to each part.

The correct dates are important for both archeology and apologetics.

The Christian archeologist has to know what the original Genesis text said about the events following the flood. Apologists who accept the Bible as an historical document also need to be clear about what that history actually is. Attacks against any Christianity that has not been watered down to a new age belief system come from those who want to discredit the Bible as reliable history.

  1. 0:00 Michael Filipek’s introduction
  2. 6:20 Henry B. Smith Jr’s introduction. He notes that there are no chronological gaps in these genealogies. He also asserts that the biblical text has higher authority over external evidence.
  3. 16:05 There are three textual traditions with differences in the genealogies: the MT, the LXX, and the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP). The correct dates are needed for archeological research and for apologetics. Smith Jr focuses on Genesis 11 because these dates come after the flood where archeological evidence has to be located and there the internal evidence is greatest for the Rabbinic Deflation Hypothesis.
  4. 25:02 Smith Jr contrasts the total number of years in these chronologies. For the MT it is 2008 years. For the SP it is 2249 years. For the LXX it is 3394 years. Although creation science explores the entire chronology beginning with creation, archeologists would only have evidence for the time after the flood.
  5. 33:15 Smith Jr analyzes the dates for Peleg as an example.
  6. 35:00 Smith Jr analyzes the dates for Kainan as another example. Kainan is mentioned in Luke 3:36 and the LXX, but not in the MT nor the SP.
  7. 40:37 Smith Jr offers a warning about critical scholarship: although there might be treasures hidden there many of these scholars support the Documentary Hypothesis which entirely discredits the historical value of these chronologies. He also comments that preservation of Scripture does not require that it be preserved in Hebrew manuscripts. It could be preserved in other languages, such as, Greek.
  8. 44:51 Whoever made the deliberate changes to the text would need a high enough motivation to overcome the command in Deuteronomy 4:2 not to change the text. They would also need the means to disseminate the changes and the opportunity to do so.
  9. 54:30 There are external witnesses before the second century AD to the LXX reading of Genesis 5 and 11: Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (LAB), Josephus, Eupolemus, and Demetrius of Alexandria as early as 220 BC. However, there are no external witnesses before the second century AD to the MT reading.
  10. 1:24:00 Smith Jr returns to Peleg as an example of a methodology on how to approach these texts.
  11. 1:28:54 Smith Jr points out the internal evidence in the MT that there is not enough time from the flood to the Babel dispersion for the population to reach the state that Genesis 10 describes it to be in. He notes that some people may find it hard to believe that the rabbis would have deflated their own texts and some may also have a long-term commitment to Ussher’s chronology which is based on the MT.
  12. 1:43:45 Smith Jr introduces the Rabbinic Deflation Hypothesis. Chrono-messianism used 1000-year blocks and the Daniel 9 prophecies to predict the coming of the Messiah. The Seder ‘Olam Rabbah became a new chronology in the second century AD. The rabbis wanted to put Jesus outside of biblical prophecies.
  13. 1:59:21 Ancient support for the Rabbinic Deflation Hypothesis comes from Eusebius, Julian of Toledo, Jacob of Edessa and Bar Hebraeus.

The following diagram compares the ABR chronology1 which prefers the LXX dates because it accepts the Rabbinic Deflation Hypothesis with James Ussher’s chronology2 which prefers the MT because it accepts the LXX Inflation Hypothesis.

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  1. Henry B.. Smith Jr, The Case for the Septuagint’s Chronology in Genesis 5 and 11, International Conference on Creationism, 2018 for the Creation and Flood date and the chart at the bottom of the Genesis 5 and 11 Project page for the Call of Abraham date: Creation 5554 BC, Flood 3298 BC, Calling of Abraham 2091 BC ↩︎
  2. James Ussher, The Annals of the World, 1650: Creation 4004 BC, Flood 2348 BC, Calling of Abraham 1921 BC ↩︎

Holes in the Net

Christian apologists who accept evolution do not realize how huge the holes are in their gospel nets.

What they don’t see is that the Bible offers not only a viable explanation of the universe we live in, but it offers the only viable explanation for it. The others are impossible modern mythologies masquerading as scientific theories.

The problem for the atheist is that one would have to accept the God of the Bible for the biblical explanation to be viable especially with the age of the universe being less than 8000 years.

  • But isn’t the universe billions of years old?
    Under Newtonian physics, perhaps, but not under relativity physics. If relativity is true, distant starlight can no longer be used as a clock.1
  • But aren’t there fossils half a billion years old?
    Radioactive decay is not a clock either. If it were then all of the rates of decay, including erosion rates and biological decay that we notice today, would have to line up. That dinosaur fossils have soft tissue2 still in them suggests – no, it insists – that they are much, much younger than that.
  • But isn’t humanity hundreds of thousands of years old?
    Historical records only go back about 5000 years. Let that sink in. That length of time is what one would expect given a global flood occurring about 3300 BC. Real people leave historical records. The existence and age of these historical records confirm the biblical chronology that the universe is less than 8000 years old3 and that there was a global catastrophe about 5300 years ago.

But that’s ridiculous! Once you realize that it is not, you will start taking the Bible seriously enough to mend the holes in the net.

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In a 13 minute video Calvin Smith presented arguments every Christian apologist who still accepts evolution needs to hear. Atheists already know these arguments: any god who would use the cruel and destructive means of elimination known as evolution to bring about creation is unloving and morally suspect. Christian morals should make one reject the very god those apologists witlessly try to promote.

Smith described Christian apologists who accept evolution as casting gospel nets with holes in them.

  1. The reason relativity doesn’t allow the speed of light to be used as a clock to measure the age of the universe is due to the conventionality of simultaneity thesis which Veritasium explained rather well. Allen Janis’s article Conventionality of Simultaneity summarizes the thesis in more detail providing additional references. Jason Lisle applied it to solve the distant starlight problem of creationism in his paper Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, Answers Research Journal, 2010. Bottom line: We cannot tell how old the universe is by knowing the two-way speed of light and the estimated distance of a celestial object unless we go back to Newtonian physics. ↩︎
  2. Creation Ministries International provided a one-minute video summarizing the significance of the discovery of soft tissue in fossils: those fossils must have been laid down recently. That soft tissue exists in fossils at all marks the end of the evolutionary worldview unless one is addicted to that worldview much like those who promote a flat earth are addicted to theirs. ↩︎
  3. There are various biblical chronologies because there are multiple manuscript traditions. The ultimate original source is lost, but one can piece it together using parts from each of these traditions. The chronology I currently find most convincing comes from the Associates for Biblical Research. ↩︎

Biblical Genealogy

I found the following video on Robert Carter’s site Biblical Genetics. The key take-away from this video is that the ultimate benefit of all of the genealogical data in the Bible was to trace the ancestry of Jesus back to Adam.

Most people (including myself) skip over the biblical genealogies unless they know what to look for. Carter says it is like looking for a fossil in a river basin. If you know what to look for you can find an amazing fossil. If you don’t, well, there are plenty of other things to enjoy.

Robert Carter and Chris Hardy were the authors of a paper on Creation Ministries International that I keep going back to called The biblical minimum and maximum age of the earth. The creation year of the minimum age supported by at least one biblical manuscript tradition is 3822 BC. The creation year of the maximum age is 5665 BC. That’s a difference of 1,843 years.

Many Christians support the younger age close to James Ussher’s chronology with a creation date of 4004 BC. Since that was a bit over 6000 years ago many of them also get tempted by speculations of the end of the age.

Early Christians along with Henry B. Smith, Jr at the Associates for Biblical Research support an older creation year of around 5500 BC. Based on this chronology the rabbinic tradition of the Messiah coming during the 6th millennium has already been fulfilled by Jesus. Smith, Jr’s argument in favor of the older age is available at the 2018 International Conference on Creationism called The case for the Septuagint’s chronology in Genesis 5 and 11. It’s another one of the papers I keep going back to.

At the moment, I favor Smith, Jr’s view, but I am a recent supporter of creationism. I am still learning. I only began taking the Bible seriously, that is, more seriously than, say, the Bhagavad Gita, about five years ago.

Over five years ago, I would have thought the earth was a gazillion years old. Why? Because that’s what I was told. My religious traditions were a mix of Catholic Teilhard de Chardin new age leaning mysticism and Protestant William Lane Craig atheist leaning rationalizations. Don’t worry if you aren’t familiar with those two names. I wish I weren’t as well.

When I was about 10 years old I remember telling my aunt that chickens came from dinosaurs. Why? Because that’s what I was told. Looking back on that incident as an adult who has now listened to many children talk I imagine she thought I was a cute kid, but stupid.

I realize today that she was right about the stupid part. Or, better put, deceived part, but then those telling me the “truth” were deceived as well. They are not the enemy. I forgive them. Today I have more important things to do like taking back all that stolen life, stolen hope, stolen joy and stolen peace.