Discrepancies In the Nativity Story

[JohnnyRudick]

Originally Posted by Loudmouth_Mormon

This one is easy. Bethlehem IS part of the land of Jerusalem. When King Solomon divided his kingdom, Jerusalem was the "administrative center" for Bethlehem. According to the Bible, the cities controlled the nearby lands. Thus we read of "the king of Ai, and his people, and his city, and his land" (Joshua 8:1) and of the city of Hebron with its suburbs, fields, and villages (1 Chronicles 6:55–56). Tappuah is both a land and a city (Joshua 17:8, and Joshua 16:8–9.) Also, Jeremiah prophesyied that Jerusalem would become "a land not inhabited" (Jeremiah 6:8; compare 15:5–7).

Here's the modern borders of Jerusalem - please note that Bethlehem is part of it. Similar concept was going on 2 millenia ago.



2 Kings 14:20 And they brought him on horses: and he was buried at Jerusalem with his fathers in the city of David.
Luke 2:4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem...

Maybe you just don't know where to look...

LM

I was hoping someone would bring this up.

I thank you

You guys save me a lot of writing


I have learned not to just jump in.

If I lay back, one of ya will get it in

Luv y'all



Bro. Rudick

[JohnnyRudick]

Originally Posted by Maya

I hope you dont overdo this problem Enlil-An. The answer may be simplier than you think. Joseph was a carpenter... maybe he got a good work possibility while there? Carpenters often had to move around a lot. Did he have his whole family with or did he leave them in ... Nazareth... when travelling around.
To mix you up even more... You ever read the Gospel of James ... Jesus brother? THERE is some very interesting possibilities. But it all is just that, possibilities, untill we are told/shown the truth.
Why JS did not tell us the truth? What town Jesus was born has little to do with our salvation. Also I think he had so much other things to tell... maybe he did get to know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but did not react as that is the common belief? Why would he have reacted to something that was obvious from before? Then again maybe God did not correct the "mistake " if there was any, as it really has nothig to do with our salvation! We need faith. If everything is given us on a plate we do not need faith!
There really are many more important facts that the scolars should search. Bible is not either proven by Arceologists... possibility to that it is telling the truth does excist, we learn the truth of it by faith, just like the BoM.
As it comes to scolars LDS scolars use other biblical scolars all the time as many dont even think LDS scolars can be objective. So why search something they are doing? Even if a scolar thinks he has found a truth... it may be wrong after a few years or decades... so we need to be careful with what we believe. We need to ask God.

Thanks again Maya..

There is no mistake in the King James Translaton of this account.


Some people are just to picky


Bro. Rudick

[JohnnyRudick]

Originally Posted by Just_A_Guy

I dunno. Maybe he just had a brain freeze. Maybe his sources were faulty. Maybe he figured it was none of our business. Maybe because he did want to downplay Jesus' Nazarene background.



Like many of the other terms to which you impute only one particular meaning--"oikia" can be an actual residence, but it can also be a generic term for any place of abode.



Assumptions. It's just as plausible that the text is merely introducing a new (to the reader) and relatively obscure location into the story.



Hardly the "smoking gun" you originally made it out to be.



Another assumption, and an incorrect one. In truth, all we can purport to "know" is that at the time Herod gave the order he believed Jesus had been born at some indeterminate date within the previous two years. We know nothing further of the time frame. We don't know whether the star came before or after Jesus' birth, or how close the date of its appearance was to the date of the event it announced. We don't know how much time passed between the star's first appearance and the time the wise men got to Herod; we don't know how long it took them to find Jesus after they saw Herod, and we don't know how long it took Herod to figure out that the wise men weren't coming back.



Naturally. According to Luke's account, that was where they were from.



Another unwarranted inference from an ambiguous passage in Matthew.



If I'm writing to my descendants about events that will take place in Tijuana, I'm not going to explain it as being in the "Land of San Diego"--even if I'm from San Diego, and my descendants could never possibly know the difference.



Joseph was afraid of living under Archelaus' reign, I grant you. But the scripture does not say why. Anything further is speculation.



His memory is more than likely garbled, yes. I have no problem with Luke's getting some of the dates and details wrong. Heck, he may even be referring to the wrong census, or some other government action that wasn't technically a "census" at all. There was no internet; no school textbooks; no newspaper morgue to verify his memory (or the oral histories) against.

That doesn't mean he's lying about the essentials: that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth but were compelled to travel to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born.



Another unwarranted inference.



I'm not comparing it to the gospel narratives; I'm comparing it to how you seem to treat them. You're taking two accounts of the same fundamental event, pointing out some differences, and using the existence of the differences to justify the assertion that even where the accounts agree they are unreliable.



Which brings to mind another question: If Jesus was not born at Bethlehem, where does that leave Micah's prophecy?



We can stop right there. Neither Matthew nor Luke bear a remote similarity to "police statements". A better analogy is if my wife, explaining to her boss later that day why she was late for work, went into painstaking detail about our actions both before and after the crash; while I (who am a lousy judge of distance) later told a friend in passing that the impact threw us nearly a hundred feet when in truth we had been thrown fifty feet.



When you take out all the assumptions, innuendo, and inferences drawn from textual ambiguities, all you've really got is the following:

a) Matthew does not tell us where Joseph and Mary lived before Jesus' birth, whereas Luke does.
b) Matthew does not explain why Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem, whereas Luke does.
c) Luke botched the date of Jesus' birth and, very probably, at least some of the particulars of the situation that got Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem in the first place.
d) Luke does not mention the flight into Egypt, whereas Matthew does.

There's a lack of overlap, to be sure; and each account individually has some flaws. But I see no prima facie evidence of actual conflict between the two accounts.

Thanks for the help.

I think this is just another person who is going to some college taking a bible course where the professor is trashing the Bible and the student is eating it up.


Bro. Rudick

[JohnnyRudick]

Originally Posted by Enlil-An

Look, guys. Everyone can believe what they want. I'm not here to convert you to something you don't want to accept. A person can explain away anything uncomfortable if they completely close their mind to the reality of what they're looking at. . .

For example (this "problem" I discovered previous to the Nativity problem while studying ancient myths from Mesopotamia), Genesis chapter 1 says, "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth..." Creationists have stretched these scriptures to no end to try and explain this scientifically. The truth is that what Genesis is describing is the creation of the universe as the people of the Ancient Near East understood it. They believed that the earth was flat, that the sky was a round dome, and that the whole of everything was surrounded by water ("the abyss").

Now I have no problem with the ancient Hebrews believing these same things and even incorporating these concepts into their sacred scriptures. I don't think it was that important to God for the Israelites to the know the exact science of creation. The problem is that these verses are reinforced in the Pearl of Great Price in both Abraham and Moses and these are supposed to be revelations given to these men (and then regiven to Joseph Smith) straight from God! Why would God lie to these prophets and tell them the earth was flat and encased in a dome called "Heaven" when he knew these scriptures would come forth in an age that knew better?

Way to picky.

I have no problem with the view given (pre-flood conditions) of the cosmology given in Genesis or the PofGP.

But the Earth is round and has always been round


If God flooded the universe with water after His original creation and then divided the water from the water where He originally placed our solar system along with a few others in His original Creation (space between Gen 1:1 and 1:2) what is the difference?


He has His reasons.

If the surface is frozen and is as a "Sea of Glass" and

If the Universe is shaped like a giant pyramid and Kolob is at the apex He has His reasons for that also.



Job 38:30 The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of
the deep is frozen.

Job 38:31 Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or
loose the bands of Orion?


Revelation 4:6 And before the throne there was a sea of glass
like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round
about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and
behind.


Revelation 15:2 And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled
with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast,
and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his
name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God.



Just a Thought



Bro. Rudick

[Snow]

Originally Posted by BenRaines

Snow, thank you for post #46 in this thread.

Ben Raines

Thank you Ben - appreciate hearing from you.

[Enlil-An]

If you want to blame the Church for your lack of education - then I'd say you are trying to blame someone else for your own failings.

Oh, right. I should have known right off the bat that LDS scholars were out to lunch. Afterall, everyone in the Church knows that. All this time I thought I could learn about the Bible from going to Church, reading the Ensign, and shopping at Desert Book. What was I thinking?

You must run with a slow crowd. The folks I hang with have been aware of the this stuff for years and years. I teach it in Priesthood meeting if it is relevant to the topic.

If so then you're straying from what's in your teacher's manual, aren't you? If you and your folks have known about "this stuff" for years and years, it wasn't from studying LDS material or growing up in Mormon communities. You learned these things from outside sources. And then you chided me for not doubting everything the Church brought me up to believe? Why don't you look at some of the posts on this thread? Apparently the "slow crowd" I've been running with all these years has been the bulk of the members of the Church? Is that what you're saying?

LDS scholars are certainly aware of this stuff as are historical scholars in general but until recently, there hasn't been any popular book directed toward the lay public on the matter.

I'm afraid this isn't true at all. Many LDS scholars for at least the last 100 years have created works that were specifically aimed at the lay public at least since the early 20th century and continue to steadily krank out more. The problem is that if they really know about "this stuff" they are not informing the lay public of it.

I have a book here: Verse by Verse: The Four Gospels written by two BYU scholars, D. Kelly Ogden and Andrew C. Skinner. After promoting the old, debunked view of the two contradictary geneologies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke (that one geneology is of Joseph and the other of Mary), the book goes into the details of the birth narratives (but not too closely, of course) trying its hardest to reconcile the different accounts and get around the historical inaccuracies by using outdated argements and dubious sources (not to mention skipping over conflicting passages). This book was published in 2006. If LDS scholars really do know about "this stuff", they're going to great lengths to cover it up and keep the lay public from hearing it.

Off the top of my head I can recommend 1. From Jesus to Christianity: How Four Generations of Visionaries & Storytellers Created the New Testament and Christian Faith: L. Michael White; 2. Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) Bart D. Ehrman 3. The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon, Marcus J. Borg, John Dominic Crossan.

That's wonderful, Snow, not one single LDS scholar among them. You don't think I have access to Amazon.com like everyone else? When did you last read Ehrman's Jesus Interupted by the way?

Try this on for size: The Bible is a history of God's dealings with man - from MAN'S point of view. God let man fumble along with it - as he permits in most all cases - but kept HIS hand in it enough so that gospel truths necessary for our salvation remained intact.

Sounds fair. Which specific "gospel truths necessary for our salvation" are you referring to exactly that you see remaining intact from the Old Testament on through to the New?

I am probably much more familiar with much of it than you are. YOU may have a problem with it. I don't lose any sleep nor do I get a aflutter and tweaky when someone like you tries to sound an alarm.

Obviously you are getting fluttered because your smug tone and condescending remarks are out of character for someone whose faith has gone through "the wringer" and come out victorious with a renewed testimony and the peace of reconciliation. You sound more like someone who has been confronted with these things before, never found satisfactory answers for them, dismissed and pushed them aside when it became too overwelming, and allowed time and a fading memory to heal the wounds. When someone like me comes along to open them back up again, your knee-jerk reaction is to attack and belittle the messenger in the hopes that he/she won't see through your little game and put you through "the wringer" all over again. You can prove me wrong, of course, by offering helpful, intellectual insights that you have discovered to help you reconcile modern historical research with your traditional faith. This is what your fellow saint is asking of you. I'm not really interested in playing immature games.

Re: the JS PoGP problem - I don't know what verses specifically you are referring to but think about it a moment... JS was a well-versed student of the Bible. He was also an intellectual (self-educated). Do you think that he thought that the earth was flat and the sky was a round dome?

The versus I'm referring to are the ones I've specifically quoted from Genesis 1:6-8 which have been reproduced almost verbatim in Abraham 4:6-8 and Moses 2:6-8. And, no, I don't think that Joseph Smith thought the earth was flat and the sky was a round dome. But, like most people who read the creation story in Genesis, I think Joseph Smith didn't understand what he was reading (there were no Ancient Near Eastern sources in translation available to him in his day to clarify these passages), and (one possible explaination) just lifted those verses straight out of the Old Testament and into the Pearl of Great Price having no idea what those texts truly signified. But, thanks to modern archeology and scholarly research, the beliefs and myths of the Ancient Near East are available to us today and anyone familiar with them would recognize straight away in the Bible's account the belief that was universal to all peoples of that time in the Near East - that the earth was a flat disc encased in a solid dome surrounded by water above and below and that if a person travelled far enough they would reach the edge of the world where heaven and earth touched eachother as it is described in Nehemiah 1:9 "But if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence, and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name there." And Mark 13:27 "And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven."

[Enlil-An]

If God flooded the universe with water after His original creation and then divided the water from the water where He originally placed our solar system along with a few others in His original Creation (space between Gen 1:1 and 1:2) what is the difference?

That's a creative interpretation, brother Rudick, but unfortunately it's not very likely. There are multiple examples in the Bible of the scriptures describing the flat earth and vaulted sky of the Ancient Near Eastern mythological cosmology. After studying Sumerian and Babylonian (as well as Egyptian) literature, a person can recognize the language immediately - as people living in those times would also have done.

Edited to add: Besides, how would verses 9 and 10 fit in with that definition? "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas".

[JohnnyRudick]

Originally Posted by Enlil-An

That's a creative interpretation, brother Rudick, but unfortunately it's not very likely. There are multiple examples in the Bible of the scriptures describing the flat earth and vaulted sky of the Ancient Near Eastern mythological cosmology. After studying Sumerian and Babylonian (as well as Egyptian) literature, a person can recognize the language immediately - as people living in those times would also have done.

Edited to add: Besides, how would verses 9 and 10 fit in with that definition? "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas".

8 is the number of New Beginnings and here we have a shift of attention from the Heavens to the Earth.

The water on the Earth are gathered together and are called seas. . .




Bro. Rudick

[Traveler]

Originally Posted by Enlil-An

It recently came to my attention that the birth narratives of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke are irreconcilably contradictary. According to Matthew, the Savior and his parents are from Bethlehem, stay there for two years after Jesus' birth, fly to Egypt to escape King Herod, and arrive at Nazareth for the first time once Herod is dead. In Luke, Mary and Joseph are from Nazareth, travel to Bethlehem for the census, stay there only a month during her purification according to Levitical law, and then return back home to Nazareth. There is no flight to Egypt, no wise men following a star, no death decree by Herod.

After reading these narratives closely, it becomes obvious that Matthew and Luke are telling two totally different, contradicting stories. Both of them can't be true. The prophet, Nephi, prophesied that Jesus' mother would be from Nazareth but only says that Jesus would be born in "the land of Jerusalem". There are no other places in the standard works that specify where Jesus was born or how he got there.

My question is, has anyone else here noticed this and how do we reconcile it with the Church's position that the Bible is the word of God (originally written by inspired men) and that the only errors in it are mistranlations and interpolations here and there?

The problem here is that the context of time and place is not understood very well. All the gospels were written some time after the death of Jesus. It is possible that the books were written 50 to 80 years after the actual events of his birth. If there was perfect agreement (as implied there should be) it would do more to indicate that the story was “fixed” and not at all accurate within the time that the text of each gospel were first made.

Another problem is historical ignorance. There was no understanding of zero at the time of Christ’s birth. A child was considered 1 year old when they were born and an additional year old at the New Year. A child that was born 3 days before a new year would be 2 years old before they were even a week by our accounting. We see this same math applied when Jesus died and was said to be in the tomb for 3 days when he really was not there for even a full 1 and ½ days by our accounting.

Mixing and matching ancient text with modern constraints is like trying to make sense of complex numbers using real number theory. All that can said of such annalists is that it is invalid.

The Traveler

[Traveler]

Originally Posted by Enlil-An

Look, guys. Everyone can believe what they want. I'm not here to convert you to something you don't want to accept. A person can explain away anything uncomfortable if they completely close their mind to the reality of what they're looking at.

.......

The truth is that what Genesis is describing is the creation of the universe as the people of the Ancient Near East understood it. They believed that the earth was flat, that the sky was a round dome, and that the whole of everything was surrounded by water ("the abyss").

Now I have no problem with the ancient Hebrews believing these same things and even incorporating these concepts into their sacred scriptures. I don't think it was that important to God for the Israelites to the know the exact science of creation. The problem is that these verses are reinforced in the Pearl of Great Price in both Abraham and Moses and these are supposed to be revelations given to these men (and then regiven to Joseph Smith) straight from God! Why would God lie to these prophets and tell them the earth was flat and encased in a dome called "Heaven" when he knew these scriptures would come forth in an age that knew better?

Again there are problems with mixing and matching different understanding of things using modern techniques. The concept of creation from a watery abyss comes from the ancient Egyptians 4000 years BC. The ancient concept becomes infinitely more palatable with the application of ancient mathematics. These ancient scientists did not believe the world to be flat and such non-sense is flawed from Medieval (Dark Ages) thinking when mixed with modern interpretations of Greek philosophy based on Medieval thinking.

The truth is that any civilization that could navigate the oceans in both the northern and southern hemispheres had to have known the world was round. We know from history that the ancient Egyptians established trade with India and used ships that sailed around the tip of Africa. The ancient Egyptian concepts of solar calendars and an absolute center North/South line indicates that they understood the earth is round much better than most high school students do today. Many with college degrees in the arts are not smart enough to see the coloration.

Please – even the Greeks and Romans (that did nothing more than copy the Egyptians) knew the earth was round. It was the silly religionist of the dark ages that came up with the flat earth nonsense.

The Traveler