Steven Avery

There are many wonderful Bible versions that have been mightily used of God. The Tyndale and Geneva were excellent translations. The Reina-Valera early editions (perhaps 1909), the Luther Bible and dozens of other versions in a wide variety of languages are excellent. All of those versions would be vastly superior to the junque being used today, basically from two ultra-corrupt manuscripts. Of course the skeptics like corrupt versions with errors, cause for them it is the duckshoot text.

Psalm 18:30
As for God, his way is perfect:
the word of the LORD is tried:
he is a buckler to all those that trust in him.

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

Johnny Skeptic

Message to praxeus: What good is a New Testament canon that the Bible admits in Revelation 22:18-19 can be tampered with? Further evidence is the fact the Roman Catholic New American Bible has books that Protestant versions do not have, so either Roman Catholics have added to the original texts, or Protestants have taken away from the original texts. So much for the New Testament canon, and so much for Biblical inerrancy.

Since "hundreds of millions" of people have died without ever having heard the Gospel message, why was it important that "anyone" ever heard the Gospel message? In addition, the Gospel message has only been around for 2,000 years, in other words, at best for only 1/3 of human history, so how in the world were people supposed to live their lives before that?

ISVfan

But this could not have happened. The Bible was never in just one 'groups' hands. It was never controlled by one church therefore it could not have been standardized. In fact many other historical works or religous documents were at one time in just one sect or groups hands for instance the Koran but the Bible was never controlled by just one group.

ISVfan

No the TR is one of the worst Greek mss of God's Word. There are places in Revelation that have completely made up Greek words. The two Alexandrian texts mentioned Vaticanus (B) and Siniaticus (Aleph) are both good texts. But God preserved His Word through errors. Wow I know that sounds confusing but it makes since. Errors exist in every Greek copy we have but if I take 5 biblical mss: 1.Alexandrian text, 2. Western text,3. Ceserian text, 4. Byzantine text, 5. Coptic text and compare them no two scribes make the same mistake twice so they all disagree a lot but mss #2 deletes a verse but the other 4 contain it. Then the copyist just made an error. #1 is badly damaged can barely be read looks like a phrase is missing #5 also deletes it. But 4,2,3 all contain the reading we know that reading is the correct one. Now of course you realize there's a bit more to it than that for instance it's date, the scribes skill but overall I think that shows how God can and did keep his Word down through the Centuries.

Steven Avery

I agree. There were NT texts in various languages, and geographical regions, and the self-correcting mechanism of "church to church" or "city to city", being able to compare manuscripts and catch errors. This would always catch blatant error, and nip in the bud even smaller error.

The irony was that one important time such backwater tampering and error did occur, in some oddball manuscripts from Egypt, the self-defence mechanism worked excellently for century after century, and then Vaticanus sat unused, uncopied, unreferenced, gathering Roman dust. It took the mechinations of 'modern scientific textual criticism' to make its attempt to get around that, giving us the corrupt modern versions.

God's Word in not fazed by such junque, however and stands majestic :-)

Shalom,
Steven

Johnny Skeptic

Are you saying that the New Testament translations that we have today are not the same as the original New Testament canon? Regardless, Revelation 22:18-19 apply to tampering with the original texts, and by implication any other revisions of the original texts. So, whatever version of the original texts that you pick, including the originals, that is, if copies of the originals still exist, tampering is possible, and in fact has happened many times over the centuries.

ISVfan

No where did you get that from? I was saying in response to your question about the entire text being revised this could not happen. Because the text was never all in the same place to be revised! We have the original New Testament canon today just as it was written 70-90 A.D. We also have the exact same readings and in fact they are without error.


I agree tampering happened. But because of the numerous mss evidence only about 1.5% of the text is really even a concern. Compare that to about 5% of Homers Illiad. So there is only 1.5% percent of the text where there are several readings that we are not sure which was in the original.

Diogenes the Cynic

This is not the claim. The individual books circulated independently of each other for decades and each was subjected to individual redactions and copy errors. No one claims there was a unified conspiracy to "standardize" the books.
Those dates for the composition of the NT Canon are more like 50-150 CE. Could you please provide a source for your extraordinary claim that the current books are all exactly the same as they were written? Which particular manuscripts would you be referring to?
How did you arrive at those numbers for Homer and for the NT? The NT, in particular, is a compilation of several different books, each with its own particuar level of redaction, error and interpolation. Some of them (particularly the Gospels) actually have earlier works embedded within them. Does the tampering of those works count as tampering to you?

Mars Man

If I may jump in here, folks. I did read up on the discussion, and I think I'm pretty sure of the various gists and points brought out.

'Tampering with' being the act, and 'documents which were or/and became part of the accepted 'NT canon' ' being the object, I agree that it is most reasonable to conclude that they were indeed altered in places--to what degree that would be on purpose is of course a matter of debate for the particular sections being looked at.

Yes, I would reason that that warning in the Apocalypse attributed to the apostle John would most reasonably have been for that scroll alone, though drawn from the knowledge that some were at least posed to, if not actually known to have altered various texts in whatever manner. And from what I have learned, it would be quite fair to understand that there quite a number of documents floating around within and between Christian communities from the later first century onward, and that warning could have been applicable to those as well, in the author's mind.

Julian

Read your post that I quote here. It was 121 words. I removed two of them. Notice how the entire first paragraph has entirely new meaning now. I changed only 1.6% of your post yet managed to reverese your points.

Why did I do this?

To illustrate that the tired old argument that only a small portion of the bible was changed is ineffectual. It is not the amount that has been changed that matters but the words themselves. You will have to do much better to produce a cogent argument that the gospel that we have today doesn't just represent an Egyptian amalgam approaching a local archetype but actually a middle eastern original.

Julian