TomboyMom

We can't presume anything one way or the other, can we?

I think most experts would agree that it really starts with an oral tradition, no?

Again, as someone from the outside, I am very favorably impressed about what does exist. Just as I was surprised to learn that most scholars favor HJ over MJ. I think most Jews do not know that.

TomboyMom

Helpmabob:
I would think if God was looking out to take care of his holy word, he would have suggested to the scribes that they write it on vellum, for heaven's sake.

Julian

We have no way of knowing this. I find that number implausible, however.
The MSS we have are quite close compared to other ancient literature. That doesn't mean too much since we know that the NT underwent tendetious changes. Not too many people are going to be changing Julius Caesar's books for tendetious reasons, hence we know that the reliability of non-religious works is better than that of religous writings. Still, we have no way of knowing anything about this with any degree of certainty. The only thing we do know is that anyone claiming that the KJV is the most accurate bible should be riding the short bus.

Julian

Roger Pearse

(I wrote a post but removed it, since I don't know that my opinion is worth anything particularly, and opinion is what I was offering).

Dargo

He could have divinely inspired some first century Christian to invent the printing press 1400 years early for that matter. For wide-scale publishing, he'd also have to inspire the invention of paper since parchment is too expensive and I don't think papyrus is durable enough for a printing press.

We shouldn't be too hard on Jehovah. It's not like he could have forseen the problems lack of early copies of the New Testament would have caused.

Doug Shaver

I only came to this forum a few months ago and have learned a gawdawful lot just in that time, but I did have a considerable head start compared with you.

But when I got my first Internet connection about eight years ago, I was probably roughly where you are today. It has been quite an adventure, intellectually.

Doug Shaver

The bottom line is that even if true, they don't prove what the apologists want them to prove, which is that we should believe everything in the texts.

I would be very interested in seeing how that 99.5% was calculated. I haven't the foggiest notion who came up with it or how they did it. Until an apologist can tell you that, it doesn't mean squat.

So far as I am aware, it is a fact that the extant New Testament manuscripts, or at least most of them, are closer in time to their originals than is the case for any other ancient document. That in way implies, though, that they should be assumed more factual than any other ancient document.

TomboyMom

In what way? I mean, what is the "original" and what manuscripts are you referring to? Didn't some people say earlier in this thread that in some other cases we actually have the original?

Roger Pearse

For documents such as personal letters and tax returns, for which only the original ever existed, in some cases these have been dug up by archaeologists. But this is not what we are discussing.

For literary texts, such as the bible, or Cicero, or Polybius, no autograph -- by which we mean the very first copy, written by the author himself -- exists for any text composed prior to the 13th century. Of course in antiquity, where dictation was common, it may be questioned whether an autograph ever existed. When copies might be taken at any stage during a continous process of revision (as happened with the "Life of St. Columba" composed by St. Adomnan, and augmented with material continously through his life), it is a very real question just what constitutes the 'autograph.'

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Waning Moon Conrad

Including cheap, sensation mongering tabloids and magazines like Who, the Australian Women's Weekly (which comes out once a month but hey, let's not be pedantic) and copious amounts of other worthless dross.

Running with your metaphor; should we trust the Council Of Nicea to separate the equivalent of responsible journalism from the equivalent of sensationalist crap?

Maybe we should but which did they throw out? Surely they knew what would sell.

Pandering to the lowest common denominator is probably not a late twentieth century innovation.