-Jay-

Andrew, just to clarify, the main point of my question to Dr. Ehrman was "did you, or to your knowledge, Dr. Metzger, ever claim 99.5% accuracy of transmission?"

To that, his answer was "no", and his elaborations were (insofar as my original question) gravy. What I've posted it what Dr. Ehrman turned around in literally about 10 minutes. I don't consider it to be a definitive answer to anything beyond the scope of the question that I originally posed. I should have put that caveat on the original posting.

regards,

NinJay

blastula

Roger Pearse, but that is the whole point of the thread. Almost nobody here would care about the textual history of the NT unless there were theological claims about the NT. Have you not read the OP?

Do you agree or disagree that we don't know exactly what any original NT text said?

Do you agree or disagree that the textual history of the NT provides no evidence to support the claim that the NT has a divine source?

Those are very relevant issues for both believers and skeptics.

Sheshonq

There is a world of difference - both hypothetical and practical - between your earlier tirade and NinJay's correcting your reductio ad absurdium.

The tragic fact that you can't see any difference ought to trouble you far more than any of us.

ksen

So if theological claims are made about a written work then obscurantism is ok, and if no theological claims are made about a written work then obscurantism is not ok?

blastula

Non sequitir. And what obscurantism? If there is any, it is Roger Pearse's attempts to bury the most relevant issues at hand.

squiz

Nice analogy, spin. The point isn't how much they changed since the 3rd or 4th centuries, but how much they changed in their first century.

All this quoting of some extremely high percentages reminds me of creationists talking about probabilities.

Roger Pearse

You're quite right, but surely we can only work from what we know to what we do not?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

That is well put.

Books that are transmitted by copying down the centuries are all transmitted in the same general manner. There is no supernatural angle to this. There is nothing specific to books of particular contents. (It's as if we were to say that in our own day bibles are printed differently to novels!) We can discuss the technical process of the transmission of texts quite independently of whether we trust what the author had to say, and we should do so independently.

To introduce the purely theological question of whether any book can be inspired (given that everything in this world is imperfect, and using the problems that every human copy has of something as an example) has no special relevance to this discussion.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Johnny Skeptic

Do you mean "then we have no ancient literature of any sort that we can trust"? If so, then my reply is that the intent of all writers, whether ancient or modern, is of paramount importance. I assume that Shakespeare wrote plays primarily for people's entertainment. I assume that the majority of ancient historians wrote historical accounts for the benefit of future generations of people.

If a God inspired the Bible, why did he do it? Since you believe that you know why Shakespeare wrote plays, and why the majority of ancient historians wrote historical records, you certainly ought to have some idea why God inspired the Bible. Perhaps you will claim that God's motives for doing anything are irrelevant. If you do that, then I will tell you that following that same line of reasoning, the motives of all ancient and modern writers are irrelevant too.

It is an utterly absurd notion that God wants people to hear the Gospel message, but only if another person tells them about it, but that is what Christians must claim. Do you consider the spread of the Gospel message to be more important than the spread of a cure for cancer? If you invented a cure for cancer, and were able to make the cure available to everyone in the world who had cancer within one week, would you do so, or would you choose to allow the existing means of distributing cures for diseases to distribute the cure, which would result in needless suffering? Does God consider the spread of the Gospel message to be more important than the spread of a cure for cancer?

As a side, note, we have a similar situation regarding access to food. God wants people to have enough food to eat, but only if they are able to obtain it through human effort. Why is that?

Now Roger, why in the world would a God use copies of copies of ancient texts in order to communicate with people when he could easily telepathically or verbally communicate the same message to everyone in the world, thereby eliminating a lot of confusion, and more effectively achieving his primary goal of trying to convince people to love and accept him? Did God use written records to communicate with Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, and early native American Indians? If not, why not?

Amaleq13

So you are not arguing that what we have can be assumed to be what was originally written?

You're just arguing we should ignore the possibility that what we have is somehow different and focus on what we have?

We have what ancient literature has become do we not? From that we can attempt to sift through the evidence in order to try to determine whether it was different in the past and, if so, how. It seems comparable to studying fossils and DNA of the forms life has become in order to determine what forms it held in the distant past. Both are necessarily speculative. Both are necessarily best understood by experts and specialists.