mens_sana

Personnally, I've always enjoyed accounts of the Robber Synod of Ephesus.

jab

Say what? come again? This answers this issue how?

Extraordinary claims have been and are still being made for the inerrancy and textual accuracy of the Bible, and for its authority as the only unquestionable, divinely ordained and infallible guide for a human to being to live by and understand her or his life. Other ancient texts have not recently or ever had the same claims of authority made for them. Thus, understanding that their present text may not be the real unblemished original thing has quite different and much more modest consequences for an afficianado of any particular ancient text than understanding that the Bible's present text may not be the real unblemished original thing has for a devout Catholic or fundamentalist Christian. There is a tremendous ontological difference between saying "this passage may not have been composed by Aristotle but by some later human being" and "this passage may not have been dictated by God to Paul, but may have been composed by some later human being".

jab

Solitary Man: non sequitur; red herring; and a falsehood covered with a rhetorical question ("Who Cares?")
the falsehood: the current Pres of the US is a a Christian Believer and a self-identified fundamentalist one, and all the serious candidates for the office of US President this year had to make a show of their Christian belief. While the US may be on its way to losing its status as the most powerful nation in the world, thanks to the Believer in Chief's wide-ranging failures, it is still very powerful.

Roger Pearse

I have addressed this repeatedly, and I refer you to my posts.

The question of how important a text might be to you or I in some remote region of the USA in the early 21st century matters nothing to the simple question of whether we have the text -- any text -- used in antiquity or not.

It's like suggesting that because the bible is considered inspired *today*, it must always have been printed in some special way, on some special paper, and if it isn't that proves that it is not inspired. But in fact the bible is printed in the same way as every other book; likewise it is transmitted like every other book.

Demanding different standards for things we would prefer not to believe is normally called prejudice, however.

The question, quite apart from what the text *says* or *means* is the rather simpler one; do we have the text.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

jab

Disingenuousness, aided by using two rhetorical questions instead of putting out forthright propositions.
"Those kind of people" are infuriated by "arguments from manuscripts"; such arguments, including inconsitencies between various canonical books of the bible and between the Bible and the historical record, have weaned many a one away from fundamentalism and even from theism. For an historical example, you might go back and read the life of George Eliot. She did not end up dismissing the Bible, but showed that we should read it as critically and yet as sensitively as any other text.

jab

!. "The question of how important a text might be to you or I in some remote region of the USA in the early 21st century matters nothing to the simple question of whether we have the text -- any text -- used in antiquity or not."
You appear to misunderstand me: What I was saying is the question of whether we have the text of an allegedly inerrant work used in antiquity does matter as to how important that text should be to any reader anywhere in the 21st century.

2. "Demanding different standards for things we would prefer not to believe is normally called prejudice, however. " If I understand what you are saying here: I was not demanding different standards; I was pointing out an ontological reality that occurs for believers who do indeed approach a certain text with different standards than other texts. As a scholar (of much more recent texts than those you work with), I try not to demand diffeent textual standards of different texts. However, one thing one has to do if one is a serious scholar of meaning as well as form, is take the standards a text claims for itself seriously and attempt to determine whether the text does indeed live up to those standards. Thus when it comes to a text's meaning and function in the world, standards may legitimately differ; not to acknowledge and respect that difference may result from ignorance, even from prejudice. E. g. from areas of my scholarship, critics expecting a comedy to adhere to the standards of a tragedy; critics expecting a satire to adhere to the standards of decorum appropriate to a children's fable and proof appropriate to a philosophical dialogue. So, if a text sets a standard of its being the inerrant word of God, textual questions of variants, and reliability of transmission can come into play in some ways they don't for works that set quite different standards, even for works that set the standard of being historically accurate.

3. "The question, quite apart from what the text *says* or *means* is the rather simpler one; do we have the text." Yes, though see my earlier answers to 1. & 2. From a perspective of literary studies, following New Criticism, Reader Response, The Death of the Author, and Deconstuctionism (which I am vary of), an equally relevant question to begin with is "Do we have a text?" It was this perspective, I think, from which an earlier poster was addressing the issue of performing a classical Greek play.

andrewcriddle

How far is being the inerrant word of God something that the Biblical text actually claims for itself ?

I can't help feeling that you are blurring the line between the Biblical text itself and the claims made about it.

Andrew Criddle

mens_sana

I agree. A historical/textual study of any text allows for no special status. And special status is what is claimed by Christian conservatives. Any time this type of argument is brought into play, I immediately assume that there is unshucked Christian baggage, a Fundamentalist interpretation, that is (dis)coloring the presentation. :frown:

Roger Pearse

No, they cannot. This is to confuse chalk and cheese.

All the best,

Roger Pearse