S.C.Carlson

BINGO! Those faded portions are the deletions by the 10th century re-inker (in which his decision not to re-ink a letter means "delete this letter.").

Stephen

Iasion

Very late.


I do not believe we should "discard" anything, nor have I said so.


No.
Nor did I say so, nor did I see anyone else say so.


Iasion

RUmike

Ok, sorry, I misunderstood what you meant. I thought you meant closest in words used, not closest in time.

NZSkep

from the site one allegience cited
http://www.carm.org/questions/Jesus_myth.htm

Didymus

But obviously not keen enough to filter out all the errors and contradictions! How do you account for that? Do you think he/she might have been distracted by Satan? Happens to me all the time.

Eh? Doesn't make sense.

And if it isn't?

Sounds like a lot of people are owed a lot of money.

I'm starting to agree with the theory that some Summer Sunday School teacher must have told his/her students to mix it up with the heathens on IIDB. God love ya, boys and girls!

Didymus:devil1:

Iasion

Greetings all,

This site is getting a lot of cites lately - what a sight !
:-)

It makes the typical apologist equivocation between reliability of MSS transmission and reliability of it's CONTENT.

Here:
http://www.carm.org/evidence/textualevidence.htm
we see the usual list of ancient writings with the usual nonsense - i.e. that there are 5600 NT MSS within 100 years of the events, that Luke/Acts was written 62CE, that all the NT was written 1st century - the usual suspects.

Especially the claim that :

If the critics of the Bible dismiss the New Testament as reliable information, then they must also dismiss the reliability of the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, Homer, and the other authors mentioned in the chart at the beginning of the paper. On the other hand, if the critics acknowledge the historicity and writings of those other individuals, then they must also retain the historicity and writings of the New Testament authors;

Which is exactly the confusion I referred to - mistaking the reliablity of the MSS with the truth of the CONTENT.


Iasion

cajela

Well, I know nothing of the biblical textual methods, but with DNA sequences you can guesstimate the common ancestral sequence of a bunch of gene sequences. You get a multiple sequence alignment and look at the consensus sequence. I've been told that these biological methods can be used for textual analysis, too...

one allegiance

I'm not entirely sure that we are talking about the TRUTH of the content, but rather reliability of the content, correct? The actual TRUTH of the text and whether or not it is divinely inspired is up for debate. But, in my opinion the reliability of what was ACTUALLY written as opposed to the claims that it has been altered is not up for debate. Now, you can call Christianity a hoax all you want, but I don't think you can debate what was actually written, b/c THEN you would have to debate what was written of Plato and so on. Is this an accurate statement?

Iasion

Greetings,

That web site, like many apologist sites, BLURS the distinction between:
* reliability of the textual transmission, and
* reliability of the content as true history.

They are un-related - we have the original MSS of LoTR (I think :-), that does not make it true.

What exactly do you mean "not up for debate"?

We can see that is HAS been altered.

We do NOT have the originals of the NT - all we have is late and variant copies of copies. There is a large field of study which attempts to re-create, as close as possible, what the original text may have been.

Of course,
the actual original is unknown in various places, and there IS much debate about the variations.


I didn't call it a hoax.
I have never called it a hoax.
I have never seen anyone call it a hoax.

But oddly, apologists keep saying that.

We DO debate what was written, because all we have is later copies of copies with many variations.

Textual Criticism of the NT is an active field with many scholars working on it - debates occur all the time - where have you been? :-)

And,
we DO debate what was written of Plato, and Socrates and others - not necessarily as much as Jesus.

All ancient writings are subject to criticism and analysis.

(Just as there are those who argue Jesus did not exist, so some say Socrates didn't. Some even argue Mohamed did not exist.)

And, when subject to analysis, the NT shows various problems as history - regardless of how problematic OTHER ancient writings may be.


Iasion

Dargo

Plato and Socrates have been far less important to people for the past 1700 years than Jesus, so it makes sense their teachings would be debated less. I've never heard of a government creating Socratic-based laws, or any wars being started by philosophical debates among Socrates' followers. Socrates' followers have never persecuted the followers of heretical philosophers either.