GenesisNemesis

Contradiction? :huh:

Where do you get the statistics?

It is, if you cannot produce evidence.

yalla

Well I've been lurking on this thread and I'm still not sure what "textually pure' is supposed to mean.
But I'll make these comments hoping they are relevant to what seems to be the issues.

Firstly I think we need to take especially careful note of Ehrman's point, as posted earlier, that, roughly:
''there are more manuscript variants than there are words in the NT".
I dont see how the significance of that can be avoided.

Secondly some of those variants, excluding spelling and trivia, are very significant theologically.
Take for example the essay by Richard Carrier which looks at unresolved problems caused by textual variants in one NT book alone.
Its worth a read, here is the link and a concluding comment.

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

"I have examined a mere two of nineteen problems, in 1 Timothy alone, a book that takes up less than four pages of English in the New American Standard Bible. 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"

Thirdly we could, if it fits within that fuzzy phrase "texturally pure', consider the problems associated with known, or at least highly suspicious, additions to whatever the original text may have been.
Such as the floating pericope of "The Woman Taken in Adultery" which appears in several different places and appears to be a 'late' addition not by the original author.
Similarly the bonus free extra endings attached to g"Mark" and, according to some scholars, Ch 21 of g"John" and perhaps even CH 15 of Romans [which is not included in some texts].
As well as the extra length of about 10% that the western text of "Luke' [or Acts, I forget which, Roger will surely know] has compared to other texts of the supposedly same thing.
I suspect all of them not only add up to .5% but are of major theological import.
Hardly 'textually pure'.

And we do have cases where one small word can make an enormous difference in meaning.
Take Galatians 1.16 for example:
"God....was pleased to reveal his son to me"
You can see how "Luke" can come up with 3 versions of a vision of the risen JC to Paul, along the road to Damascus from that verse.
But try this:
"God....was pleased to reveal his son in me".
No external event.
One tiny word difference and the concept of an external vision becomes untenable, at least from this verse. Yet 'in' is an equally valid, perhaps better, translation of the Greek word so I have read.

Hardly 'textually pure', whatever that means.
cheers
yalla

Roger Pearse

Good to have some real figures - thank you Andrew. That has the right sort of sound.

I admit that I tend to use the "would this difference be visible in a literal translation" test as a quick rule of thumb on how important (to non-specialists) a variant is. Addison long ago satirised the self-importance of textual critics, and pointed out that it hardly matters if a scribe wrote 'et' or 'ac' or 'atque' or '&'.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Indeed so.

The idea that a book must have a different process of copying and disemination, purely because people today make various claims for it, hardly needs discussion. Once we state it, indeed, it is an obvious category confusion.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Consider that Jesus and the apostles lived in the era of manuscripts. They were entirely familiar with this issue. Yet they don't consider it of any theological importance at all as far as the text of the bible is concerned (the OT, in their day, of course).

The fathers don't worry about it either. All books are like that, having variants is a feature of all books, the bible is a book, so what's the problem -- would seem to be the logic.

I think that we may infer from this that we are confusing ourselves.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

blastula

Yes, believers wouldn't. Believers are good at rationalizing away doubts for belief.

Yes, it's just like any other ordinary book. Nothing special about its origin.

blastula

Except, it's claimed by Christians that the words of the Bible had an extraordinarily different source than other books. And yet, there's nothing about the books themselves in their content, medium, or dissemination that is extraordinarily different than other books. At least if all manuscripts were consistent, that could be special for the time. Shouldn't be much of a trick for the creator of the heavens and the earth.

blastula

No, you miss the point. The originals would have been written in the first century (not to mention, decades after the original events). The earliest full copies are dated to the third century.

Even granting your alleged 99.5% number, you still don't know what originals said.

Roger Pearse

Does it matter who the author is, for questions of copying etc?

Do books written by me, intelligent, rich, clever, and altogether superhumanly modest, go through a different process to your miserable pamphlets, merely because they are written by me, rather than you?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

This has already been addressed in this thread. If this is so, then we don't know what any ancient text says. Such a view is obscurantism.

All the best,

Roger Pearse