Chris Weimer

That's not a fact.

Weltall

Because you say it doesn't make it so.
And this is why we don't have the original texts, right?

achristianbeliever

Maybe he did it just for me.
I don't want him to keep the originals preserved. Just because you think he should have so what? Why should God show favoritism towards your desire to have them preserved over my desire to not have them preserved?

mata leao

who knows? we found the dead sea scrolls after a long time...we may find more........will the very stones cry out? (figuratively? literally?)... One might argue that God, assuming he is who the Bible says he is) is rather patient....and God has the privilege of being patient.

pharoah

Finding them now will be of no help for the people of the past 1900 years or so. I also strongly suspect that it won't benefit many sectors of present-day Christianity either, to the point that they probably will claim them to be forgeries.

mata leao

well pharoah..kinda depends on what they say dont it? everybody here, including myself, is just one turn of the shovel away from having their entire world and world view turned upside down! Careful not to burn too many bridges!

Roger Pearse

There are several issues here twined together, some of which I can comment on and others not.

Firstly there seems to be the idea that a document can only be "God's word" if it is extant in the original hand-written copy written by a certain human being. This seems a strange idea. You see, I don't know how we tell if something is "God's word" apart from a theological authority telling us so. There is no way to tell, whether it is or isn't, outside of that, as far as I know (although no doubt there are indications). So who says that this has to be the case? We know that Jews in the time of Jesus did not think this; we know that Christians do not think this now, nor Moslems.

Secondly, no ancient literary text whatever is extant in this manner; nor many modern ones (is the autograph of the Hobbit in existence? I know the Narnia tales are not). Indeed no such copy may ever have existed, in an era of dictation and scribal revision. Is this an argument that ancient literature has not reached us? If so, the implications are much wider than biblical studies! But if we accept that (e.g.) the speeches of Cicero have come down to us more or less as delivered (and they do so mainly in 15th century manuscripts), then there is no issue.

Thirdly there seems to be confusion between the idea of textual variation and differences. All texts have small textual variations, including printed ones. This is just a feature of life. But we do not discard the Lord of the Rings on these grounds.

The argument then seems to reduce to saying that it is impossible for a deity to make use in a special way of a book, other than in the original. This I cannot comment on, without a divine revelation to confirm this.

I saw a couple of comments about the Koran. The text of the Koran has never been critically studied, so the content of the text is in fact unknown, in a sense. No-one alive today has any honest idea whether the cheap printed texts of the 21st century are the same as the text selected by Uthman. To find out will require a comparison of all the early manuscripts, and drawing up a critical edition. No doubt the text does indeed contain pretty much the same thing, a few scribalisms aside -- but no-one actually *knows* this.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

spin

Unless you are making a distinction between literary texts and historical texts, this statement is not correct. We have for example all the Elephantine letters, the Lachish letters, the Amarna letters sent from the levant, a vast body of letters and edicts from Oxyrhynchus, the Murabba'at letters, the Wadi ed-Daliyeh texts and a host of others.


spin

Answerer

WHAT!?

If the biblical teaching are so screwed, why even bother to be a christian and waste your time over some wrong stuffs? Join us..........


Oh yeah and thats what Sunni and Shites had been fighting for over the past 1400 years. Their own one true version of the Quran.

Overcomer

Given the propensity of human beings to worship things instead of God, there existed the danger that people would worship the original copies of the books of the Bible. Look at the way the Roman Catholic church promoted relics, saying that a bit of wood came from Christ's cross or a drop of dried blood in a bottle was shed from his body. This was total nonsense.

Should we be concerned that the originals are no longer with us? Not really. The Scriptures are reliable without them. Information scientists and document experts agree on this fact. There are some 25,000 ancient documents by which scholars can compare texts. What makes this sigifnicant? Consider this:

Let's say I give five people a letter to copy. They do so and I see that there is one sentence that has been copied five different ways. How would I know which one was right if I didn't have the original letter?

Let's say I give that same letter to 50 different people to copy. When I collect their copies, I see that one sentence has been copied five different ways by five of the copyists. However, the other 45 agree. Therefore, I can reasonably and validly claim that the 45 were right while the five were wrong.

I hope that illustrates why the fact that there are so many copies of Scripture to compare (be they full texts or partial) allows us to determine the accuracy of what was written so many years ago.

The Dead Sea Scrolls also showed how accurately the Bible has been preserved. The full text of Isaiah found in the caves there were compared with the Isaiah we are using today and there were only 15 differences, all a minor letter here or there, none of which changed the meaning of the text.

You will find there are some copyist errors but none of them alter the message of the Bible. And, truthfully, you can get to the bottom of them by doing just what I described above, comparing, comparing and comparing again to arrive at the truth.