Toto

Syler Kite was yet another sock puppet of Haran (Bryan Cox). The style was unmistakable, not to mention the IP address. I really wish he would stop playing these games.

Magdlyn

Oh, whew. Thank you, Toto.

capnkirk

Setting all the discussion about the ending of Mark and the adultury pericope aside for a moment, the example I found most compelling was the passage where Jesus tells Nicodemus about having to be born again, and Nicodemus misunderstanding.

I found this compelling because, the double entendre in the Greek word found in the earliest surviving texts (which makes the misunderstanding possible...and the passage work) does not extend to either the Hebrew of Aramaic words for either of the two meanings. For the passage to be genuine, Nicodemus could only have musunderstood had Jesus been speaking to him in GREEK!

Since the subject of this passage places the need to be 'born again' in Jesus' mouth, it is important to know how far removed from eyewitness account is the passage...and the central tenet of Xtianity it presents.

BH

I honestly don't see how textual criticism can tell what was originally in the Bible or not, let alone any old book spanning centuries.




Then as now scribes would copy books and information in the writing styles used many years before their own time. This could make a more recent work appear much older.

You can't ever know what is missing or undiscovered, and you may never know what might have gone on (let alone prove something went on) that led to certain unoriginal variants being included and mass produced ---possibly giving false strength through numbers.

Case in point. Take we Muslim's caliph Uthman. It is said that he standardized the Holy Quran for us, and in this standardization some of the original Quran was left out of what we have now. This is a charge Christians never cease to bring up to us. Well, why couldn't the church leaders of the time have done the same thing to the Bible? The mainstream Christians acknowledge that ancient Christian leaders bemoaned the fact that heretics would change the scriptures to suit their needs. How do we know that the "church fathers" didn't do such themselves and simply lie about it? I've read that the church fathers seem to qoute what is in the Christian Bible but in a different form. They also seem to qoute scriptures not in our Bible today.

mens_sana

There's a fan club? :wave:

sky4it

I listened to all 10 of Ehrman's you tube video's. There is nothing AT ALL here to be in the slightest bit concerned. In fact, I heard the same on the women taken in adultry over 20 years ago. Victor Paul Weirwille taught the same thing. Wierwille was one of the biggest inherants ever as least as far as one might classify him. (Most people also dont know that in the KJV italized words were added for clarity and that particular word in italics was not in any original text)

Ehrman actually says, that none of this stuff is breaking news and some circles well known. He is correct, I knew this stuff for a long time.

In fact what Ehrman discusses is so insignificant that most biblical teachers who know about it dont mention this stuff. Why? Why spend a couple of hours telling people how the text was put together, there are more important things to discuss. This "stuff" has been totally blown out of proportion, because some people feel that the stoke behind it is too devalue the bible. Not in my world, all it does is "value add" to the bible. God doesnt want his people worshiping words.

Ray Moscow

No. I reject Wallace as having much valuable to say because he dances around the most obvious problems in the Bible to maintain and promote fundamentalist and evangelical doctrines about it.

It's like discussing geology with someone who maintains that the earth is flat. Why bother?

Ray

Roger Pearse

This is the problem which textual criticism was devised to solve. It has no special connection to the bible, but affects all ancient texts. These often reach us in a single handwritten copy, written 9 or more centuries after the originated was written (dictated, whatever).

Every book acquires typos as it gets copied. But if we propose to say that no ancient book has reached us (or the various phrasings which amount to the same thing), we instantly join the obscurantists. It's silly; any amount of ancient literature has reached us, as we can quickly see; the question is how well it represents the original. We answer this question by looking at how texts change when we *do* have examples spread over centuries.

The answer is that we find that nearly all the changes are accidental, except in things like textbooks of law or agriculture (which may get updated). More, we tend to find that they are the same types of errors, made as a natural consequence of the copying process, and so predictable to a certain extent. Consequently it really is possible to clean them up.

Some may feel that we can never be sure that a modern critical text is a facsimile of the ancient one. This is true, but unimportant. The odd word may be a synonym or whatever, but one has to remember that every word forms part of a phrase, each phrase a sentence, and each sentence a train of thought. Consequently it is actually possible, for instance, to translate Tertullian's Ad Nations 2, even though the edge of the page in the sole manuscript has been cut off, and we don't actually know what the words there are; but as we can see the rest, the sense of what must be there is rarely unclear.

Note that we don't actually have any more certainty on *modern* texts. Paperbacks notoriously contain mistakes. But we don't find it a problem. Nor did those who lived in the manuscripts age.

In short, it's a grave mistake to confuse the question of whether a text has reached us -- whether we have what the author wanted to say -- and the minutiae of the clean-up process.

In fact the scribes had no idea of what was 'old'; this had to await the invention of paleography in the 17th century. Consequently this kind of fake is unknown to me, and indeed would be very difficult for them to do.

Unless we propose to tear up the classics, this sort of speculation is one that we must refuse to entertain.

Not sure whether bits were left out; the point is editorial interference at an early stage. This undoubtedly gets raised because Moslems make such a point of the Koran being exactly as dictated by Mohammed and all being exactly the same.

Of which time, tho? We could ask whether any of them had the authority of Uthman, and if so who.

But we can't just ask whether it *could* have happened. We must write history from what we have evidence did happened. Surely?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

douglas

Can you explain what you mean by saying Wierwille was one of the "biggest inherants"? I take it from this comment that you are a current/former "Way International" member, so you should know that Wierwille did not believe that Jesus was God incarnate. How do you classify this as innerancy?

I don't doubt that Wierwille taught the pericope adulterae was not original, but he probably did so to bolster his arguments that it was ok to ignore parts of Paul's teachings (ie. Jesus was God) because there are in fact errors in our existing text.

Frankly, mentioning Ehrman and Wierwille in the same breath makes me feel kind of icky.

James Brown

Lee Strobel has written a new book called The Case for the Real Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk) and he expressly states in his introduction that people ARE taking Ehrman seriously. Christians have written Strobel stating that they either read or heard about Ehrman's work, specifically Misquoting Jesus, and were worried that Ehrman's claims were true. Strobel felt it necessary to publish his latest apologetic work in order to reassure his audience that Ehrman's conclusions were completely unfounded. I've not read the book, but just looking at the Amazon reviews and searching for the keyword 'Ehrman' demonstrate that Strobel had a well-worn copy of Misquoting Jesus at his elbow. If Ehrman's conclusions were insignificant, why would one of today's most popular apologists devote so much time to it?