spin

And of course you've deceived me the same way.

Certainly no worse than your efforts. Oh, yes. He also knows what he's talking about.

You are not serious. I indicated to you that you cannot derive their (you only mentioned the first two before) material from John and you persist in your folly. Yup, crap argument. You need yo go back and read my meagre comments then respond.

What I love about you is your shameless sweeping of inconvenient data under the carpet. Then of course Tertullian has fucked you over because you were caught out implying usage of only a bad English translation. And here you are waxing logorrhoeic about something you don't have, ie a methodology.

I've had this process from judge. When one poor example fails you butterfly off to another. And like judge you don't listen to what is said to you. You had your opportunity to respond to comments about this verse. But whooosh: nothing. You even acknowledged having read the first sentence of the paragraph. but after that you're a blank.

Read my lips there, boyo: each case has to be weighed up.

You keep arguing for the all-or-nothing syndrome, when Tertullian has said you should take nothing when his witnessing to no "my" in various parts of John contra TR said you couldn't have all.

Tertullian has contradicted you, yet you come back to him like a bad penny. He has to support you in each case otherwise you are caught in hypocrisy, lifting the carpet up and sweeping the issue of "my (father)" under.


spin

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

spin, I found your post incoherent. At first I thought you were talking about Tertullian on Acts 8:37 (since he is interesting there) and then I realized you were actually going a bit strange on the pronoun issue on John.

So be well. One suggestion.
Try to expand your vocabulary beyond logorrhoeic.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

spin

You need to learn to fart and chew gum both at the same time, Gerald.

I was talking about the generally fallacious position you put yourself in. You will run to one source that agrees with your desires but will ignore them when they disagree with you.

Here you are trying to float Acts 8:37 using Tertullian and totally covering up about his evidence for the early form of John regarding the phantom extra mous in the TR. If Tertullian is a dependable source he should provide good information about each, but your cover up shows that you aren't interested in the veracity of Tertullian's evidence, but only that in some cases you can use him to support your errors.

Your position is not eclectic: it's simply incoherent.


spin

avi

To recap:
I proposed that the KJV version, of John 14:28 and John 10:30, contained a single word, "my", corresponding to the Greek word "mou", that was not found in the "original" Greek manuscript, i.e. the papyrus upon which the ink had not yet dried from the author's own quill.

Steven Avery and some of his colleagues suggested to the contrary, that most of the oldest Greek texts, particularly Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and the Westcott/Hort text, erred, relative to many of the "Byzantine" Greek texts, upon which KJV is based, by virtue of having omitted the "mou" that had been present in the original version, i.e. the version that "john" himself wrote, or whoever composed John.

One of us has to be wrong in his assessment. "Mou" cannot concurrently be both absent, and also present, in the author's original sentences, i.e. John 10:30 and John 14:28. The original author either wrote "mou" or he didn't.

Roger, in his usual attempt at diplomacy, sought to find a middle ground, between our two polar opposites, by suggesting that scribal fatigue, and innocent mistakes, account for most errors in these ancient texts. Bacht, in his usual cerebral fashion, also sought to minimize the significance of the discrepancy, by suggesting that "mou" insertion or deletion had very little, if any theological consequence.

I think Steven and I agree, however, that this discrepancy between KJV and Westcott/Hort does not represent a casual blunder, that one can not attribute to scribal fatigue, or as someone suggested, a casual insertion of "mou" because "mou" is found in many other sentences, so the scribe innocently inserted "mou" imagining perhaps that it may have been unintentionally omitted by one of his colleagues in earlier epochs. I think Steven and I are in accord, that there is only one correct response to this question: Either "mou" was written by the author we call "john", or else it was inserted later, in subsequent decades/centuries.

This insertion, as I maintain, or redaction, as Steven believes, thus represents a human invention, not a "divine" inspiration. In other words, from my perspective "THE" Bible is a myth. There are at least two different versions, representing two different theological perspectives, one in which "mou" is necessary, one in which "mou" is either insignificant or untrue. The Christian community, as a whole, in my opinion, based upon this discrepancy between the presence or absence of "mou" cannot claim to read "THE" bible. There is no single document which represents "the" truth. They are all human fabrications.

To counter the argument that KJV was defective, because it revealed the unwarranted insertion of "mou", Steven and his colleagues suggested that Tertullian had quoted from John, and that his Latin translation of an even more ancient Greek manuscript (than Sinaiticus) would therefore represent an accurate indicator of what the original manuscript, ink not yet dried, contained.

Spin conducted the research, using Roger's excellent web site, and discovered that, contrary to Steven's presumption, Tertullian's Latin translation, omitting "my", i.e. "meus", in either passage, agreed with my interpretation, i.e. that the original Greek manuscript did not contain "mou".

I had suggested, at the outset, that it would be useful to examine Papyrus P66, the oldest extant copy of John 10:30 (it unfortunately does not contain John 14:28). I inquire, again, if anyone on the forum has contact with someone at the Geneva library where this famous document is housed, to respond to this question. There are a couple of books published, which supposedly contain a transcription of P66, perhaps someone on the forum has access to one of them....

Steven Avery

Hi Folks

No "presumption". Read what I actually reported and said. Feel free to quote it in full and then correct your words above.

After reporting on two early entries on a translation site, I specifically warned that such English translations could be wrong in about 3 different ways, especially on small pronoun/article issues. Including the fact that the manuscripts may be a lot newer or the translation itself could be wrong. Manuscripts can also conflict. Sometimes they work off a questionable "critical text" as well.

Since you write above sincerely, I take the time to mention the correction.

W-H is a new Greek text, not old, 1880, matching closely no other text in the world. A text that appears to always takes Vaticanus and Sinaiticus when they agree, no matter what is in all the other manuscripts in every language and any other evidence. Note: I don't think anybody checked the apparatus carefully, I know that aChristian and myself would not really be that interested if it was one Greek manuscript or 5 or 20 versus the 500 or 1000 (the apparatus deliberately does not indicate the number) or so on a simple omission verse, aChristian from memory thought there might be only one, apparently having checked it a while back.

As to your theories of insertion and omission, an omission needs no special explanation, they are far more likely from a scribal probability standpoint than an insertion. This is so trivially easy to understand that of course it is not applied soundly in modern scientific textual criticism.

As for your doctrinal theories, I have not really paid attention to them, so I have not commented one way or another, especially since the omission was almost surely scribal not doctrinal.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

avi

Thank you Steven. First of all, I dispute, most vigorously, your assertion above that I have misquoted you.
Here are the salient extracts from this thread, focused exclusively on this single issue, i.e. why it is that KJV inserts "my" in John 10:30 and John 14:28. None of the oldest sources, Greek or Latin, support this translation. I reject the notion that "my" is without theological consequence. I absolutely refuse to "correct" so much as a comma from anything I have written here on this thread. I certainly deny having misrepresented your position. Please identify which salient quote of yours I have failed to acknowledge. I refer here to those posts of yours in this thread, germain to the issue of my challenge to the veracity of KJV, based upon its insertion, {according to me,} of the word "my" in text of John 10:30, and John 14:28, text originally not possessing this little word, "my".

I believe that you owe an apology to those of us who have endeavored to keep a civil dialogue with someone who makes claims, and then fails to back them up with citations, supporting his claim. In particular, it is deceptive, in my opinion, to initially claim authority for your position {attributing absence of "my" in Sinaiticus and Vaticanus to deletion} from Tertullian, (who had, according to your faulty recollection, written "my father", when in fact, the Latin text, as spin confirmed, does not employ "my") but then, when the contrary is demonstrated, to continue to act as though Tertullian did write "my". Neither Tertullian, nor Jerome wrote "my" in John 14:28 or John 10:30, and you and aChristian need to acknowledge that fact, instead of ignoring the fact that your opinion of the universality of KJV has been refuted by the ancient extant texts.

Your claim, in this case, is that the original manuscript, ink freshly applied by the quill of John himself, did contain the word "mou", and that many subsequent copies of John's gospel omitted the word "mou", either because of scribal laxity, or incompetence, or for any other banal reason, but not because of malevolent interference by religious authorities, dissatisfied with the presentation of the original text. For some reason, unspecified by you Steven, or aChristian, either a few copies avoided the supposed redaction, so that KJV could be created with the "my" restored to its authentic, original locus, else, the scribes were sufficiently clever to have restored "my" to its proper place in the English version of the Bible, even though "mou" is absent from all of the earliest documents.

Steven, you and aChristian both need to revisit this issue. You are welcome to claim that KJV is the best available translation, but you are not welcome to repeat blatant falsehoods about it: KJV, at least for these two passages, is NOT faithful to the original manuscripts. Why it is not faithful, is another question, for another thread. My purpose here was to demonstrate that "the" Bible is a myth.

aChristian

Hi everyone,
Sorry that I have taken so long to get back, but I don't have that much time for this. I need to correct my earlier statement so that I am not misleading anyone.
I checked the UBS aparatus and they did not even show any differences in the manuscripts in John 14:28. They just left the mou out without any notes in the aparatus below. I checked the appendix in J. P. Green's Interlinear where he notes any differences between the TR and the majority of the Greek manuscripts and he showed none. This would mean that at least the majority of the manuscripts have mou in it or he would have noted the need to change the TR to agree with the majority text. Last I looked at the NKJV which notes where the Nestle or UBS or the Majority text differ from the TR used for the KJV/NKJV. The NKJV did not even note any the difference with the Nestle or UBS. Thus I feel pretty confident that at least the majority of the Greek manuscripts have mou, but I cannot claim to have checked it more than that.
That said, from what I have read (mainly Pickering and a few articles since then), the vast number of the Greek manuscripts agree with each other 99.9% of the time. They also cannot successfully be grouped into families having the same errors. As I think Pickering said, they are all orphans. Of the thousands of Greek manuscripts probably none of them is identical to any other. They will all differ. However, they will differ in different places, showing that none of them can be a direct copy of any of the others since none of them reproduce the errors of another. (I think there is one exception to this rule where there are a few (10?) manuscripts that show signs of being copies of one manuscript.) For example, if manuscript A has a difference in line 1, manuscript B has a difference in line 7, and manuscript C has a difference in line 15, but all the rest of their lines are identical, and line 1 in B and C match, line 7 in A and C match, and line 15 in A and B match, this implies that A, B, And C were all copied from an earlier version and each copiest made his own individual mistake not duplicated by anyone else.
This is how I understand the state of the thousands of Greek manuscripts. Thus for any given verse, you will find 99.99% of the manuscripts agree and just a few disagree and those few that disagree may often disagree among themselves. Now when I talked about the only logical way the manuscripts could be in the state they are in, what I mean is that I have read that they are found all over the ancient world from different times and they don't appear to have been copied from each other since they have their own unique mistakes. Yet the fact that the majority agree on 99.98% of the text shows that they all must trace their lineage back to the autographs as penned by the original NT writers. How else could there be such close agreement without evidence of copying from each other? Hort saw the problem and invented the Lucian recension, where he supposed one particular group of later manuscripts was selected to be the standard and everyone copied it, thus spreading it over the world from then on. The only problem with Hort's idea is there is no history to back him up.
Hort just made it up because he didn't want to accept the obvious fact that the reason all the thousands of Greek manuscripts were in agreement and gave no sign of being copies of each other was because they were not copied of each other, but independent lines all going back to the originals with different individual errors picked up by each one and not shared with others along the way.
Getting back to the verse in question, I don't know how many manuscripts have mou, but the sources I checked show at least a majority do. From what I have read on the state of the manuscripts, I would guess that it would be only a few, but I do not know that for sure. In any case, the majority have it and thus it is the most likely to be the original reading.
As far as your reasons for thinking the mou should not be in there Avi, there are so many verses indicating Jesus' divinity you would have to throw out so much of the text that it would be ridiculous and you would be throwing it out because of some preconceived idea of yours, not because of the manuscript evidence. The manuscript evidence supports the majority text.
I apologize for misleading anyone with my earlier claim.

avi

Thank you aChristian, for revisiting this issue. I believe that spin has already addressed the problem of assuming that quantity of erroneous copies suggests validity, so I will not waste bandwidth reiterating his point.

I disagree with your conclusion, i.e. that it would be "ridiculous" to discard "mou" because of some "preconceived" idea of mine. First of all, I was baptised in infancy, and compelled to attend both lutheran and catholic churches on alternate sundays until age 17 when I began university, and had an opportunity to read Bertrand Russell. So, any "preconception" on my part weighed heavily towards a feeling of admiration for Martin Luther. I read, (and clearly did not understand!!!) KJV from childhood, half a century ago.

Secondly, I hope that I approached this question of what the original manuscript, authored by "john" himself, contained, at least for 10:30 and 14:28, by asking to observe the actual Greek text in many different editions. You may or may not have glanced at the links which I provided, in an earlier post in this thread, but the links give the neutral person, one without a bias, an opportunity to read the various Greek and Latin versions, without commentary on supposed validity or illegitimacy.

Finally, I applaud your sincerity, and am grateful for your response. I think that you are an honest person. I don't understand why you believe that quantity transforms into quality, but certainly there are many analogies in the world of human consumer products which disprove such a notion. To me, it is crystal clear that:

(a.) Some one or some group needed to change the original Greek (and I have suggested that it was to counter the growth of Islam as a possibility) to conform to realities, then current; i.e. "mou" was inserted into the majority, not excised from the minority. This insertion, if true, renders false the notion that KJV represents the "original" text from "John" himself.

(b.) the apparatus in charge of distribution of "authentic" copies, post Constantine, merely had to round up all the existing copies, destroy them (overlooking a mere handful scattered about,) and then issue new documents, containing the "correct" version. A thousand or fifteen hundred years later, of course, after the great roundups and fires of destruction, there will be more copies with the "mou" in place, but that certainly does not mean that the ink drying from "John's" quill included "mou" in those two phrases: 10:30 and 14:28. One has only to recall the extreme reaction of catholic authorities to William Tyndale: in those days, peddling the "wrong" version of a Bible led to death by burning as a heretic. Calvin burned to death Michael Servetus for refusing to accept infant baptism, and trinitarianism, among other "crimes". The Christian community, for more than a thousand years, post Constantine, burned alive people distributing, or even possessing, unsanctioned copies of the work of John and the other "apostles"--copies viewed as illegitimate. Naturally, today, we will certainly find then, a thousand fold copies compatible with the orthodox view, compared to any "heretical" version.

(c.) "Mou" wasn't in the original text, flowing from John's quill, because in the first three plus centuries, until the era of Constantine, Jesus was viewed, in my opinion, as a human prophet, not a deity, within a substantial portion of the nascent Christian community, particularly among those living in modern day Syria and Turkey, i.e. proximate to Constantinople, distant from Rome and Alexandria.

As for all the text supposedly documenting Jesus' ostensible status as deity, I submit as evidence, the fact that so many believers in the accuracy of KJV are clearly wrong. Do you imagine that John 10:30 and 14:28 are the only two places in the new testament where authorities intervened to change the original text? Even Eusebius, redactor extraordinaire, complained about the unevenness of the text in copies in his possession. Heresy was universal in the third and fourth centuries!! Burn them alive, that will fix the problem!! Not.

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Sure you did. You said I had a "presumption" about Tertullian. And you actually quote me below -- not even noting that this "presumption" idea was totally wrong. Now you have compounded the problem by expanding the accusation when you yourself included the text that refutes the "presumption" claim.

I simply remembered correctly what is given in the available English translation and said very carefully, as you have in the thread. (emphasis added)

To call this a presumption is silly. Nothing could have been written clearer, I put extra effort to put everything in order. And the English translation you can find on the ecatena Peter Kirby site or Laparola which has ecatena data (this was also mentioned in the thread, as I recall). And we found out later was done by Alex Souter, at first incorrectly identified as KJB sympathetic.

Please, Avi. I challenge you first, in a friendly manner, to quote a "blatant falsehood". If there is not one, I would hope for at the least a retraction, so that I can suspend my posting on a friendly note.

You cannot accuse someone of a falsehood on your words of imprecision. Clearly you do not have any original manuscripts. You have a theory of them (at least on this one verse) with which I disagree looking at the criteria quite differently. I certainly hope you know, or can learn, the difference between "the originals" and a theory about the original text.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Steven Avery

This sounds accurate. There are also web pages that try to list the differences, Marlowe might have one. They might miss a small variant, however. The Laparola Münster apparatus, if I recall right, has Byz for the inclusion, without a split (they sometimes split all the Byz into two, majority and minority ... in textcrit mishegas Byz means the great majority of mss). One sec... yep .. so that would mean that 0 or very few of the Byzantine Majority Greek mss (95% + of the hand-copied mss) have the mou, do not have the omission.

99% would be a safer number, of course any such number is subject to quibble and discussion about things like spelling variants since there is no accepted methodology (understandably) for two-way comparisons, only a triangular comparison can easily adopt a methodology.

Ferrar Group (family 13) is likely this reference.

Stick with 99% . And in some situations 95% is safer. There are some verse exceptions though.

And also moved back the Peshitta dating two centuries.

Why let facts get in the way of a theory ? Vaticanus and Sinaiticus über alles.

The doctrinal idea of avi is his own hobby-horse. He is welcome to ride it .. however he should not expect others to pay much attention. I don't even think it is relevant to the textual discussion,

Professor Maurice Robinson has a good quote about how easily both sides of an internal argument can be taken blithely in textcrit land.

"The use of a string of continual quotes from contemporary eclectic critics, each attempting to shoot down one or another element of internal evidence espoused by another is an entertaining exercise when done well." (Textcrit forum 2/1996)

On small variants especially, those that have very simple scribal faux pas explanations, this entertainment can be comedic. (Mark 7:19 is an example.)

Thank you for excellent sharing. Just be cautious on numbers, as the precision issue will become a point of attack, rather than getting the gist that you are saying a huge majority. Use them more conservatively, the point will get across.

Shalom,
Steven Avery