Jedi Mind Trick

In another thread a poster made the folowing claim:

Is this at all true regarding the consensus opinion?

Codec

I think it depends what you mean as the original, as it was several hundred years before there was a concensus what the Bible actually consisted of. After that time I believe there hasn't been significant deviation from the text of around 300AD ish, and the OT dates back much further of course.

Jedi Mind Trick

I think he means the original autographs; the actual ones penned by the author(s).

Codec

I'm not an expert my any means, but again it depends which ones you mean. There is good evidence for a lot of editing in the 4 main gospels, showing they probably evolved somewhat in their early days before settling down to what we know. This might have happened over 10 or 100 years - that sort of time span.
They were also most likely not written by the names given to them, the textual evidence doesn't back up the authors names very well at all.

Pauls letters are also not intact - I think some are, some have been shown to be more of an assembledge of bits. Other books are hotly disputed who wrote them, and when and if they have been changed.

The OT you can take much further back of course, particularly because of the dead sea scrolls.

Infiniteguy

sounds like he's making the claim that the concensus of biblical scholars agree that the current documents we have are in exact correlation to the original manuscripts. the minusclue percentage of those who are in contray to the claim must prove why they are are not.

this defies the burden of proof that theist have to bring to nontheist concerning the existance of a immaterial dety. the onus has always been to those making extraordinary claims to bring fourth the evidence.



kham

ksen

I never made the claim that the majority of manuscripts are in "exact correlation" to the originals.

I'm saying that they are close enough that they can be pretty much trusted to give us if not the wording then at least a sense of what the originals said.

I made the claim in the OP in response to a skeptic who had no problem using Bible passages to accuse the Biblical God of things but whenever I'd bring up a Bible verse to the contrary or to support my case all of a sudden it wasn't valid because I couldn't 100% prove that the passages I quoted were in the originals because the originals no longer exist.

By that standard he shouldn't be able to use the Bible to accuse God either. In fact by that standard you can't use or quote any ancient text.

I hope that helps clarify why I made that statement.

ksen

Oh, and I'd also include the text of the OT because I meant the OT as well as the NT.

If I'm wrong about the consensus then I'll happily post a retraction. But I don't think I'm wrong.

Chris Weimer

As long as you understand multiple compositional theory, aka the documentary hypothesis, and the late dating for the texts, Jewish or Christian, then you can rest assured that you have reasonably the same as the "originals", but that in itself is understanding what scholars mean by "originals".

What specifically are you worrying about?

ksen

Me? I'm not worried about too much in the Bible.

However Johnny Skeptic kept raising, imo, ridiculous objections about not having certainty about any passage of the Bible because we don't have the original autographs anymore.

He was asking me to prove the Adam and Eve story was in the "original" text. Then when I started using Bible passages to support my arguments about the Christian God all of a sudden I couldn't use Bible passages because I couldn't prove they were part of the originals.

But that didn't stop him from using Biblical passages to condemn God.

But there you go.

gregor

Two thoughts:

1. The concept of a "majority consensus" (in addition to its gramatical problems) is a combination of the logical fallacy of an appeal to authority with an ipse dixit thrown in for good measure. Different commentators have different opinions on the quantity and quality of the variations of the text families.

2. I think Ehrman's Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (or via: amazon.co.uk) describes some of the errors in the OP's assertion. It is irrelevant if 200 theologians say that we have 2,000 copies very similar to an old text, when a few researchers point out a dozen critical, foundational variations between families.