Toto

It depends on how far you are going to trust them. You can read the Iliad and the Bible as literature of their time, of interest in understanding human history. But if you try to read the Iliad for military strategy, or if you think you might be required to sacrifice your virgin daughter to win the war in the Middle East, you probably should not trust that text.

Similarly, if you find a supposedly ancient text that claims that the Macedonians were not Greek (or were definitely Greek), or were maybe proto-Bulgarian, you might consider the possibility that a modern day nationalist on one side of the Macedonian question has altered that text.

Chili

Interesting here is that the translation used by the Baptists is wrong to say that "Adam was first formed, then Eve," since neither Adam nor Eve where ever formed to 'be'. They merely existed in the imagination of man (MAN) and still exist today in the same imagination of man who was first called Adam after this imaginative quality created the additional ego identitiy wherein they consciously knew that they were naked.

Here is the passage used from their translation:

(Bold is added by me).

Created is the right word here, never to be formed and find existence in being, and therefore remaining an illusion that may be fun for fantasies but will never be real.

Sure, good to know thet difference between good and bad [such as when making a living] and may even be fun to crucify after it has served its purpose.

Solitary Man

It's also full of real history.

premjan

The Iliad is a mythological retelling from the viewpoint of Classical Greeks, of exploits of Mycenean Greeks. The events are believed to be real history, but told from a perspective of many centuries later.

-Jay-

I'm arguing less that the NT is or isn't the "best" preserved (which is a qualitative judgement) and more that we:

A) Cannot assign a quantitative measure to the degree of preservation (e.g. 99.5% or what have you) because we don't have the originals to compare to, and

B) Must acknowledge that while there are many minor/irrelevant discrepancies in the extant mss, there are some that are significant enough to prevent us from saying categorically "The NT is reliable."

You are responding to an argument that I'm not making. I'm not saying that the NT is useless as a source. I'm saying that we need to question the reliability of the NT because there are known discrepancies between the extant mss. We cannot just assume the reliability.

But it's not in the same sense, unless you're proposing an that there were ancient Minolta Photoscribes or something like that. The transmission methods are different as regards who was doing the copying. Additionally, with modern books, we can at least in principle go back to the original manuscript or data file.

My statement, as I wrote it, is true. Ehrman cites several instances where the differences between mss are significant. (There aren't that many options here - either one mss matches the original, perhaps with insignificant deltas, and the others don't, or none of them match the original. Significant differences between mss are still significant differences between mss in either case.)


You're a little off, but that's my fault for not making the point more clearly. What I'm trying to get across here is that for any given ancient text, we don't judge its value based on what an original may have said - we judge its value based on the best reconstruction we can get of it now. (In point of fact, even if we happened to get lucky and recover the original of some arbitrary ancient text, it would be extremely difficult to confirm that it was indeed the original and not a very early copy.)

The Bible is pretty much unique, at least in the Western world, in the sense that it directly and measurably influences both personal and social policies and interactions. That influence makes it an imperative that we be very careful in how we deal with it.


I would state it differently to say that we use what we have, on the basis of the best reconstruction that we can muster.


So you don't seek to hold the Bible up as authoritative?

The problem is that you appear to be applying a tremendous bias in assuming the reliability of transmission.

Well, I've read a lot of Ehrman, both his popular books and his scholarly books and articles. I feel very strongly that he writes very clearly and with appropriate caveats on his conclusions, and consequently readers shouldn't be getting this message. I'm certainly not going to argue with you that people aren't coming away with that message.

I've asked you before if you'd read any of Ehrman's work yourself. I believe that you indirectly indicated you had not. If that's the case, I think this particular discussion - that of the message people take from Ehrman's writings - would be well served if you did read some of his material. Then we could discuss specifics instead of generalities.

Agreement!

The problem is that texts aren't transmitted the same way - yes, they were hand copied, but depending on the text, the time period, and the location those scribes could have been very literate professionals or barely literate hobbyists. It makes a difference.

Now, we can go back and forth about different standards and whatnot, but at the end of the day it comes back to this:

A) We've got a bunch of different mss of various parts of the NT.
B) There are a bunch of differences between corresponding passages within those mss.
C) They can't all be right.
D) Modern Bibles contain passages, indeed entire books, of debatable origin and/or questionable translation, due in large part to A) through C).

These are facts. They're not open to debate.

The "more or less", above, is key.

Absolutely not. The heritage of which you speak is really the aggregate sum of what has gone before. In the case of texts, the heritage includes not only the originals that are lost to history, but the copies, edits, mistakes, translations, and interpretations that yield the version that I can obtain today.

It's extraordinarily difficult to keep religious arguments out of a discussion that centers on the reliability of the NT.

There are, certainly, plenty of other reasons to suppose inaccuracy in the Bible, but we happen to be embroiled in a discussion in the Biblical Criticism and History forum of a discussion board populated heavily by atheists, agnostics, and assorted other flavors of skeptics.

I suspect very few, if any, here have "tear up the heritage of mankind" on their personal agendas, and were the Bible not so influential and prominent in the modern Western world, I suspect there would be a lot less discussion on what it says and how it was formed.

(Incidentally, re: your comment about possessing the original autographs - I agree that it wouldn't affect the question of the veracity of Christianity.)

regards,

NinJay

(As an aside: Roger, would you be willing to adopt the convention of either splitting responses to long posts among several posts? The VB software makes long intercalated respones somewhat cumbersome, and I suspect some readers might find shorter post/response sequences easier to follow.)

Roger Pearse

Um, I'm very short of time, and I'm not sure that I have anything further to add on this. Very long posts are impossible to follow, as you rightly say.

Your responses seem to be reiterations to me (because I think that I have already addressed the issues that they contain).

Doug Shaver

Last time I checked, the only facts in the Iliad that are considered undisputed are (1) Troy existed at the time in question (13th century BCE, plus or minus a bit), (2) it fought some wars and lost them, and (3) some Greek forces were probably involved in at least one of those wars.

squiz

Although in this letter Ehrman describes a process by which small changes accumulate, this is not the main type of change that he describes in his books. In this case he appears to be simply rebutting the ridiculous claim of 99.5% accuracy. If anything is obscurantism, it is this number which is getting bandied around.

My understanding of what I have read from him, is that deliberate changes to support particular doctrinal views were much more significant.

There are some major differences between the transmission of the NT and the Classics. For the first couple of hundred years or so, the NT was copied by amateurs, who made many more mistakes when compared to dedicated scribes. More importantly, the NT documents were holy texts, whose words were used as a basis for doctrine. This obviously creates huge motivation for making changes, let alone complete forgery. The same does not apply to the works of Cicero.

Another problem with comparing the NT to the classics is that the NT is still the basis of doctrine for many Christians today. This obviously raises the bar a bit.

Your claim that "the NT is the best preserved of ancient literary texts", while probably true in shear numbers of ancient copies, is grossly misleading when it comes down to analysing what the original Christians might have actually believed. This is obsucrantism.

andrewcriddle

The NT is not unique among ancient texts in ideologically motivated changes.

There seem to have been attempts by later Platonists to rewrite Plato so as to make him agree with their understanding of Platonism.
See Dillon 1989 "Tampering with the Timaeus" American Journal of Philology 110:50-72

Andrew Criddle

Roger Pearse

I wonder what the evidence for these claims might be. I have a feeling that you are perhaps repeating something from somewhere here? How do we know this?

As far as I know, we do not know very much about the now non-existent ancient ancestors of our medieval copies of the classics, for the obvious reason that they are, well, non-existent.

Certainly texts like Livy were revised and copied in private households in late antiquity, as copied subscriptio's indicate.

I have a feeling that these statements are the conclusions of some kind of argument, rather than pieces of data as they appear?

The idea that people have no motivation to alter (e.g.) histories seems curious to me. I seem to remember that people joked that the Soviet official histories were issued loose-leaf, so that the pages could be revised more readily as people fell out of favour and disappeared from 'history'. We can all imagine reasons why texts might be changed.

But as I have remarked at least twice already, unless we restrict ourselves to changes for which we actually have evidence, we go directly to subjectivity where texts are considered corrupt for reasons other than evidence.

All the best,

Roger Pearse