Steven Avery

There are dozens of other examples, generally less in size and/or doctrinal import, but very significant nonetheless. You will find that in most cases the overwhelming number of manuscripts, and early church writer quotations, supports the Byzantine Text. (The exception above would be the Johannine Comma).

Those of us who accept the historic NT, the Textus Receptus, and its English translations like Tyndale, Geneva and then the King James Bible, would agree that a small minority of manuscripts were rather grossly corrupted, but that is simply a non-issue since we have the historic New Testament.

The problem is that rather insipid theories of the NT text, theories that have at base a view of errancy and error within the text, have made those small number of manuscripts the base for the corrupt modern versions. And most of the 'apologetic' web-sites go through the seminary indoctrination so they end up trying to defend conflicting texts. Really, it can't be done.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Roger Pearse

That is correct, and rational.

I don't think people should go down the road of supposing the NT is textually corrupt; it isn't. On the contrary it is our best attested surviving ancient text. All texts suffer damage in transmission; the only question is whether they are destroyed in the process, and very few are.

Where people go wrong is in supposing that for us to access the content of a text requires it to be transmitted exactly, or not at all. But people who lived in the manuscript era knew that no two manuscripts are alike. (Some of us know that no two printed editions are alike either...) But they lived with that, and to attack a text on these grounds means to deny the possibility of transmitting texts from antiquity to our own day. The distance between this and obscurantism is invisible to me.

Let's be grateful for what has survived. Some stuff has survived fantastic obstacles. The sole manuscript of Tertullian's Ad Nationes is damaged. Water seeped into the parchment. At some date, in a salvage operation, the rotting margins were cut off. The result is that, particularly towards the end of Ad Nationes, words are missing. Yet these words form part of clauses, the clauses part of sentences, and the sentences part of the train of thought of the author. This means that the English translation does not have gaps in it, even though the Latin text does; it is possible for us to read what Tertullian had to say, even though, strictly speaking, it doesn't exist!

Why would we wish to discard such knowledge? Whatever reason we might have, it would be a heavy price to pay. There are other ways to approach this issue.

Note that textual critics must examine the deviations, in order to heal the text. But if it doesn't matter to a translation, it probably doesn't matter to anyone else. You can stare at glass and note each speck and defect, and see nothing else. Or you can look through it, into the world beyond. The historian does the latter, the text critic the former.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Has it?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

JES

See, this is where I get in trouble when debating with Christians (I don't if you are or not). Are you saying that questioning the reliability of the Bible by pointing out textual issues is a poor argument against the Bible because you believe the documents to be reasonably accurate or because you believe them to be God's divine transmission?

Here is my problem (that I'm trying to work through) when I get the proselytizing Chrisitian who wants to 'prove' to me the truths of the Bible they turn into Josh McDowell and start reciting all these claims of textual accuracy. As I look into those claims I see a large number of inconsistencies between the main copies of the NT.
Is the NT textually accurate (from the autographs to present day) or not? Is this an accepted fact by scholars? Again, not that a textually accurate NT would in turn 'prove' Christianity 'true'.

Steven Carr

You can always get 'The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture' by Ehrman, which, considered as a pure work of scholarship, is superbly done. Opposing arguments are given full weight, considered, and disposed of where appropriate. No bashing straw men for Ehrman.

I have a watered down version at http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/reli2.htm and http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/reli1.htm

But get the book.

Steven Carr

I think he is saying that we have so much evidence from the early centuries, much more than for other works of ancient histories, that we can see where early Christians changed the text to suit their own private agendas.

If we didn't have so much amazingly well preserved evidence, we might not have been able to detect such changes.

Steven Carr

And the good thing about the late manuscripts, is that , in comparison to the early manuscripts, metaphorically the ink has only just dried on them, which is another argument in favour of them.

Why have old, faded manuscripts when the Church has produced shiny new ones for you to look at?

Steven Avery

This is a fair question. Again, the standard view today (which I would call quite liberal) is along the "reasonably accurate" view. The more conservative and historic view is God's divine transmission.

Your observation is correct. The Josh McDowell type of view is to handwave away the current major dichotomy in NT textual viewpoints, as an internal discussion, and pretend that the differences are insignificant. However, a perceptive inquirer will force the cards on the table. After all, how could the inerrant Word of God have even one or two of the four textual unsurities that you mentioned. Whole sections where the Christian apologist cannot say whether they truly are the Word of God or not ? Tis a major conundrum, and the handwaving doesn't quite work, and in fact there is a ton more involved than those four.

The Received Text viewpoint that I hold is yes, the NT text is 100% accurate. In fact the Received Text Tanach view is quite similar, vis a vis the Masoretic Text.

Not at all. And in fact, scholars have virtually no 'accepted facts' about textual transmission. A certain type of mentality will try to theorize different autographs on the most minimal and absurd quantities and types of evidences. Mark 1:41 (an Ehrman mention) or Matthew 28:19 (on the web) would be two such examples. This shows more about the mentality of textual rejection (of the historic Bible) than any sensible type of analysis.

Not at all. Though it is a nice collobarative auxiliary element. However it becomes very difficult to maintain any type of full Christianity, including an inerrant Bible declaring Messiah, without a view of the textual accuracy of the NT. And that is where there is in fact a major dichotomy of viewpoints.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Steven Avery

However, these verses in the "shiny" NT have substantial collaboarative early support, in textlines that date early, including the Old Latin, Vulgate Latin, and Aramaic, as well as having the full Byzantine manuscript line with its large number of manuscripts and wide geographical transmission. There was a built-in self-correcting method when you have a text that is accepted in hundreds of locales. In fact, this is why the now-virtually-discarded concept of a Lucian recension was invented, to try to give an alternate explanation of the huge mass of geographically diverse manuscripts being homogeneous.

On top of that virtually every disputed reading has substantial early church writer support from BEFORE the time of the earliest extant manuscripts (look at the ending of Mark discussion as an example) effectively destroying the "faded" and "shiny" comparison.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

pharoah

How about the bolded portion of the above quote, Prax? This is a disputed passage omitted from all newer translations. If such a legend was true or even a common belief, one would expect to find extra-historical support for it, particularly in the Talmud. Is there any?