Johnny Skeptic

Comments please.

I will tell remez about this thread.

Salam

Which version?

What do you mean by pure?

remez

Sorry for the confusion Salam
JS invited him to question what he posted on another thread?
Called me a fundie, Ignored my polite request, quoted me out of context and ran over here to gain your support.

Interesting approach?

here is the post from the other thread....................
Fair Eough. I accept.
Desire and reason drive me to fix upon the foundation of the New Testament.
You are a positivist, so first I appeal to the science of textual Criticism. This branch of science stands defiantly opposed to your assessment of the N.T.

The N.T. is scientifically 99.5% textually pure.
Reference: N.T. has approximately 20,000 lines of text.
Only 400 lines are in doubt. That’s about 400 words. None bearing any weight on doctrinal issues.

The N.T. gains further support from patristic quotations

In this light, I ask you to scientifically support your assessment of the N.T.
Then we can compare and discuss further.

Johnny Skeptic

But what you said does not have anything whatsoever to do with what I said. Here is what I said:

1 - But you do not know what the Bible is, or rather was.

2 - The Bible was a collection of original writings.

3 - No one knows what the originals said, and how many times they have been changed.

4 - Even if we had the originals, I would not trust them.

What problems do you have with what I said? Since you do not have a clue what the originals said, at best, all that you can claim is that most SUPPOSED copies of the originals were accurately copied.

John Kesler

Questions about the degree of the NT's purity strike me as misguided, when the real question is why God would inspire the Bible, only to allow it to succumb to the same transcription shortcomings as other works of antiquity. While the presence of textual variants doesn't preclude divine inspiration, such mistakes certainly do nothing to suggest such a provenance.

Toto

This question was extensively discussed in this previous thread.

I think that remez is trying to say that the surviving manuscripts are consistent with each other, which they are, more or less. But there are some significant differences.

And the fact that the manuscripts are consistent does not mean that 1) there were no signficiant variations among earlier copies; or that 2) the content of the text is true in any sense.

rickP

I just finished reading Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk). He seemed to indicate there are well over 100,000 textual differences between the roughly 5700 surviving manuscripts.

remez

To JS

Remember you invited me to choose.
Thanks for the enumeration it will make it easier to address.
My chosen focus was on point 3.
Point 4 is an issue to follow after we established the scientific comparison of your claim and mine.
Others have raised some great issues as well. But for now, upon your invitation, Point 3 is the focus.

So more specifically we have a textually pure N.T. supported by the science of Textual Criticism. That means we do know what the autographs said.

Where is your scientific evidence supporting your…. as of this point…… emotional claim that we do not know what the autographs said?

Have a good night.

Roger Pearse

If so, then we have no ancient literature of any sort, never mind the bible.

Firstly, textual criticism is indeed the art (not really a science) of healing damage to the texts transmitted by copying from antiquity. It certainly does reject the wild claims of non-transmission above. We can watch the transmission of a work between the 5th and 15th centuries for some texts, and we do not see these vast changes in them. When I was looking at Jerome's Chronicle, which is a work that was completely reformatted by some scribe in the middle ages, I nevertheless did not find such changes from the 5th century manuscript that I used as a basis.

This is general stuff, applicable to all texts. The NT is the best preserved ancient literary text, as I think we all know (not least because the Greeks who copied all these things in the middle ages copied bibles most often).

The specific statistics given are unfamiliar to me, but may be correct. Whatever the values are, they will be higher than for any other ancient text, given the wealth of manuscripts and their early date.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

rickP

So I'm guessing you disagree with Ehrman's analysis of the status of the manuscripts? What do you see as his errors in methodology?