Roller

Thanks!
I'll go read up on the thread started by Spanish Inquisitor.

Julian

There is no Greek evidence for the comma that can be placed earlier than the 16th century.

Julian

Julian

Advising against reading anything is very bad advice. That being said, reading Ben Witherington is colossal waste of time.

Julian

yalla

I once read a book by Witherington.
Something about a 'bone box'.
It confirmed your evaluation.
cheers
yalla

Nazaroo

Yes, for instance, the large scriptorium in the most important capitol exporting professionally copied papyri, Alexandria, run by the catechetal school of Origen (c.200-250 A.D.) who later worked at a similar center in Caesaria (c. 230-40). And earlier too, as in the one where Tertullian operated, in Carthage (c. 190-220 A.D.).

And of course MSS were copied outside of scriptoriums, such as by individuals during organized but underground church meetings, a bit at a time, and pasted together as primitive 'lectionary' or ecclesiastical texts.



No. In more accurate words, Ehrman was telling *some* truth about the early manuscripts, which results in a picture of the situation that can only be classed as a deliberate 'untruth'.

For instance, Ehrman claims publicly that 'no Greek father before the 9th century comments upon John 8:1-11, whereas Ehrman himself published a WHOLE BOOK in scholarly circles about a 4th CENTURY Greek father, Didymus, whose works were discovered in 1942.

Thus the 'impression' Ehrman gives is not only false, but contradicts his own published works.

Nazaroo

Yes. He should be studied carefully, since he is actively engaged in a propaganda campaign against the Torah and NT, and misleading literally millions of viewers/listeners.

His work is a very uneven mixture of moderate scholarship and outrageous propaganda, which needs to be carefully sorted so that what can be salvaged actually is, without throwing the baby out with the absurd bathwater.

Ehrman has embarked on a path similar to John Allegro, who published a series of fantasy books about the followers of Jesus worshipping 'magic mushrooms'. All that Allegro accomplished by this was the imploding of his own career as a scholar.

The credibility of serious skeptical and conservative scholars is tarnished when supposedly reputable scholars decide to do LSD and 'trip out' for entertainment purposes.

Steven Avery

However, putting aside his rigging and deceptive presentations of evidences (a trick that Bart inherited, he is not the initiator) there is a certain positive part of the Bart Ehrman presentation that is good to mention.

The accepted paradigms of 'modern scientific textual criticism' are in fact those that are only compatible with unbelief in the inspiration of the scripture, while being very compatible with the skeptic and infidel view that scripture (even in those ethereal 'original autographs') is full of errors and confusions. Creating the skeptic's bonanza.

This is true whether those paradigms are given public presentation with a happy face, as by James White or Daniel Wallace, or if the mask drops, as with Bart Ehrman. (One can put his teacher, the late Bruce Metzger, as an idelogical intermediary between Wallace and Ehrman).

Therefore to the thinking and critical and skeptical evangelical Bart Ehrman can truly be a help, perhaps even a godsend.

Since he has taken the modern 'scholarly' and 'seminary' paradigms to their 'logical' and inevitable conclusion .. unbelief.

And evangelical may use that as a spur to truly examine the faults and fallacies and foibles of what passes as textual criticism today....

And truly examine the Bible (and Reformation) premise of tangible, pure and inspired scripture, given from God as His voice and gift to men.

Psalm 12:6-7
The words of the LORD are pure words:
as silver tried in a furnace of earth,
purified seven times.
Thou shalt keep them, O LORD,
thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

spin

You do have a problem with the truth there, Nazaroo. I don't really know enough about Ehrman, though what I do seems to indicate that your opinion is merely bias.

However, you are simply crassly wrong about Allegro's career. John Allegro's career hit a reef when he fell in with the bunch of ditherers and ass-coverers who ran the scrolls business. Whereas he was a scholar who believed in getting the information out -- and hey, nobody's perfect, but the major reason for not publishing is the writer can't get his/her act together --, his colleagues simply couldn't bring themselves to publish because they couldn't do the job. Allegro was the first to publish new materials. His volume came out a decade before anyone else's.

In fact, we own so much to Allegro for giving us our only views of much of the Qumran corpus. He did his job efficaciously and published, earning the ill-will of his fellow workers. He also was a shit-stirrer, so that didn't help matters. He was responsible for giving us a text of the copper scroll many years before the official editor could get his act together. That didn't sit well, because he published someone else's text allocation, but having had the text, being the first to transcribe it, to understand it and to watch the feet dragging of Milik, he also published the copper scroll. This forced Milik to speed up his publication which came out a few years later. Milik hopelessly thought that the copper scroll was a work of fantasy. Thank god for Allegro.

The price that Allegro paid for being a competent serious scholar was to have his career ruined. It was only after this phase in his life that he went for the money that a cult work could earn him. There wasn't much else for a person with his expertise who was denied employment. His career imploded before he went for magic mushroom books. It was imploded for him by people who were less scholarly. Some of these guys didn't publish for twenty or thirty years. What good were they to scholarship? They were a dead loss.

His views on the scrolls were ultimately rather standard. He was an Essene advocate which I think is just plain wrong, but that was the only game in town at the time. He was probably right about the copper scroll. However, the important thing was that he provided us with most of the texts available for twenty years in the history of the mismanagement of the scrolls. Pouring shit on Allegro is tantamount to declaring oneself unthankful for having been done a good turn.


spin

spin

Just a complaint on terminology. There were no "scriptoriums" before medaieval times. There were scribal schools.

What we find at Qumran is a monk who was used to the monastic model projecting his own mores onto an archaeological site for which such terminilogy was inappropriate. In fact, what were called "writing tables" at Qumran were clearly something else. Scribes didn't start using desks for several centuries. They tended to write standing or sitting on the floor. I think it was Metzger who had an article in Revue de Qumran around 1960 on the matter of scribes and tables. The so-called writing tables had shallow dishes across them and did not resemble tables at all. So much so, that later archaeologists attempted to analyse them as benches of a triclinium (Donceel & Donceel-Voute, working from de Vaux's notes).

So, please, drop the scriptorium stuff and stick with scribal schools.


spin

gregor

- Irony meter explodes -