Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Toto · 01-21-2010, 10:43 PM

I came across this:

bibical texts blog

Quote:

Last week, the Institute for New Testament Text Formation Research (INTF) held a major colloquium in which about 55 of the very best text critics were present. If you care to know, I'm talking about people such as Eldon Epp, Larry Hurtado, Barbara Aland and all the Münster people, David Parker and the Birmingham [England] people, the Tyndale House people, Dan Wallace, Bill Warren, Tjitze Baarda and the Amsterdam people, Joel DeLobel, Paul Foster, David Trobisch, Maurice Robinson, Michael Holmes.) No, Bart didn't come.

...

Early on, it became obvious that a good number of people think that the transmission of the text from about 80 C.E. to 170 C.E. was so wild and erratic that we will never be able to backtrack from our oldest manuscripts (late second to early third century) to the "original" text.

Roger Pearse · 01-22-2010, 12:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Early on, it became obvious that a good number of people think that the transmission of the text from about 80 C.E. to 170 C.E. was so wild and erratic that we will never be able to backtrack from our oldest manuscripts (late second to early third century) to the "original" text.

Do they think this only about texts which ended up in the NT, or all texts? If the former, we might ask why; if the latter, doubtless the classicists will have something to say about it.

They will probably start by asking what the hell people who have mss one miserable century after composition think they're talking about, when the rest of us have to make do with copies 11 centuries after composition.

Just obscurantism, all this, I fear.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

dog-on · 01-22-2010, 12:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

I came across this:

bibical texts blog

Quote:

Last week, the Institute for New Testament Text Formation Research (INTF) held a major colloquium in which about 55 of the very best text critics were present. If you care to know, I'm talking about people such as Eldon Epp, Larry Hurtado, Barbara Aland and all the Münster people, David Parker and the Birmingham [England] people, the Tyndale House people, Dan Wallace, Bill Warren, Tjitze Baarda and the Amsterdam people, Joel DeLobel, Paul Foster, David Trobisch, Maurice Robinson, Michael Holmes.) No, Bart didn't come.

...

Early on, it became obvious that a good number of people think that the transmission of the text from about 80 C.E. to 170 C.E. was so wild and erratic that we will never be able to backtrack from our oldest manuscripts (late second to early third century) to the "original" text.

Call it continuing revelation, I guess.

Clivedurdle · 01-22-2010, 12:48 AM

I must confess my very great pleasure at a blog that has a certain painting by a surrealist of a view from his bedroom that was executed with huge involvement of Walt Disney and the best Hollywood technology, using a famous model and whose theme is the salvation of the universe by a god becoming man using medieval thinking!

It sort of states very strong mythological sensibilities!

Quote:

INTF has developed a computer program which charts the relatedness of a given textual variant to other variants in the same variant unit. They call it the Coherence Based Genealogical Method (CBGM), although some people are simply calling it the Münster method. The method is probably too complex for me to understand, let alone explain. In fact, one of the concerns is that so few outsiders understand it well enough to be able to critique it. Nonetheless, the Nestle-Aland 28th ed will be corrected against it in the Catholic Epistles (i.e., James-3 John) when it comes out in 2010.

An interesting result of the Münster method is that it is finding more and more individual Byzantine readings to be more plausible. This accords well with the general flow of textual criticism over the last 20 or 30 years. I should hasten to say that this does nothing to help out the theory of the priority of the Byzantine text, but simply reinforces the notion that one cannot dismiss a reading simply because it is Byzantine.

One would have thought that Maurice Robinson--one of the world's only Byzantine priortists--would have been pleased to hear that the Münster method was pushing for more Byzantine readings. I talked to him about the issue on several times. Prof. Robinson has to be one of the very nicest, most engaging, and most interesting personas in all of textual criticism.

If I understood him correctly, Prof. Robinson says that he has read every article written by Gerd Mink (the brains behind the Münster Method) whether in German or in English. While many were hesitant to accept the method on the basis that they really didn’t understand it, Prof. Robinson was stating that he opposed the method precisely because he did understand it. He claimed that if he were to feed his presuppositions into the computer’s programming, the Münster method would spit out a Byzantine Priority schema.

This reads to me that we are looking at a near repetition of the equivalent of the evolution of life but in a very foreshortened context.

Early xianity is the equivalent of the major part of life's history, and arguably still the major driver of life - the microcosmos of the very little beasties freely and continually exchanging genes in varieties of symbiosis, gobbling up and co-evolution.

We have a gene transfer world until possibly the 250's CE that then evolved a multicellular life form - orthodox xianity that then evolved into the several big beasties of the main varieties of xianity - the eastern and western churches, the coptic, nestorian and other variants.

A clade analysis would be very valuable.

We must start by stating clearly we are in a very similar position to the Cambrian explosion - reasonably good fossils post 250, before that very unclear but evidence of a huge variety of beasties.

We cannot and must not extrapolate back from our existing beasties to an assumed singularity at Christ on a cross - that is only the view of one of the very big and old beasties extrapolating back their set of beliefs.

It is a very different picture - a series of oriental cults with ideals of pacifism and commonwealth that were quite puritan and anti sacrifice that in many ways is predictable from already existing Greek Jewish and Persian and other thinking, out of which with a co-evolution with the political world of an empire became the dominant species as a way of managing an empire.

The entire New Testament must be understood as a heavily edited document of its time - the 250's - drawing on older documents in various ways.

We need to move its time and place much later and elsewhere. There are no priority texts, all texts must be looked at in the context of the 250's through to 400's.

Clivedurdle · 01-22-2010, 07:53 AM

I may have been too polite to big religions! Maybe they are not multicellular but the stage before!

Quote:

Colonial Organisms

Colonial behavior refers to a number of individual organisms of the same species aggregating in the same place to form an interdependent community of individuals. From human colonies to penguin colonies to insect colonies to the Portuguese Man o' War, this behavior is found throughout the biological world.

Colonial groups share resources for mutual benefit; they generally improve defences, gain the ability to attack larger prey, and enhance food-gathering ability.

A colony of single-celled organisms is a colonial organism. It's likely that early colonial organisms were the first evolutionary step from single celled life to multicellular species. Some colonial organisms closely resemble multicellular organisms; you can tell the difference by separating single cells from the rest of the organism. If the cells always die, the source was a multicellular organism.

Communities of microbes can, communally, possess millions of genes, providing th community with a genetic diversity much greater than that of all known multi-cellular organisms. Their collective size can also be impressively large, measuring in multiple cubic miles.

Jellyfish are one of the most well-known colonial organism, with three different types of polyps in the organism providing different functions to benefit the colony as a whole. Other colonial organisms include corals and algae.

http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Colonial_Organisms

spamandham · 01-22-2010, 09:54 PM

Quote:

Early on, it became obvious that a good number of people think that the transmission of the text from about 80 C.E. to 170 C.E. was so wild and erratic that we will never be able to backtrack from our oldest manuscripts (late second to early third century) to the "original" text.

With enough time, they might even realize that they can't really say anything definitive at all about a HJ - to include who he was, what century or continent he lived in, or whether he even existed.

Clivedurdle · 01-24-2010, 05:05 AM

Quote:

The Precambrian (Pre-Cambrian) is an informal name for the span of time before the current Phanerozoic Eon, and is divided into several eons of the geologic time scale.

It spans from the formation of Earth around 4500 Ma (million years ago) to the beginning of the Cambrian Period, when macroscopic hard-shelled animals first appeared in abundance about 542 Ma.

The Precambrian is so named because it precedes the Cambrian, the first period of the Phanerozoic Eon, which is named after the Roman name for Wales, Cambria, where rocks from this age were first studied.

The Precambrian period accounts for 87% of geologic time.

Very little is known about the Precambrian, despite it making up roughly seven-eighths of the Earth's history, and what little is known has largely been discovered in the past fifty years.

The Precambrian fossil record is poor, and those fossils present (e.g. stromatolites) are of limited biostratigraphic use.[1] Many Precambrian rocks are heavily metamorphosed, obscuring their origins, while others have either been destroyed by erosion, or remain deeply buried beneath Phanerozoic strata.[2][3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precambrian

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