Codec

Yeah, but to join the PFJ, you'd really have to hate the Roman Editors... how much do you hate them?
;-)

Steven Avery

This is simply Joe<edit>, placing words under my name that not only I never spoke, but are opposite of my views in multiple ways.

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

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hi, Prax,

There are no "thirty Old Latin extant manuscripts with the gospels". This number includes all Old Latin manuscripts.

Who said that?

Best,

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Actually, this website appears to be blacklisted by Google, for whatever reasons...

Regards,

Yuri.

Roger Pearse

It's a poor argument, for several reasons. Firstly, because any argument that rubbishes whether a text has reached us seems to me hard to distinguish from obscurantism. The modern age begins, remember, with the recovery of the classical heritage. In the Renaissance Petrarch was so excited when he discovered the letters of Cicero in the Cathedral at Verona that he sat down and wrote a letter to Cicero to tell him what they meant to him. That is the true spirit, which we should all aspire to. Men did not willingly let these works die. What sort of man wants to kill the classics?

Secondly, it's a poor argument because the New Testament is the best attested text transmitted to us from antiquity. (The next best are the major fathers, of course). Any argument that disposed of the NT on these grounds will destroy all ancient literature even more surely.

I sense a question about the integrity of what I'm saying, which I'm afraid you must decide for yourself. But I am indeed a Christian, and I do indeed consider the bible inspired as all Christians do. But I think this irrelevant, and rather a red herring. It is only accidental that we are discussing the NT. The same argument should apply if we were discussing Pliny's Letters equally across the board.

You must excuse me, but I have never read McDowell. So I am unsure what the argument is. I don't see that textual accuracy proves anything about the *content* of any text. I daresay Petronius is fairly well preserved, in those portions that survive. But it is still porn!

I think I have already discussed this. You have the statement of the great paleographer, F.G.Kenyon. But I am wary of appeals to 'scholars', because on controversial issues such as religion and politics, I have observed that their conclusions invariably tend to reflect the prejudices of those who sit on academic selection boards.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

I am interested that you know that nothing can be "God's Word" unless it is identical to the autographs. I hope you won't mind me being cheeky and asking whether you acquired this theological knowledge by divine revelation?

Of course. Which those might be, and how, in an objective sense, is remarkably hard to determine without knowing all of the copies of an ancient text and all of its copyists.

The 'heretical' works of Tertullian survive, which lash the Bishop of Carthage. They survived in Carolingian copies. Why did Dark Ages monks copy them? Well, we don't know -- but we do know that such monks often didn't get on well with their secularised Bishops. Every copyist could have a prejudice. Is such an argument really a valid reason to discard a text?

We have no autographs of literary texts before the 13th century.

Count the age and number of the manuscripts.

The relevance of this escapes me, I'm afraid. We do not receive the Chinese classics by transmission from antiquity.

To reiterate: we should not go down this route. Literature, including the bible, is quite adequately transmitted from antiquity. Whether it has something useful to tell us is a separate matter. IMHO, of course.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

gregor

Roger

I could not disagree more. Discussions of faithful transmissions are important on numerous grounds.

1. No one argues that contra-Celsus is divinely inspired - but the argument of divine biblical inspiration is essential to Xians, and one needs to figure out what God actually inspired.

2. Plenty of schisms were based on textual variants, so primacy equates to orthodoxy.

Steven Avery

Hi Yuri, Keep in mind that in some contexts the 'Old Latin' line can include Italic or Bohemian (Tepl) and other manuscripts descended from or related to that line. This distinction may have to do with the numbers discrepancy.

http://www.scionofzion.com/olv.htm
The Old Latin Version and the King James Bible Readings By Will Kinney
"Gary Hudson... "An actual count reveals 61 Old Latin manuscripts that are extant. This information may be found by comparing pp. 712-716 of the Nestle-Aland 26th Edition Greek Text (Appendix 1:B, "Codices Latini"), with the UBS3 (pp. xxxii-xxxiv). The Old Latin mss. are listed by their corresponding content (Gospels, Acts, Pauline Corpus, Catholic Epistles, Apocalypse). Of the 61 extant mss. (very fragmented in their contents), 30 contain the gospels; 14 the Acts; 19 the Pauline epistles; 12 the catholic epistles; 8 the Apocalypse."

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

Roger Pearse

You grasp that these are all theological points, or predicated on points of theology? I don't think the answer to the question of whether or not texts are transmitted from antiquity or not should depend on whether or not I (or even you) have the right answer to the question, "How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?", or similar.

But of course there is certainly room for disagreement.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Steven Avery

Check your PM's