RED DAVE

From praxeus:
And is there no possibility that your status as a believer influenced your change of position? Cognitive dissonance is a very powerful mental tendency.

RED DAVE

Steven Avery

Feel free to invite him to this forum, or any forum, to defend his views. He avoids dialog (such as the invitations from Professor Maurice Robinson) where he will can be challenged directly.

Steven Avery

Lot's of things changed my position. However I had been a believer for a long time, without a view that the Johannine Comma was scripture. Hadn't concerned me in the least, and I was doctrinally very happy that way.

Then I really studied the issues. The types of articles referenced above, in depth, from a large number of sources.

In fact, at that point in the early stages, I had a sharp dialog with someone about the Cyprian quote on a forum, and it was clear that you really have to put on deep blinders to try to deny that he was referring to the Johannine Comma. (Even if you still want to reject it as scripture). Then I found out that Martyn Shue had had almost the same dialog (on net articles) with Daniel Wallace. Hmmm.. where do they come up with this stuff was my question, how can they take such absurd positions, how could the Metzger and Ehrman types write in such a clearly deceitful fashion.

And since the Johannine Comma is the "best case" scenario for the "no preserved Bible" and "tampered Bible" and "TR is wrong" views, it has great theoretical significance as well, no doubt. However, realizing that was more of an afterthought on my part.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Steven Avery

Here is a Will Kinney article on Bart Ehrman's epiphanies and theories

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messia.../message/11632
Sat Feb 11, 2006 11:33 am
"Misquoting Jesus" - Down the Road of Apostasy

Apikorus

This Will Kinney is apparently the same imbecile who "solved" the Ahaziah problem by inventing a new definition of age. Why do you waste time with such drek?

BenefitOfTheDoubt

Literally the Hebrew says: "A yearling was Saul at the beginning of his reign, but he reigned two years over Israel, then he chose three thousand..."

Along the same lines, Young's Literal Translation says: "A son of a year is Saul in his reigning, yea, two years he hath reigned over Israel, and Saul chooseth for himself three thousand..."

Matthew's Bible (which is Tyndale's :angel: translation of the Torah, Jonah and the New Testament with the rest of the OT completed by his friend John Rogers) gives the passage according to its literal translation:

"Saul was as a child of a year old, when he began to reign. And when he had reigned two years over Israel, he chose him three thousand..."

In other words, Saul was childish when he began to reign and therefore did not do anything of consequence until the 3rd year of his reign when he established an army.

Now was that so hard to understand? It is obvious from even a casual reading of the passage that there is a CONTRAST being made between the first two years of his reign and the 3rd year of it. "Oh! Corruption! Corruption!" Instead of wasting time crying wolf, how about just reading and thinking. There is such a thing as actually reading and thinking about what it says before throwing your hands up in surrender. And what's more, you can make any verse look corrupt if you pull it clean out of context -- you cannot separate verse 1 and the beginning of verse 2 because they are the same sentence. If you do separate them, well duh, it's going to look funny because that's not the way you're supposed to read it.

Now as for the KJV, it does not translate the verse literally in this case (as is quite obvious), but it basically does preserve the sense in that it says "Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years over Israel, Saul chose him three thousand..." by which you are led to ask "Why is the first year (or even the second) of his reign even mentioned if he did nothing in it? What does it mean, he reigned one year and when he had reigned two years?" which makes the same point as the literal translation, namely that Saul did nothing until the 3rd year of his reign. (And, btw, the KJV did translate the vav at the beginning of verse 2. They translated it into verse 1 as "when" in "WHEN he had reigned two years" instead of translating it in place in verse 2 as "he reigned two years, AND THEN" -- both ways mean the same thing.)

Apikorus

Some of us actually read the Hebrew and don't need Young's or Tyndale or the KJV.

What you are missing is the fact that 1 Sam 13:1 uses a formula which occurs some 36 other times in the Hebrew Bible (see here). This formula records the name of the king, his age upon accession to the throne, and the duration of his reign.

As I've shown, this is a harmonizing translation which does not reflect the plain sense of the text. To say that so-and-so reigned, one uses the past tense malakh (or vayimlokh), as in 1 Kings 4:11:

v'hayamim asher malakh dovid al-yisrael arbaim shanah bechevron malakh sheva shanim uviyrushalam malakh shloshim v'shalosh shanim

And the period (lit. "days") which David reigned over Israel was forty years. In Hebron he reigned seven years, and in Jerusalem he reigned thirty three years.

There are several other examples I could adduce. For example, one verse in which all three forms are used is 2 Chronicles 20:31,

vayimlokh yehoshafat al-yehudah ben-sloshim v'chamesh shanah b'malkho v'esrim v'chamesh shanah malakh biyrushalam v'shem imo azuvah bat-shilchi

And Jehoshaphat reigned (=malakh) over Judah. He was thirty-five years old when he began to rule (=b'malkho) and for twenty-five years he reigned (=malakh) in Jerusalem. And the name of his mother was Azuvah, the daughter of Shilhi.

Based on your translation of 1 Sam 13:1, we have, mutatis mutandis,

...and when he ruled twenty-five years in Jerusalem, his mother was named Azuvah...

which is of course absurd. Back to kita alef for you!

The inescapable conclusion is that 1 Sam 13:1 is corrupt, and there are probably two lacunae in the verse. Virtually every bible scholar on the planet agrees with this, save for evangelical "scholars" who are of course fettered by confessional stance.

RED DAVE

From Apikorus:
Funny I remember slogging through that verse in Hebrew School and being told by my teacher, matter-of-factly, that the verse didn't quite make sense and was probably corrupt. Most Jews, except the most fanatic, recognize corruption in the text.

RED DAVE

Steven Avery

Api, you have been rather unresponsive in this thread, combined with getting away with a tacky ad hom based on a technicality, (the person isn't on forum) taking advantage of very questionable forum rules.

First, for all your self-proclaimed Hebrew savvy, you made an incredible blunder trying to claim an error on the "missing vav" claim, (remember you looked all through chapter 13, and were refuted directly a couple of verses away in chapter 12). So you simply dropped it like a hot potato when your claim unravelled. The right thing to do is to simply say "I was wrong" before switching gears. Now Benefit has even gone one step further correcting your Hebrew misunderstanding on that issue that you raised and potato-dropped.

And you have been shown already in a prior post that the first year was in fact the beginning of Saul's reign, eliminating all your concern above, and explaining the difference between the two malakh forms in 1 Samuel 13:1. You of course just ignored that and repeated yourself. The second clause, the subsequent years, does use the past tense, but the first clause represents the beginning of the reign.

So when you come up with something substantive rather than simply repeating your position, "its a formula" it will be more interesting, and revive your stagnant position on the thread.

Then you make the same mistake of referring to a "formula" that isn't there, already dealt with many times, including my quite apropos "cart before the horse" English example. All of that of course is ignored by you, since it took apart your fundamental "formula" argument. You want to strait-jacket the Hebrew of 2500+ years ago, and it does not wash.

Overall, you have a theory of an unknown original text, combined with an attendent unknown theory of text-corruption. Wow, talk about textual vaporware.

Remember we showed that Api refused to even find one other verse in the whole Hebrew Bible where he would claim a similar 'word drop' in a middle of a verse as he claims here in 1 Samuel 13:1. This is supposed to be the one case in 50,000 or so words. Api hand-waved that request multiple times, never answering directly, typical.

So Api has a totally unique claim in this verse, the one and only place in the Bible where a single-word-drop corruption is supposed to have occurred, and to make it worse he combines it with another vague "probable" error in the very same verse. All this to avoid a simpler reading. Occam is shaving in his grave.

Api is giving us - "Well there was an error or two, but I have no idea what the text was, nor any textual theory of how it changed".

And then when the text is explained in a simple way that makes sense, Api goes ballistic, typical of the textcrit mentality.

Api, nothing you claim here makes any sense. On the second "probable" error (do you have a suggested text in the non-probable case ?) you don't even offer a starting point for consideration, nor how a scribe, all scribes, would change this word to that word, point A to point Z

Honestly, Api, "virtually every bible scholar" believes a ton of nonsense on the ending of Mark or the Johannine Comma or many other aspects of the Bible. The 'given wisdom' stuff is often inane, the blind leading the blind, as has been shown in thread after thread. It is no surprise that the same type of junque takes place in Tanach, as you have demonstrated here.

As an aside, it appears that an unbalanced view of Professor Lawrence Schiffman's view of the Masoretic Text has been given on forum, implying that he would correct the MT with the DSS. He suggested to me that I check the whole context of the DSS reference on "Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls" (I'll check the Queens College library to see if they have it), and talk to him more directly. Since Professor Schiffman is speaking here in a week I'm hoping that will offer the opportunity.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Apikorus

Nonsense. I showed how the KJV translates the vav at the beginning of every single verse in 1 Sam 13, with the exception of 13:2. In 1 Sam 12, the leading vav of each verse is translated in the KJV, without exception.

So rather than prove you right, 1 Sam 12 in fact proves you wrong. Once again, the KJV translates the vav when it comes at the beginning of a verse. Your example comes from the middle of a verse. For an instructive example, let's look at 1 Sam 12:14-15:

(14) im-tir'u et-yhvh va'avad'tem oto...

(15) v'im-lo tish'm'u b'kol yhvh...

Now let's look at the KJV for these verses:

(14) If ye will fear the LORD and serve him...

(15) But if ye will not obey the voice of the LORD...

We see how the vav at the beginning of verse 15 is directly translated as the disjunctive "but." So im = "if" and v'im = "but if" at the beginning of these verses. Your goose is cooked.

As I have shown explicitly, the formula occurs in 36 other locations in the Hebrew Bible. You grimly maintain otherwise in the face of the withering evidence. 1 Sam 13:1 is corrupt in all surviving witnesses, and is missing entirely in the Vaticanus. Why do you suppose that is?

As I said there are numerous examples of this sort of scribal error. I already cited another example in Gen 4:8 (again deliberately mistranslated in harmonizing fashion in the KJV). Since you have shown a pattern of avoiding the evidence, though, I wanted to stick to 1 Sam 13:1, so as not to let you wriggle away.

In what way? By quoting verbatim from his book? In private, Schiffman, an Orthodox Jew, may well have some excuse to proffer for the paragraph which dropped out of 1 Sam 11. As an Orthodox Jew, his attitudes toward the Torah are perhaps colored by his religious stance. He is, without doubt, a first magnitude scholar when it comes to the Dead Sea Scrolls. He has, however, displayed a rather credulous attitude toward the rabbinic literature, particularly with regard to reconstructing social and religious norms in first century Palestine. (This is evident in many of his writings, but especially in his little book, "Who was a Jew?". The criticisms of Shaye Cohen are worth reading here. Cohen's own study, in "The Beginnings of Jewishness," is significantly more nuanced.) At any rate, Hebrew Bible text criticism is not Schiffman's area of expertise. You'd be better off consulting someone like Emmanuel Tov.

Back to the leading vav's: I have not researched this fully, but my impression is that the KJV translators were fairly meticulous in direcly translating all of these. If you could find an exception to this rule, I would be interested and grateful. The fact that there are no exceptions in 1 Sam 12 through 1 Sam 14 utterly destroys your argument, and bolsters mine. But you might try, just to see if you can salvage anything at all, and look for exceptions in some other part of the Hebrew Bible.