Gullwind

mdd344:

There are literally millions of copies of The Lord of the Rings in existence, with far fewer differences between them than the biblical texts. Does that mean that Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn really existed?

Quantity of copies proves nothing about whether the events recorded actually happened. All it proves is that someone went to the effort of making sure the copies were accurate. The same arguments are made for the Quran, Hindu texts and many others. Does that mean that they are true also?

mdd344

Gullwind,
No, and I never said it did. In fact, I think I stated the opposite. But if the Lord of the Rings had been corrupted and drastically changed through the years its final product would be suspect. My point with the opening post is to establish that the text is trustworthy. Be it true or false, it is trustworthy because of the meticulous way it has been transmitted and copied. Thus, no one can come back later and say "the text has been corrupted" or any such like thing about the text.

Sauron

"Faithfully copied" is not the same thing as trustworthy. Mistakes and outright lies can be faithfully copied; think of a xerox machine. The fact that they are copied 100% faithfully doesn't mean that the content is uncorrupted.

Wrong. You apparently have decided to ignore my post, above, top of page.

The Dead Sea Scrolls tell us nothing about whether the earlier texts were corrupt, or not.

EssEff

The Bible is unfallible because the Bible says so. There's no other proof that it's the word of god, so all the textual criticism and the rest is pointless. If someone has a delusion, thinks god was talking to them, convinces other people that it really happened, then they tell others and eventually someone writes it down and etc., even if you could track back to that original person it still doesn't mean it was really god talking to him. You'd be believing him because you want to believe it.

mdd344

Sauron,
But don't you agree that the Dead Sea Scrolls did establish the trustworthiness of the Massoretic text, and furthermore when combined with the evidence of how careful the Scribes were that the documents that make up the Bible most likely have been faithfully copied since the originals existed?

aa5874

Mdd344, the population of the world is about 6.5 billion and Christianity has about 2 billion followers, so just from those figures you will see that about 4.5 billion people do not regard the Bible as the authority on 'objective' morality.

There are non-christian nations in the world that have far less child molesters, drive-by shootings, murders, rape, robberies and other serious crimes than those that are Christianised.

adren@line

The Vedas have been transmitted for close to 4000 years, so whoop-de-do.

Sauron

It's important to keep in mind which direction history is flowing, when talking about these various texts. It's easy to confuse the manuscript names, as well as the BC and AD dating that is used.

* Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) - mid 200s BCE to mid 100s BCE
* Essenes and DSS - 100s BCE
* Masoretic Text - 500s AD - 900s AD

The Masoretic text wasn't even started until the 6th century AD - over seven hundred years after the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the Masoretic text wasn't completed until the 10th century AD.

The Essene settlement at Qumran (where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found) dates from the mid-second century (the 100s BC), until the destruction of Jerusalem in 68-70 AD. The scrolls themselves have been dated through various means, and they date from 250 BC to 70 AD. Which means that the Dead Sea Scrolls came after the Alexandrian translation effort. In actual matter of fact, the main value of the DSS was not in dating texts at all. It was in the area of textual criticism. The value of the DSS was to observe:

a. whether or not the Masoretic Text and the LXX had been accurately copied over the years since their original compilation; and

b. whether or not the LXX or Masoretic Text were based on texts which represented mainstream textual criticism, or were instead fringe elements of textual families.

What's more, if you have that much faith in the Masoretic text, how come you don't use it? The Christian Old Testament (KJV anyhow) is based upon the Septuagint, a Greek translation (above).

Absolutely not. Hebrew society underwent substantial changes in the centuries prior to the Septuagint and the Essenes. Just because people in 150 BC were faithful copiers of the text does not mean that people five hundred years before that time were just as faithful.

Moreover, there is evidence that in King Josiah's time, there were multiple copies of the several bible stories floating around, and there was a coordinated effort by the temple priests to merge them together into one coherent story - which became the five books of Moses (and several other books). That means that they deliberately worked to eliminate contradictions and the more glaring impossibilities. Have you read Finkelstein's account in "The Bible Unearthed"?

Edited to add: as always, Peter Kirby is the undisputed living repository of this kind of expert knowledge. He's also one of the nicest and most humble people you're likely to meet on this bulletin board. You'd do well to read the sticky note posted at the top of this forum view. It contains a lot of Peter's writings and pointers to good information.

Coleslaw

I think those may have been before my time-do you have the links?

Sauron

Tyre - otherwise known as "Lee Merrill gets his butt kicked"

And again, Lee Merrill comes back for more Tyre-thrashing;

And Tyre again - not Lee this time, but Richbee and bfniii get badly spanked;

Finally, Babylon - aka "Lee Merrill comes back for a second helping".