Julian

This link has a good overview and lists the relevant passages.

The original book that proposed it, Westcott and Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, vol. 2, Introduction [and] Appendix can be found here: http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/Ebind/docs/TC/WH1881/ (Type 'any' for both username and password.)

Julian

TomboyMom

Can we reconstruct a basic, non-controversial history of the bible's manuscripts, oh knowledgeable ones? Would this be right:

Paul's epistles are thought to be written around 60 C.E.
Mark's gospel is thought to have been written around 80 C.E.
There was an oral tradition, and presumably a lot of papyrus manuscripts of a lot of different gospels, only some of which made it into today's bible, from say 50 C.E. to around 400 C.E. [Do we have any other manuscripts from this period?] A big problem is just that manuscripts would have been written on papyrus, which is fragile.
Athanasius decided there should only be 4 gospels, and they were chosen and the first thing that could really be called a New Testament written in Greek in 367 C.E. This was probably a culled down collection of papyrus manuscripts that were circulating separately at that time. The main criteria for choosing which ones stayed in and which ones got thrown out was theological, not authenticity in the sense of faithfullness to the earlier manuscripts.
The first latin translation, the Vulgate, ~405 C.E.
In 1516 Eusebius translated some Greek manuscript ?which? into latin.

Please expland/correct, oh those-who-know-these-things. Thanks.

TomboyMom

If I understand this and your earlier posts in this thread, I think you are saying that the bible that we have now was written/compiled very close in time to when the original was written, and while you may doubt the truth of what it contains, it isn't reasonable to doubt that the modern bible is very close in text to the "original" bible. Is that right?
I am no bible scholar, but from spending some time in this forum, I think this view is either incorrect or betrays a lot of misunderstanding about the bible and its history.
My understanding is that the mainstream historical view is that the first time anyone put together a list of books of the new testament that was very close to the list we use now was in around 367 C.E. At the same time, scholars also believe that there were papyrii on which some of these books were based during the first and second centuries, but we don't have them to compare, mainly because papyrus is fragile. So what you have is a book that was compiled 200-300 years after at least some of the original text on which it is based, and no original text with which to compare it.
That's just to get us started, without getting into the problems of copying errors, deliberate alteration by scribes, committees discarding whole books of it, and the like. Do you disagree with this history?
If not, how can you say that the text is text we have is anything like the "original", whatever that may be? What do we even mean by the original?

Helpmabob

Hi Didymus - I expect errors and contradictions are amply addressed in other topics – this thread is about whether the Bible is tainted or corrupted, or whether the message could be genuinely true. I don’t see any reason, or possibility of corruption to have occurred under the watchful eye of a just God. I find the Bible to be entirely inspiring and trustworthy. For me, a regular Bible user, if you like, there is no suspicion of biblical tampering.

Hi Alf - Perhaps not; although the evidence - not least the continued prevalence of the Bible - and the movement of the Holy Spirit suggests that He is indeed there.

NZSkep

what about the fact that, as I posted previously, there are hundreds of differing versions of the bible in english alone. At least 99% of them must wrong in some way or another. How do you decide which is the correct version? Which is the version which god was watching over?

Julian

Some of them possibly even a bit earlier. No firm date can be determined.
Possibly a bit earlier (not before 70, though) but even more likely quite a bit later.
And, significantly, papyrus can only survive in certain climates (dry and hot) which means that our surviving papyrus fragments represent a geographical viewpoint of the text.
I think you mean Erasmus in that last sentence. Erasmus compiled the first printed version of the Greek NT which he got from a handful of second millenium byzantine manuscripts of an inferior nature. This text eventually evolved into the Textus Receptus and ultimately the KJV.

Julian

TomboyMom

How does this view interact with the facts as summarized in my above two posts?

Roger Pearse

In fairness to your correspondent, you should be aware that both your posts were horribly erroneous in matters of fact.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

TomboyMom

In what way? Please be specific. Thank you.

Roger Pearse

Sorry, but I really have no time. Just one example: you suggested that we could not 'have the bible' as it was originally because the canon was only decided in the 4th century. These are different concepts.

We have the texts. Whether they are canonical is another issue, surely?

Is it perhaps that you're still thinking of the bible as a single physical book in codex form? Of course such an artefact could not exist technologically until the 4th century. But whether the bible is in a single codex or a bunch of rolls is not an issue on either side, surely?

Athanasius did not decide the canon -- one of his easter letters records a list of books which happens to be the same as the final list. Tertullian ca. 200 is working with much the same Novum Testamentum (his phrase and coinage) as we are, bar a letter or two.

I really can't spare more time this evening. Also beware the common confusion between a manuscript (whether on papyrus or parchment) and the text that it contains.

All the best,

Roger Pearse