Book of Revelation: A REAL Vision' or a FAKE Prophecy' PatchedTogether from Scraps of 'Old" Test

My personal opinion is this is a non-issue. Here's why.

I believe this world has "ended" many times before, most likely in a highly similar manner. Of course there are recordings with identical catch phrases. Much of the Old Testament is a retelling of ancient text sources, including African teachings, Asian stories, and Sumerian text. Some people use that as a weapon to debunk the Bible. I don't. I see it as a reason to acknowledge Scripture though not in a literal manner. Much of the Old Testament borrowed from older texts, as I have described. However, the New Testament and the teachings of Christ are done in the form of parables. There's a reason for that.

Either way, the reason for the retelling is each time it ended in a similar manner, though not exactly in the same manner. It is up to us to figure out why we keep destroying our planet.

reply to post by troubleshooter


John only authored the version of the Apocalypse recorded in the KJV of the Bible. Other disciples shared their version of the "end" as well. This is why we should acknowledge that Jesus spoke in parables. Someone else already mentioned this and I did as well before reading that person's post. He did so as to not upset the priests and call attention to Himself via the Romans. JMO.

Anyway, each disciple understandably came to different conclusions concerning The End. I don't recall that Mary Magdalene weighed in on this in any significant manner. She probably understood it most.

another possible source are sibyl texts and oracles

The sibyls are an ancient order that lived in caves and prophesied to Roman Emperors, government officials, and the wealthy. Their works and oracles were widely distributed throughout roman empire centuries before Christ and also foretold of a savior that would overturn the world order.

There are many parallels between sibyl texts and the Bible, however the original sibyl works were sought out and destroyed by Converted Roman Emperors and the Organized Church after the conversion of Constantine in 326 AD.A true tragedy as they included great works of prophecy that predate all of new testament and some of the Old.

The Book Of revelations were a battle to be included in Canonized Bible, it took centuries of negotiations to settle on the four gospels...the main obstacle the claim that Jesus was also God. This was the price for those that wanted to include the book of revelations into the Canonized Bible, the inclusion of the Book of John which proclaims that God the father and Jesus are one and the same.
It was through this settled negotiation that Revelations passed Canonization, and the current bible comes into being.

Revelations can be traced to hundreds of years prior to its actual writing, John of Patmos borrowed heavily from previous literature, and once accepted as canon, competing literature was destroyed.

Have any of you ever heard of Ockham's Razor? It means don't overcomplicate things.

Maybe, just maybe, the apostle John wrote down the vision he was given from Jesus while in exile on the isle of Patmos, in about the year AD90, concerning things to come.

What a concept, eh?

reply to post by SaberTruth


"Have any of you ever heard of Ockham's Razor? It means don't overcomplicate things"


Applying your razor to the Bible would result in tossing the entire assembled works out the door. It is up to people of reason and logic to review and research a religious writing, especially one that has impacted the world in such as way as the Bible, or Koran, or etc.

Originally posted by ariel bender
reply to post by SaberTruth

 

Applying your razor to the Bible would result in tossing the entire assembled works out the door. It is up to people of reason and logic to review and research a religious writing, especially one that has impacted the world in such as way as the Bible, or Koran, or etc.

Not at all.Whether the text supports these complicated theories or not, the simplest one is that the text is what it appears to be. "Reason and logic" are what drove me to that conclusion, along with a grasp of grammar and syntax and the normal, reasonable, logical rules of textual criticism. I can assure you that the people who have examine ancient texts use reason and logic, whether they hold the text to be divinely inspired or not.

I really am tired of these arrogant claims to have exclusive use of logic and reason solely on whether one is religious or not. Tautology much?

Originally posted by SaberTruth

Originally posted by ariel bender
reply to post by SaberTruth

 

Applying your razor to the Bible would result in tossing the entire assembled works out the door. It is up to people of reason and logic to review and research a religious writing, especially one that has impacted the world in such as way as the Bible, or Koran, or etc.

Not at all.Whether the text supports these complicated theories or not, the simplest one is that the text is what it appears to be. "Reason and logic" are what drove me to that conclusion, along with a grasp of grammar and syntax and the normal, reasonable, logical rules of textual criticism. I can assure you that the people who have examine ancient texts use reason and logic, whether they hold the text to be divinely inspired or not.

I really am tired of these arrogant claims to have exclusive use of logic and reason solely on whether one is religious or not. Tautology much?

edit on 4-6-2011 by SaberTruth because: (no reason given)

It may be, that your opposition do not see much use of logic and reasoning in your writings and methodology. You only CLAIM to have it, in a superior form to all opposition. But you never get to a point beyond that claim, and when challenged, you just make disappearance acts.

I have repeatedly offered you an unravelling of the objective/subjective concepts used in trying to establish 'truth/reality', and your response is the same.

Circle-arguments originating form your version of doctrines, semantic dodgings into irrelevant sidetracks or a sullen reference to 'persecution'.

The bible, its specific parts and its impact on mankind certainly requires a more solid approach than scholastics or semantic gymnastics to validate it.

reply to post by cry93

Hi Cry93

The so-called King James Version (c. 1611) of the English 'Protestant-Bible' (aka KJV) was only able to use the late Masoretic pointed text (c. 1000 AD) for the Hebrew Scriptures (having no access back in 1611 to the Dead Sea Scroll material which was re-discovered beginning in Novemeber of 1946 - and totally and deliberately ignoring all the various and sundry ancient LXX Greek Septuaginta 'old' testament family of texts (and the Samaritan Pentateuch as well !) along with ignoring all the variant textual traditions containted in such ancient text families as those later used by Symmachus and Aquila and Theodotion - i.e. all the variant versions of the Greek OT) ..

The King James compiler-translators were only able to use Codex (A) Alexandrinus and the Western Codex Bezae Bi-Glot Cantabrigiensis (D) - for their entire New Testament - of which only (A) Alexandrinus contained the Book of Revelation (since you must know by now that the Book of Revelation is totally absent in the Codex Bezae Biglot - D)

So......they only use ONE Manuscript to produce their error-laden text of the Book of Revelation in English.

Well, here's more : Besides being totally missing in Codex Bezae Biglot (D) the so-called 'Book of Revelation' is ALSO missing from Codex Vaticanus (B) which was unknown to the compilers of the King James Bible, and is ALSO missing from The Codex Claro Montanus (Dp) annd the Freer Codex Washingtoniensis (W).

So we are not working with a very 'well attested' Greek text by any stretch.

In fact, what mangled Greek Manuscripts (MSS) of the 'Book of Revelatioin' that we DO possess are quite textually 'corrupt' (i.e. they have been heavilly 'tampered-with' by the many copyists who handled the actual MSS)

Especially noticeable are all the massive textual differences between even the tiny fragment of say the Papyri (e.g. #P. Oxy. LVI 4499- dating from around AD 260) and say, (A) Codex Alexandrinus (dating from around a hundred years later i.e. c. AD 360).

In few of these facts, how on earth could you even think for a moment that the grossly textually corrupt 1611-King James Version of the 'protestant' Bible is the ONLY source for this book? (you did know, didn't you, that the King James Bible of 1611 had in fact to go back to the printers to re-issue no less than THREE 'corrected' versions of its printed pages within the space of its very 1st year of publication in 1611 - and still leaving intact more than 7,000 textual errors still in to this day !)

Is all this news to you? Or are you just deliberately NOT looking at these uncomfortable little factoids regarding all the mangled ancient hand-copied Greek manuscript texts of the so-called 'Book of Revelation' simply because nobody in your 'Sunday School' bothered to find out about any of them?

What have you to say for yourself?

reply to post by SaberTruth


Hi Saber Truth -

You wrote: “ Have you ever heard of [William of] Ockham’s Razor? … whether the Text supports these Complicated Theories or not - the simplest one is that the Text is what it appears to be.

Reason and logic are what drove me to that conclusion, along with a grasp of grammar and syntax and the normal, reasonable, logical rules of textual criticism. I can assure you that the people who have examine[d these] ancient texts use reason and logic, whether they hold the Text to be divinely inspired or not. “

Unquote

You fall victim by citing such persons as William of Occam to what is known as ‘oversimplification’ of a far more complex textual-literary and religio-political situation when it comes to coding systems present within the ‘Book of Revelation’ - in fact, the mangled ancient hand copied Greek texts are certainly NOT what they seem to be on the surface - by any stretch to those who have studied these matters closely –

The first fact to bear in mind here is that in point of fact, there is no one single uncorrupted hand copied ‘original text’ of the so-called Book of Revelation’ in existence today – all we have are highly corrupt and deliberately altered ancient Greek manuscripts (all hand copied and textually mangled – which caused someone to tack on a warning about such shenanigans at the end of the book !)

For another thing (and contrary to what most persons reading the text in English who often miss such facts…) the mangled Greek text(s) of this book are ‘stuffed to the rafters’ with coded anti-gentile anti-Roman & highly seditionist WAR language - which has been carefully masqued by the author(s) often utilizing subtle symbologies within the text (i.e. in many places) e.g. by using a sort of midrashic-rabinnic style of ‘abbreviated verbal clustering’

(After all, 1st century Judaeans and those Jews 'scattered amongst the Goyim' in the Greek Diaspora Synagogues couldn’t very well go around making ‘graven images’ or ‘painting coded pictures ‘ in those days the way other non-Jewish ccultures could to get their message across, so they had to resort to other means of painting a picture)

e.g. sometimes using techniques of densely (and often somewhat sophisticated) expressed ‘verbal-painting’ which their listening audiences would have been quite used to – and often utilizing a technique known in the trade as ‘Gezera Shewa’ (strings of gemmatrially-linked key catch-words & phrases) by someone (or group) who was highly educated in Leveticcal 2nd Temple sacrificial priestly matters – and who moreover originally wrote in Aramaic & Hebrew - and whose (unfinished?) original Aramaic Ur-Text was very very badly-translated into often totally un-grammatical koine Greek.

And for another thing, we moderns who read the text even in its mangled Greek forms do not live in the Troad Synagogue system in Turkey or in 1st century Palestine, and therefore cannot understand many of the more subtle political nuances that are undoubtedly present in these mangled texts …

Simply put, we to-day are simply not privy to all the kinds of methodology that exiled political seditionist criminals (from the Roman Empire’s Point of View, that is) had to resort to in order to ‘preach the Word of EL’ to the ‘Elect ones’…during a major Rebellion against the State (e.g. AD 66-72).

Like all ‘Jewish Apocalypses’ (from the Greek prefix : APO = ‘remove’ & the Greek noun: KALUPS = ‘veil’, hence APO-KALUPS – literally ‘Removal of the Veil’) the text is SYMBOLIC being highly dangerous i.e. seditious politically (the whole Apocalyptic movement having been born in a milieu of successive & brutal ‘Military Gentile occupation of Eretz Yisro’el, first invasions and conquered lands taken by the Assyrians, then by the Babylonians, then by the Persians then by the Greeks then by the Romans etc…)
So (unfortunately for you and others like you) a much more complex situation exists not only with the history of transmission of these mangled and contradictory ancient Greek texts for our Book of Revelation, but also with the process of ‘getting back to the original meaning of the author(s) and his/their 'original audience' whoever they might have been.

An appreciation of all these points above and many others like it is the very first step in any true uinderstanding of any given text from antiquity – as you must already know - and questions of Authorship, Date, Writing Style, original Language, Religio-political Weltanschauung (i.e. the writers presuppositions), the Persons who made up the ‘Original ‘Audience’ , the Location of the Writing and the Locations of all the Copies that were made over several hundred years (and were constantly being adapted as they were copied in the process) in antiquity etc. etc. all have an impact on making the book into the form(s) that people can examine to-day.

So as much as I admire Sir William of Ockham Midaeval Logick (& his often semi-lucid approach to things in general) in this particular case, we must be very wary of ‘Throwing the Baby Out with the Bath Water…’ by over-simplifying what is clearly meant to have been an obfuscatory piece of literature from the get go - like all Apocalypses are 'by definition...'

Originally posted by Sigismundus
reply to post by SaberTruth

You fall victim by citing such persons as William of Occam to what is known as ‘oversimplification’ of a far more complex textual-literary and religio-political situation when it comes to coding systems present within the ‘Book of Revelation’ - in fact, the mangled ancient hand copied Greek texts are certainly NOT what they seem to be on the surface - by any stretch to those who have studied these matters closely

You are mistaking the complexity of textual criticism with the complexity of interpretation. The latter is what I was referring to; there are some very complicated theories of what the text means, and I view them as unnecessarily complex.

So of course I disagree with your assertion here. Not being any kind of expert in textual criticism myself, I depend upon the research of those who are, and when such experts disagree as they do on this and other things, I must choose the side that makes the better argument in my estimation.

For another thing (and contrary to what most persons reading the text in English who often miss such facts…) the mangled Greek text(s) of this book are ‘stuffed to the rafters’ with coded anti-gentile anti-Roman & highly seditionist WAR language - which has been carefully masqued by the author(s) often utilizing subtle symbologies within the text (i.e. in many places) e.g. by using a sort of midrashic-rabinnic style of ‘abbreviated verbal clustering’

I go directly to the Greek. And I am not aware of the bulk of scholarship describing the text of Rev. as "mangled". If you ever get a chance to assemble a team of experts in ancient classical and koine Greek, I'd be most interested in seeing them debate a like panel of experts that disagree with them. Only then will I know I have all the pertinent data with which to make an informed decision; I'm certainly not taking only your word for it.

Or, you could submit a paper to known experts and have it peer-reviewed by both friendly and hostile scholars. I'd really like to see you do that, since you appear to set yourself up as knowing these things better than they do and have made quite a few bold claims here. Go for it!

So (unfortunately for you and others like you)

Arrogant, insulting and condescending remark. You just dropped about 1000 points on the respect scale, bud. You can take your "let me enlighten you ignorant peasants" attitude someplace else.

The super loons have taken the thread hostage.

lol

reply to post by SaberTruth


"Whether the text supports these complicated theories or not, the simplest one is that the text is what it appears to be"



With any due respect, this is nonsense. A work of literature such as we are discussing is not accurate simply because it is written down. This is a terrible method of diligence and should be refuted.

There is nothing complicated in tracing plagiarized literature through the ages, it is an accepted tool and should absolutely be used by anyone in serious effort researching material, more so if it involves spiritual matters.
Using basic research tools available, the writings of John of Patmos are Plagiarized, borrowing heavily from the works of sibylline oracles, older Hebrew literature, among others.

reply to post by AdamsMurmur


A vision under the influence of hashish.

reply to post by SaberTruth


You wrote:

["You are mistaking the complexity of textual criticism with the complexity of interpretation. The latter is what I was referring to; there are some very complicated theories of what the text means, and I view them as unnecessarily complex.

So of course I disagree with your assertion here. Not being any kind of expert in textual criticism myself, I depend upon the research of those who are, and when such experts disagree as they do on this and other things, I must choose the side that makes the better argument in my estimation"]

Including a rational component into your speculations would definitely bring it closer to the simplicity of an Occam's razor presentation.

The common theist pre-occupation with elaborate embellishments always leads to a patchwork of overdone non-answers.

Originally posted by NOTurTypical
The super loons have taken the thread hostage.

lol

The increasing use of character-defamation in your theist campaigns isn't more convincing than your former use of hijacked science/logic.

Don't you have ANYTHING else to promote the inside of your holy bubble with. Say like a rational argument or the will to find real communication?

Originally posted by NOTurTypical
The super loons have taken the thread hostage.

lol

As always.

Have you ever gotten a moderator to respond to any of our reports on these trolls? I still hold out hope that they really aren't as blatantly biased as it appears so far, but I don't know for how long. They jump immediately on off-topic posts elsewhere, so maybe nobody is assigned to the "ghetto". I wonder if they'd ever allow a Christian to be moderator over said "ghetto"?

Originally posted by SaberTruth

Originally posted by NOTurTypical
The super loons have taken the thread hostage.

lol

As always.

Have you ever gotten a moderator to respond to any of our reports on these trolls? I still hold out hope that they really aren't as blatantly biased as it appears so far, but I don't know for how long. They jump immediately on off-topic posts elsewhere, so maybe nobody is assigned to the "ghetto". I wonder if they'd ever allow a Christian to be moderator over said "ghetto"?

It's questionable, if this post of yours would survive moderator scrutiny either. But if you wish, we can work our way back to topic together.

reply to post by bogomil

character-defamation...

holy bubble...

When in Rome..

Originally posted by SaberTruth

Originally posted by NOTurTypical
The super loons have taken the thread hostage.

lol

As always.

Have you ever gotten a moderator to respond to any of our reports on these trolls? I still hold out hope that they really aren't as blatantly biased as it appears so far, but I don't know for how long. They jump immediately on off-topic posts elsewhere, so maybe nobody is assigned to the "ghetto". I wonder if they'd ever allow a Christian to be moderator over said "ghetto"?

I don't alert mods to the trolls. Only time I get a mods attention is for extreme violations.

Originally posted by ariel bender
With any due respect, this is nonsense. A work of literature such as we are discussing is not accurate simply because it is written down. This is a terrible method of diligence and should be refuted.

Likewise, with any due respect, your response is nonsense. You're burning a straw man.

2nd line.