Deutro-Isaiah. Credible or Incredible...?

[_Samantabhadra]

And you people have a problem with the Book of Mormon exactly why then?

Because the Book of Mormon is a fraudulent document written by a con-man. As Buffalo notes, the Hebrews were real people. The Egyptians were real people. The Samaritans and the Assyrians were real people. However the "Nephites" and the "Lamanites" and the "Jaredites" were all the invention of Joseph Smith. There is no such thing as "Jaredites" or "Nephites" or "Lamanites." They never existed. They are the imaginary peoples of an imaginary story imagined by some guy who loved to tell stories. The comparison is not with Hebrews and Egyptians, but with Hobbits and Elves.

For "Mature Christians," it makes no difference whether or not the author of Deutero-Isaiah was the same as the author of the rest of Isaiah, since both were inspired by God and both had an important, canonical, message. It doesn't impact their faith at all, because they know that the content is the most important thing, and authorship in the ancient world was considered very differently from the way we think of it now. For example, there was no such thing as copyright.

However the transparently bogus nature of the Book of Mormon means that it could not be--that it most certainly is not--what it claims to be or what Joseph Smith claimed it to be. Mature Christians are not bothered by the fact that portions of Isaiah were written later than other portions of Isaiah, since the value of the Book of Isaiah does not derive exclusively (or even mainly) from the authority of its composer(s). Mature Christians are not bothered by the fact that most of the Psalms either pre-date or post-date King David, since the value of the Psalms do not derive from the authority of King David.

On the other hand, the Book of Mormon claims to be the record of an ancient American civilization. But this civilization never existed, and whole passages that must necessarily (if the Book of Mormon is to be believed) have come from pre-exile Jews, are known today with absolute 100% certainty to date from after the Exile. This poses no problem for mature Christians, for the reasons outlined above. But it poses huge problems for Mormons, because it is incontrovertible evidence that Joseph Smith was a liar and a fraud and that the Book of Mormon is not what it claims to be.

Since when did adding real people, places, and events into a fictional account start transforming it from fictional account an actual historical account? Isn't ficition still fiction no matter how many real people, places or events is mentioned in passing?

No one here is saying that the Book of Isaiah or Deutero-Isaiah is fictional. Quite the opposite--we know there were two authors because of the facts included in the book, which postdate one of its authors. Nor is anyone here saying that it is fraudulent. There are many ways for faithful Christians to acknowledge that the Book of Isaiah, including Deutero-Isaiah, was divinely inspired, and not fraudulent.

[_Franktalk]

On the other hand, the Book of Mormon claims to be the record of an ancient American civilization. But this civilization never existed, and whole passages that must necessarily (if the Book of Mormon is to be believed) have come from pre-exile Jews, are known today with absolute 100% certainty to date from after the Exile. This poses no problem for mature Christians, for the reasons outlined above. But it poses huge problems for Mormons, because it is incontrovertible evidence that Joseph Smith was a liar and a fraud and that the Book of Mormon is not what it claims to be.

The claim that any civilization existed or not is based on belief. For almost two thousand years scholars believed that the Assyrians were a fable because no evidence of them existed. Oh there were some mentions in other works of them but no physical evidence means to some no existence. If God wishes us to find evidence then nothing can prevent the evidence from coming forth. But if it is His desire to have us live in faith then the evidence will not be available no matter how hard anyone tries to find it. It is your attachment to this world that leads to your conclusions. As a Thomas you desire to place your hand in the wound of Christ, many do.

But let us step back for a moment and look at the big picture. Does scripture predict a fall of the church? Yes it does and history shows a fall. Does scripture tell of the Word being restored in the latter days? Yes it does. What Church today has the closest doctrine to the original church? You may argue this point but people like myself believe that the LDS church and its doctrine are the restored gospel. So all of this nonsense about this little detail or that little detail is just something for those of the world to fall on. Any attempt to pry scripture apart with the world will not matter to someone who walks in faith.

[Guest]

The claim that any civilization existed or not is based on belief. For almost two thousand years scholars believed that the Assyrians were a fable because no evidence of them existed. Oh there were some mentions in other works of them but no physical evidence means to some no existence. If God wishes us to find evidence then nothing can prevent the evidence from coming forth. But if it is His desire to have us live in faith then the evidence will not be available no matter how hard anyone tries to find it. It is your attachment to this world that leads to your conclusions. As a Thomas you desire to place your hand in the wound of Christ, many do.

But let us step back for a moment and look at the big picture. Does scripture predict a fall of the church? Yes it does and history shows a fall. Does scripture tell of the Word being restored in the latter days? Yes it does. What Church today has the closest doctrine to the original church? You may argue this point but people like myself believe that the LDS church and its doctrine are the restored gospel. So all of this nonsense about this little detail or that little detail is just something for those of the world to fall on. Any attempt to pry scripture apart with the world will not matter to someone who walks in faith.

I do find the concept of a Mature Christian pretty alien to the Christians that came before them. There is a long tradition, over a period of 1800 years, of Christians (the early saints, apostles, and Jesus himself among them) that did not hold these beliefs. The Mature Christian believes just anyone can be inspired of God and pretend to be the authors, you know the prophets and apostles, of the Bible, instead of honestly stating who they are as themselves. They justify this behaviour by stating: Well, that is just how it was done without batting an eye about the ethical issues involved, chief among them being the pure audacity and dishonesty involved.

Now according to Samantabhadra, this does not extend to Joseph Smith. A position I find to be transparently weak if you truly hold the belief that anyone can be inspired of God and pretend to be any author. I feel this is merely an expression of bias against Joseph Smith and demonstrates a serious weakness in the belief described above. It smacks more of the reasoning that the true position of Mature Christians is that they doubt prophets can see future events (the reason they flock to the Duetro-Isaiah theory); that nowdays they are more sophisticated and more knowledgable than Christians that came before (like Jesus Christ, John, and the apostles); so they can pick and choose what they believe is inspired and true about Christianity. I believe this is at the heart of what a true Mature Christian is all about - and it is quite an alien creature from any Christian that came before.

[_Franktalk]

Tobin,

It is obvious that if this tactic does not work they will just come up with some new one. The technique of defining a term and then twisting that new term to pry apart a belief system is not new. I find it amusing that people of little faith tell people of strong faith what faith is. It is true that Christians (self proclaimed) come in all flavors. But the people who walk in the spirit know each other when they meet.

[_Runtu]

Tobin,

It is obvious that if this tactic does not work they will just come up with some new one. The technique of defining a term and then twisting that new term to pry apart a belief system is not new. I find it amusing that people of little faith tell people of strong faith what faith is. It is true that Christians (self proclaimed) come in all flavors. But the people who walk in the spirit know each other when they meet.

I don't see why you feel the need to accuse others of disingenuousness and dishonesty. Bad form.

[_Franktalk]

I don't see why you feel the need to accuse others of disingenuousness and dishonesty. Bad form.

That is not my intent at all. Some people argue for the sake of arguing. Still others argue because they truly seek answers. But most including myself argue because we feel we have found something worth arguing over. I know of no one who knows the whole truth about anything. In this world we are as blind men describing an elephant. We each have our own perspective. The methods we use are all over the map and I have seen many.

I see Isaiah as prophecy. For me the message comes from the highest authority. The exact method of placing the words in written form means nothing to me. Some servant of God placed the words in written form and the message has been protected down through the ages. What else is there to talk about?

[_Samantabhadra]

If God wishes us to find evidence then nothing can prevent the evidence from coming forth. But if it is His desire to have us live in faith then the evidence will not be available no matter how hard anyone tries to find it.

I'm sorry but that is among the dumber things I have ever read. That is like the claim made by the anti-evolutionists, that God put fossils that are millions of years old (or appear to be millions of years old) just to "test the faith" of Christians. This argument succeeds in one thing, and one thing only: convincing anyone paying attention that you are not interested in discussing the issue on its merits.

You could use this same reasoning to prove anything you wanted: God wants us to believe the Book of Abraham so He changed all the papyruses in the world, and the Rosetta Stone, and the whole system of hieroglyphics, after-the-fact, just to demonstrate how special Joseph Smith was, so we would have faith in order to combat against the evidence from Egyptologists and papyrologists that Joseph Smith had absolutely no idea what he was doing when he supposedly "translated" the Breathings of Hor.

See how easy that was?

If God exists, He is all-loving and does not deceive anyone. Therefore if evidence for or against something has been destroyed, it has nothing to do with the desire of God to cover anything up.

And I have never heard anything to the effect that there was ever any question as to whether or not the Assyrians existed. They were a part of the Akkadian Empire from the mid-third millennium BCE, which is well attested both in terms of textual and archaeological evidence.

[_Franktalk]

Samantabhadra,

You can believe what ever you wish. You can construct a god into any form you want. Maybe one from wood or clay would be nice. But I will not do this.

2Ki 6:17 And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.

The basis of your argument is that this reality is the end and reference for all thought and reason. Anything which disagrees with your view of this creation must be in your eyes an error. Any god that interferes with the creation must be false to support your view that the creation is the ultimate god.

In my view the creation is but a thing like a tool. To be used by God to perform His will. How He chooses to use the creation is His business. Your logic means nothing since it is tied to the creation. Your ideas or right and wrong are tied to your senses and tied to this manufactured place. That is very limited in my view. You have accepted a view that everything around you can be interpreted by man and is truth. And that anything which disagrees with man's truth is false. Many hold on to this kind of belief system. The concept that man has interpreted fossils correctly and anything that disagrees with that concept must be a lie is just another indication of an attachment to this world and the idea that man's ideas can't be wrong. If you wish to surround yourself with dead bones and make a story up about those bones feel free. But don't point your finger at me and use those dead bones to tell me you know the truth and what I believe is a lie. Go ahead and embrace those things of death, I will embrace a living God.

[_Samantabhadra]

You have accepted a view that everything around you can be interpreted by man and is truth. And that anything which disagrees with man's truth is false.

I have done nothing of the sort. In a former life I was a physicist, who skirted dangerously near the edge of such a view, but with time I came to see the error of my ways. Now I have a deep contemplative practice, a practice that transcends time and space and duality and the limits of logic and language. I reject materialism, physicalism, atheism, and secularism. I think they are fundamentally wrongheaded and I think Western civilization took a wrong turn (off a cliff) at the time of the so-called "Enlightenment."

However, and I cannot stress this enough, that does not in any way imply that the material historical record is fictitious or that things like radiometric dating do not have important things to tell us about that material historical record. You can close yourself off from the whole world if you want to, live in a perfect little bubble of your own perfect little epistemic closure. That's fine. Just don't expect anyone with an open epistemic horizon, or anyone who thinks it is important to separate what is true from what is false, to agree with you.

Like you, I think the material historical record is a distraction from the most important parts of life. I think inner development and inner purification are infinitely more important than arriving at the precisely correct date for when such and such an event happened. But just because my priorities are different from the priorities of secular culture does not mean that I reject the conclusions of secular culture when it comes to secular matters such as when the dinosaurs lived. Acknowledging that knowing when the dinosaurs lived will never get us into Heaven is very different from claiming that we can learn more about when the dinosaurs lived from the Bible than from radiometric dating. The Bible is not a reliable instrument for attaining that knowledge; radiometric dating is a reliable instrument for that knowledge.

[_Franktalk]

...Like you, I think the material historical record is a distraction from the most important parts of life. I think inner development and inner purification are infinitely more important than arriving at the precisely correct date for when such and such an event happened. But just because my priorities are different from the priorities of secular culture does not mean that I reject the conclusions of secular culture when it comes to secular matters such as when the dinosaurs lived. Acknowledging that knowing when the dinosaurs lived will never get us into Heaven is very different from claiming that we can learn more about when the dinosaurs lived from the Bible than from radiometric dating. The Bible is not a reliable instrument for attaining that knowledge; radiometric dating is a reliable instrument for that knowledge.

The problem with acceptance of the science is the acceptance of the assumptions that come with it. If you accept a uniform past then supernatural events are excluded. In my belief system God is active and has greatly changed things in the past. This of course has jumbled up all of the stuff on the earth in unknown ways. To accept God and not accept supernatural events makes no sense to me. I have decided that my belief in God is stronger than any belief in man's limited view of this world. I don't ignore the stuff laying around like bones but I refuse to push my belief in God aside while I try and figure out what they mean. I know for certain I can not sit at the table of science and also sit at the table of faith. Many sit at the table of science and then paint God into a smaller and smaller corner. I refuse to do that. In your statement there is an implied belief that what man determines to be true is true and any knowledge of God must bend to fit that truth. I am not sure you have thought this out.