Yuri Kuchinsky

[Re: the early status of Luke 24:12]

Really, Prax?

Which "early church writer references" are you talking about here?

In fact, none of them predate "by centuries" any extant manuscripts omitting this verse!

The only church writers that I'm aware of who cite this verse are Eusebius and Cyril -- both 4th century. And Eusebius _also_ omits this verse elsewhere.

Regards,

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hi, Steven,

You seem to allow for only two possibilities here; either it was added later, or deleted later.

But perhaps this verse was early, but it could have been changed later, or deleted.

Or perhaps the other way around? I.e. no less than 92 were changed by Mark?

Still, I agree with you that there are some suspicious elements in Lk 24:12 indicating the hand of a Johannine editor.

Yes, it seems like we see here a late Johannine editor at work, re-editing this part of Lk.

Or else changed by a later scribe.

In fact, it's four OL MSS for including this verse, vs. six for omitting. The six that omit are generally more valuable.

What is quite remarkable about this verse is the breadth of the early manuscript support for it. All Greek manuscripts but D include it. Also, all Syriac and Coptic manuscripts support it (including the 2 OS MSS).

So this makes me think that this verse was not a late addition. Nevertheless, it seems likely that its present shape is rather late.

Regards,

Yuri.

Steven Carr

Praxeus says look at the Old Latin for reliable manuscripts, and when it is pointed out that many do not have the verse, his reliable manuscripts cease to be reliable.


No, now we head into the world of probability.

What is more likely? A Christian scribe harmonising the Gospels by making one more like another?

Or scribes dropping whole verses of the resurrection stories, and doing so at a place where Luke uses language more like John than Luke?

Do Christians harmonise? Yes. We all know that happens.

Do things get dropped by accident? Yes, but a whole verse , and one betraying such strange features of a verse supposedly by Luke? Less likely.

And we sceptics are in a no-lose situation here. The very fact that Christians have to argue about what verses might be original is a disproof of an inerrant bible.

Christians wind up defending inerrancy by claiming early Christians scribes were errant.

And impossible to explain the ommission, together with the very similar langauge of the verse to John. Even the name of the burial clothes agrees with John, and not the word used by Luke in the same chapter!

And there is Praxeus again with his shiny new, later manuscripts.....

Praxeus does not hesitate to call those very early manuscripts grossly corrupted whenever they disagree with his King James Bible....

And, if I remember rightly, p75 does *not* have the later text. It has a rather different wording,

Is praxeus claiming Bezae and the Old Latin are from the 6th century?

Before the Old Latin manuscripts were reliable. Now they are isolated instances.

Mark written in Latin, and we have no idea if Luke had access to a completed Mark? (why *completed*, apart from the fact that Praxeus wants to starts red herrings running)

Were uncompleted copies of Mark floating around , waiting to be completed?

More crackpottery. Luke suddenly changes tenses for no good reason, and so Biblical scholars dream up all sorts of explanations, out of thin air. There is no hope of any evidence that Luke did it to build suspense. Should we ask him at a book-signing session?

Even Praxeus KJB feels no need to write 'he sees', rather than 'he saw'. In terms of suspense, it doesn't really add all that much saying 'he sees', rather than 'he saw'.

Narratives tend to use the same tense. A man goes into a bar, he orders a pint of beer, the barman asks him, he replies.... etc etc.

Not an inviolable rule of course.

Just one more factor making it a remarkable coincidence that such a strange verse, from a Lucan viewpoint, should be dropped by Christian scribes.

Luke changes 92 out of 93 historic presents he finds in Mark, and the only one he doesn't change gets accidentally dropped by scribes. What a coincidence!






Just argument by authority and bluster. Apparently untrustworthy naturalistic textual criticism is going the way of Darwinian evolution. Abandoned on all sides by critics.....

Just say critics are abandoning it and you are spared all that bother of trying to work out why Christian scribes would drop such 'suspenseful' passages as Luke 24:12.

Praxeus makes no attempt to explain *why* the verse was dropped.

It is easy to see why early Christians would want to harmonise. There are so many harmonisations already in the early manuscripts that one more is no surprise.

And why quoting p75, a manuscript from *after* the time Westcott-Hort proposed that the additions took place, proves the additions did not take place *before* p75 was written is beyond me...

Scribes just happened to accidentally drop a bit of Luke which closely resembled John 20:5, with had words not used elsewhere by Luke.

What an amazing coincidence!

It us much easier to accept that a scribe added. We know early scribes did just that. Praxeus complains often enough about early scribes altering the text.

Steven Carr

I'm sure it was. Even p75 does not have all of the later text (a fact Praxeus omits), so we know that it developed over time.

I can only admire your perspicacity :-)

60 percent of the Old Latin omit the verse. Interesting.


Again, virtually every manuscript we have is after the period when the texts could have been changed the most - the second century.

So it is not really a case of counting manuscripts (although such a count does count for something), but looking at why a verse could be added or dropped and whether the verse jars in terms of style.

Other factors, as well, of course...

Julian

Your posts and their tendentiousness is the subject. What do you expect when you posted what you did earlier in this thread? That it wouldn't generate a reaction? I am not discussing you. I don't know you and have no comments having to do with your person. Your ideas, however, are very much a part of this thread.
How you feel is none of my business. Are you saying that Lucan primacy is mainstream? Or is it fringe? Fringe meaning marginal or peripheral. Well?
Wow, I'm defending a mainstream viewpoint. How weird. Yeah, I am sure that's worth paying for since I couldn't imagine anyone defending the mainstream.
Go ahead, that is certainly your right.
Again, your view against the mainstream. I am sure that you know best, of course...
Oh, like, for example, P75 which Hort actually imagined beforehand. All kinds of stuff has been found since 1881. You don't know about these?
Too big of a question for anyone to answer simply. I certainly won't attempt it.

I used to have you on my ignore list before I became a mod so, yeah, I probably did miss something.
Yeah, I read it. So they made some mistakes, so what? That doesn't negate the things that they did right.


Julian

Steven Avery

Actually, I only expressed my disapproval of the 'modern scientific textual criticism' and explained in depth why it is based on unbelieving presups designed to give an errant text. In a sense you could say that the textual analysis from Erasmus through the Reformers was a type of 'textual criticism' .. however it was done far more sensibly and understandably and correctly than what is done today.

And I have explained that my history was precisely the reverse. I used and accepted the errant modern version texts for many years. Then I studied out the issues, top to bottom, and this led me to the Textus Receptus and King James Bible views. My analysis was rather thorough, and I really had no intention at all of moving to that position, in fact I was rather hostile at the beginning.

If "scientific" means precluding the possibility of a perfect text by taking on presuppositions of an errant text, then you are correct. If "scientific" means evidentiary, logical, sensible and consistent, then you are wrong.

Actually I often appeal to the ancient documents, especially early church writers who precede our extant manuscripts. There are some oddball and ultra-scribally-corrupt manuscripts that I consider of having little overall import. They have strictly a collaborative role (they could demonstrate that a reading existed at that time and locale). This would especially be the Westcott-Hort proof-text alexandrian manuscripts, Aleph and B, also the later Bezae fits into that category.

Actually that is definitely not a crackpot theory, however it is more the theory of Professor Maurice Robinson (perhaps Wilbur Pickering and some others) than mine and other TR and KJB afficiondos. The Textus Receptus view is close to the "Byzantine Text", however it has significant differences. Start with Acts 8:37 and the Johannine Comma as examples.

Yes, I hope that each person really spends a little time examining these issues themselves in depth. Such an examination liberated me from the modern version alexandrian westcott-hort disaster (I used the NIV for many years) and anybody with a sincere heart of faith who studies the issue similarly may be very pleasantly surprised, led to a similar liberation, and a far superior Bible than the 'versions' they are now using.

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

Steven Avery

LOL.. you could (and probably do) use that argument for any proposed mangling of the Bible text in the 2nd century. All our extant manuscripts are 4th century and later, with only some limited papyri being earlier.

This is part of the Carr shell game, never tell folks the actual full evidences, (snip those sections when there is a response) and then try to come up with the "evidences" in the 2nd century where you can theorize anything on the diciest of conjectures, claiming the true reading really is hidden for hundreds of years more and pops up in a couple of manuscripts here or there.

Ignore the question of how the supposed "interpolation" took over the Greek line, the Aramaic, the Vulgate (an update of the same Old Latin, btw), the early church writers, all over the textual world. Just handwave the impossible and play "scholar". Who cares about common sense, logic, and such, when you have a "textual criticism" theory .. "well, I don't think the scribe would have done this because if he thought that then he wouldn't be there .. (yada yada)" .. basically all nonsense repackaged as scholarship.

What Carr has done was appreciate the "textual analysis" of Bart Ehrman, understandably, since Ehrman brings similar unbelieving baggage to the table, and a position in the field, and Carr repackages the Ehrman analysis which is made-to-order for an unbelieving skeptic view.

And in a sense the liberal 'Christian' textcrits really cannot object, since they work in the same type of unbelieving concepts themselves (example, Daniel Wallace on Mark 1:41)

When you have counts like 1000 to 6, and early church writers as well aligned against you the game is simply textual sophistry.

LOL .. you should watch the textcrits pontificate on this. On virutually ANY disputed verse they can come up with opposite "looks" full of fancy jargon and conjecture. It is (almost) all a shell game. Take a look at the Mark 1:41 discussion on the Textcrit forum for a textbook textcrit example of this.

Right.. the "I found three words that weren't used exactly" junque. Actually in this case the style IS basically seen as Lukan, and the arguments are simply strained to the max.

Sure, anything you can find and embrace to try to defend a nonsense view.

Lets not be bothered by simple things like the widespread and early and overwhelming dissemination of a reading into multiple texts, lands and languages, as in this case. Let's try to find some arcane "logic" that the confused might buy into. That is the current skeptic agenda.

However, there is a remnant

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

Steven Carr

This is all very tedious. Praxeus cited a 3rd century manuscript, now he is claiming that all our extant manuscripts are 4th century or later, except the ones which aren't.

And his reaction to textual critics who don't agree with him is to call them unbelievers.

My web page is designed to tell atheists why the text of the NT has been changed.

I give the main reasons why it is certain the text of the NT has been changed.

It is not designed to be scholarly. It is designed to be factual - to summarise scholarship. If you want to know why textual critics think the text of the NT has been changed, my page tells why.

Ehrmann's book 'The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture' is designed to be scholarly. It gives the reasons why the NT has been changed, considers opposing arguments (including *all* the ones Praxeus gives), and then concludes they are insufficient.

People wanting more background information are far better off reading the book than my web page.

People who just want to know the reasons why Luke 24:12 is not authentic can read my page (and it is a slam-dunk case, despite Praxeus saying that most manuscripts from the 4th century or later have it)

Praxeus arguments really are very weak. His argument for why Luke 24:12 uses a different word for the burial clothes is almost invisible....


Luke 24:12 uses words never found elsewhere in Luke, but are found in John 20:5, and Praxeus claims Luke just had to write stoop because they were just no other suitable words. Really?

Steven Avery

Yes, trying to dialog with you is quite tedious, Steven. You simply ignore the basics, and try to nitpick anything you can as a smokescreen.

Our earliest extant NT manuscript is the 4th century Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, perhaps an Old Syriac is 4th century as well. And I sited the papyrus as being 3rd century, and not supporting your claim of omission. Oops to your theories that every early manuscript (pre-fifth century, if Bezae is 5th and not 6th) goes against your omission claim.

Actually I often go into great detail as to the false presups that taint textual criticism. However, I cannot do that in every thread.

Finally something I agree with.

<edit>Nobody claims this at all except Carr, there are compelling and even overwhelming arguments that you simply ignore and hand-wave. You simply embraced Ehrman because his bias matches your own <edit> preferences<edit>.

"Praxeus saying.." ??

So apparently you didn't even know that was true before you started your little shtick. You didn't know that the Greek Byzantine manuscripts would be something like 500 or more to 0, the Latin Vulgate as well, the Aramaic Peshitta also 100's to 0, even alexandrian manuscripts all have the verse, you didn't know that early church writers quoted the section before your earliest omissions.

No wonder you are so <edit> wrong about this. It matches either your being ill-informed or hiding information. You are simply covering your backside and trying to shoot the messenger who tells others the critical information that you never offerred.

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

Steven Carr

I never made such a claim.

And p75, our earliest manuscript, does *not* have the wording of later manuscripts in Luke 24:12

I shall ignore the rest of your ranting.