Quote:
Originally Posted by Gullwind
The thing is, even if its true, all it means is that a lot of people were careful when they made copies. It says nothing about the truth of what the writings were about. It sounds good, especially if you're already a believer, but it really doesn't mean what they use it for.
There are millions of copies of The Lord of the Rings floating around, probably a lot more than 99% identical, but that doesn't prove that Frodo and Gandalf really existed.
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And beyond that we have to ask if the strain of copies that mach each other with more than 99% accuracy really even matter if they are not copies of the origanal story. When Tolkein wrote the lord of the rings he made first second and third drafts that were all different form one another. Only the final draft however was mass published as the difinitive "correct version" and has remained basically the same for several decades since its first printing. because of this it would be pretty hard to argue that these report any kind of event (in the case that tolkein claimed them to be real, or someone else did after he wrote them) by saying that they are first hand testamony to the events and it is immpressive that they remain remarkably consistant with each other despite the length of the book and how many copies have been made. Yeah NOW they are all consistant with each other, but that consistant version did not appear until years after the "first report" and the first reports were not nearly as consistant. Only if we could see that the first version of the story was the only one written by the one who people claimed to be the reporter and that this first version is the one we have today and that it has not been changed since its inception could we argue that this represents a reliable report.
The Bible fails to show itself to be the first version of anything and instead shows signs of being a heavily revised set of stories that are not always consisitant with each other and often add in details in later texts that were not there before I.E. Mark mentions no resurection, but later gospels do.
Not only that but earlier records of gospels can be used to show that the story we have now is not the same as the gospel narritive in its earliest state.
Therefore even if we believed that the story of Christ was a real event we cannot beleive that the Bible we have now is a first hand account of the events, regardless of how consistant the final versions may be after they were compiled or how little they have changed since their first large scale use copy making.
05-10-2007, 10:30 AM
