Jayrok

Is Our Copy of the Bible a Reliable Copy of the Original?

Link to article

From the link:



I've been given this a few times in the last couple of years from christians saying the bible is reliable because it is the most accurately documented collection of manuscripts in existence. God preserved his word throughout the centuries even before the printing press, they say.

Of course, just because something is copied accurately does not mean the original is divinely inspired, but that's another issue.

I've read Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus and found it fascinating. He indicates it was common practice for church scribes to add or change texts on occasion. If this occured over the years, how can these 24K manuscripts agree in 99% of the texts of the earliest copies?

There are several christian websites, like the one above, that proclaim the accuracy of the copies. If you read the website, you come out with the impression that the copies we have today are 99% the exact same as the very first copy found in the mid second century. But how accurate is the claim?

Malachi151

Not only this, but our atheist Bible study has some good graphs on this data. There are no complete manuscripts until the 4th century, and very few until like the 9th century, when there is a huge explosion in the number an manuscripts due to the adoption of minuscules, tiny writing. I'm sure someone here knows more about this subject than what I just said, and can probably correct me, but basically we start with very few manuscripts, then a huge explosion hundreds of years later that lasts for about 3 or 4 hundred years until the printing press comes along.

Also, the value of late copies makes the % of divergence go way down.

That 95% for the Iliad comes from probably like 100 texts, or something, but for the New Testament its like 20,000 texts, mostly late copies, so naturally the % of divergence will go down.

With just 1 text that has a difference among 100 copies, that's 1% right off the bat for the Iliad, yet with 20,000 it takes 200 differences to make 1%.

Gamera

The whole comparison is misleading. The issue is not the percentage of accuracy but the character of the variation as they relates to meaning of the texts.

There are numerous textual variations among the Codexes, but my understanding is the variations are mostly insignificant and scribal in nature, and don't change the meaning of the text in vast majority of cases.

If two mss have slightely divergent passages, but the meaning is palpably the same, what's the difference? What we care about (and what you would think Christians would care about) is not the preservation of the wording of a text, but the meaning.

My point is I think the whole analysis of worrying about the accuracy of the NT mss in terms of nondivergence doesn't go to anything much, even for the Christians propounding the argument. The issue is the quality and effect of those variations, which can't really be reduced to a percentage.

Jack the Bodiless

IIRC, there is no resurrection in the shorter version of Mark (the story ends with the discovery of the empty tomb, but there are no subsequent appearances by Jesus).

That doesn't affect Christian doctrine?

gstafleu

First of all, it would be nice to know exactly what we have to imagine as "the original." As Ehrman points out, there is no such thing right now, and it doesn't really look if we will ever find one. It is also not clear if an "original" ever existed. The gospels started life as collections of oral traditions. Sure, at some point someone gathered a bunch of them and wrote them down. But even if we had all documents, would we find one "firstfruits" version we could dub the original, or would the situation be more like a river that originates from multiple contributaries? If the Pauline epistles really are epistles we might have a better theoretical chance there: we would have to find e.g. the original of what Paul sent to the Corinthians. Good luck!

This whole obsession with the "correctness" of the bible started with the reformation. In rebelling against the Roman church the protestants decided to do away with all kinds of embellishments like the Maria cult and the Saints, and to go back to the source, so to speak. The source was declared to be the OT+NT, and the reason that this was the source was that God himself wrote, or at least "dictated" the thing according to their view. And as God can not make mistakes (for some reason) the bible had to represent an absolute level of truth and was hence called "inerrant." All kinds of chickens have of course been coming home to roost ever since then.

Does anyone know when the OT/NT were first thought of as dictations/inspirations by god, as opposed to important but nevertheless human endeavors?

This bit where a book of absolute truth is dictated by a god seems to be a Abrahamic idiosyncrasy BTW, or does anyone know of other mythologies that have a similar concept?

Gerard Stafleu

Atheos

Jack's right. Not only does Mark's original ending stop before any post-resurrection appearances by Jesus, but it specifically states that the women did not tell anyone what they saw because they were afraid. The added words are in direct contradiction of that very precise statement.

This is not just a minor spelling change, nor does it leave the original meaning of the text intact. Reading the original ending would leave an individual with the impression the women never told anyone what they saw. Reading the added ending leaves the individual with the opposite impression.

Also I'd like to suggest the following:You don't get to claim supernatural involvement unless there is 100% error free transmission. Humans can always get "nearly perfect" results if they're careful.

Malachi151

Johannine comma anyone?

yalla

Quoted by Jayrok in the OP

"With all of the massive manuscript evidence you would think there would be massive discrepancies - just the opposite is true. New Testament manuscripts agree in 99.5% of the text (compared to only 95% for the Iliad). Most of the discrepancies are in spelling and word order. A few words have been changed or added. There are two passages that are disputed but no discrepancy is of any doctrinal significance (i.e., none would alter basic Christian doctrine). "

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...ier/bible.html

Richard Carrier's article on the degree and significance of manuscript problems is relevant here.
Two Examples of Faulty Bible Scholarship (1999)
Richard Carrier

"There are several thousand Greek manuscripts of Paul's letters, but fewer than a hundred are relevant, and among these there are a total of nineteen deviant readings in 1 Timothy alone, not counting simple spelling mistakes, which are legion."

He refers to the difficulty, even impossibility, of understanding just 1 verse, 4.10, because of such problems.

"We cannot know. Thus, no one today knows what 1 Timothy says here. It says one thing or the other, but that still means we cannot reconstruct Paul's original choice. This is a common problem throughout the New Testament"

And summarises thusly at the end:

"There are one thousand, four hundred and thirty eight significant deviations (again excluding spelling errors; Barbara Aland, et al, The Greek New Testament, 4th rev. ed., United Bible Societies, 1994, p. 2) in the whole of the Greek New Testament. Of those, I estimate almost a third, like the problem in 4:10, cannot be resolved with any certainty, even after the full exertion of critical scholarship and paleography. "

Jack the Bodiless

I've never seen the Rylands Fragment (a little scrap about the size of a credit card) referred to as the Rylands "manuscript" before.

Roger Pearse

Why?

All the best,

Roger Pearse