//if the church is wealthy the god deniers complain and if its poor they complain//

Who is complaining about poor churches, runner?

Of course, there is always the other problem with Biblical literalism... like any work that has been printed, translated, re-printed, re-translated a zillion times over, errors are going to creep in. It's quite possible that some of the words the literalists are so staunchly adhering are just good old-fashioned mistakes. After all, who can forget the infamous Wicked Bible of 1631, in which the faithful were directed due by a mistake in the Ten Commandments, that 'Thou shalt commit adultery'. XD

Good thing people didn't take that one literally, eh?

Sells,

<<I am still waiting for an answer. Where are the bones of Jesus?>>

You have a cognitive bias to want to know where the bones of Jesus are located. You don't seem to want to deal with the biblical evidence.

Eminent Anglican NT scholar, former UK bishop of Durham, former professor at Oxford University, and now professor at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Dr N T Wright, in his magnum opus, The Resurrection of the Son of God (SPCK 2003), spent approx. 500 of 817 pages demonstrating that the resurrected Christ involved a soma (physical body). He wrote that the apostle Paul believed and articulated it in considerable detail that ...

"the resurrection would not only be bodily (the idea of a non-bodily resurrection would have been as much an oxymoron to him as it would be to both Jews and pagans of his day; whether you believed in resurrection or not, the word meant bodies), but that it would also involve transformation.... The Christian life belonged within a historical narrative which began with Jesus' resurrection and ended with the resurrection of all believers' (Wright 2003:372-373).

Writing for ABC Religion & Ethics (Australia), N. T. Wright stated:

"Ancient Judaism, on the other hand, is rooted in the belief that God is the creator of the world and that God will one day put the world to rights; and this double belief, when worked out and thought through not least in times of persecution and martyrdom, produced by the time of Jesus a majority belief in ultimate bodily resurrection.

"The early Christian belief in hope beyond death thus belongs demonstrably on the Jewish, not the pagan, map" (Wright, 'Only Love Believes: The Resurrection of Jesus and the Constraints of History', 17 April 2014). See: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/only-love-believes-the-resurrection-of-jesus-and-the-constraints/10099298

Toni,

What's the topic?

How do you reply?

<<Of course you do. Although it should be noted that this will occur after the talking eagles and the giant locusts with human faces.
That's just the tip of the iceberg... yep, ya gotta love Biblical literalism. Those guys are a hoot.>>

You don't address the topic I raised of Jesus' resurrection and return but you proceed with not dealing with the subject and ridicule Christianity. Thus you have committed the Appeal to Ridicule Logical Fallacy. See: http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/42/Appeal-to-Ridicule

You want my argument to sound ridiculous so you exaggerate your antagonism to Christianity instead of dealing with the topic. You engaged in fallacious reasoning.

Sells,

<<I think that the only answer is that Jesus' bones lie in Palestine. We must remember that Paul, the earliest NT writer knew nothing of the empty tomb>>.

Using your lingo, Jesus' bones are in an analogical and metaphorical phase of orbiting the disgraced liberalism that connects myth with fantasy, fiction and fairy tale. Bones of Jesus?

You are plumbing the depths of irrationality with your circular reasoning.

You will never know Jesus' grave is empty and there are no bones on earth to find because your presuppositions blind you to that conclusion.

<< We must remember that Paul, the earliest NT writer knew nothing of the empty tomb.>>

Every Bible version available on BibleGateway contradicts your view. See http://biblegateway.com/. You read a different Bible to these. First Corinthians 15 must be excluded from your Bible. In addition, Paul wrote of Jesus' resurrection in Rom 1:4; 6:5, and Phil 3:10-11.

Paul knew everything about an empty tomb of Jesus because he was a converted Pharisee and they believed resurrection meant bodily resurrection.

Anglican professor at University of St Andrews, Scotland, Prof Dr N T Wright (not a dummy on research about Jesus' resurrection), profoundly disagrees with your view: 'Early Christians envisaged a [resurrection] body which was still robustly physical but also significantly different from the present one.... The new body will not be corruptible - we might say not that it will be LESS physical, as though it were some kind of ghost or apparition, but more.... They were not talking about a non-bodily, "spiritual" survival' (The Resurrection of the Son of God. SPCK 2003:478).

Contrary to your imposed view of the meaning of 'mature theology' coming to 'a metaphorical reading of the texts', biblical teaching rests on Jesus' bodily resurrection, which was consistent with the expectations of the Jews.

Sells. You can believe what you like. But for me I trust the bible.

Moving with that line of thought. There are many theories and perspectives that people hold as their own that are outside of the bible, or are corrected by the texts in the bible if they were willing to study it. I'm not talking about unbelievers here, I mean Christians also. Like you many want to find answers for themselves and some with more reliability then just picking answers that sound good to them at the time, a vast magority just believe because of no evidance or reason outside of what they want to believe.

If you apply the stance to trust the bible, then many of the extra theories can be either dismissed as not important enough to constrate on, or they can corrected by what is written in the texts. You can still hold things that are outside of the bible, (such as the theories of rapture being before, during or after the tribulations predicted in the world), but on the matters that are in the bible, why would you doubt them? The matter of bones should be easy enough based on the tomb being empty.

The article you wrote was well written with the point to not dismiss the bible by liberal Christianity rewriting what the texts mean. It also faught against a literal interptation that I don't think anyone apply when they read the bible literally. (The point being to read psalms and parables as you would a historical document instead of looking for the underlying message and the context it meant it for).

(Continued)