JoeWallack

JW:
I wasn't planning on posting anything here because it all belongs in the related "The Price Is Wrong Thread" but I just love the Irony that a thread which indicates it was started by Peter Kirby won't actually have anything in it posted by Peter Kirby.

Okay, this thread will be dedicated to considering potential errors in "Acts", with the objective of evaluating the significance of these errors to "Acts" supposed historicity. This thread is necessary because in Price's related article he has concluded that Acts is accurate even if it is not accurate and errancy can be evaluated without evaluating errancy.

Regrettably both Peter Kirby and Vinnie have communicated to me that they will not be posting here. Vinnie has received several death threats because of his disrespectful "Was Jesus Gay" article so he is changing it to "Was Jesus Bi-Sectual?". Peter is busy changing all 1001 of his Avatar mottos from "Always Learning" to "Always Learning (Except from JoeWallack)". Just as well though. Until relatively recently both believed that god sacrificed himself to himself, thereby conquering death by dying and putting an end to a Law which was Eternal.

Fortunately, for the rest of us, someone has already itemized a list of all potential errors in Acts no matter how small, trivial or likely to give Snobbish Skeptics Strokes:

http://hometown.aol.com/thenewporphy...eindex102.html

Now, where to begin, hmmm...how about the beginning?:

#666

"Acts" has no intermission, popcorn or Guides wearing funny hats. Just kidding (it does have Guides wearing funny hats).

# 648

"Acts 1: (KJV)

2 “Until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen:�

No “the� before “holy spirit� in the Greek."


JW:
Okay, just the Type of error that offended Peter and Vinnie. Let me just say that in my opinion this is more than just a trivial error. Christian English translators are adding "the" to try and strengthen the appearance of (the) spirit holy as a Separate Entity. Darby normally puts something like this in parenthesis (God bless them). Brown explains that this is exactly the Type of thing KJV does in his "The Birth Of The Messiah" which misleads the English reader. This goes straight to the issue of the credibility of the Church. If English translators are playing this game what does that say about the Latin translators and the Greek translators and the Church as a whole? The Christian Bible is much more than whatever was originally written (which obviously we don't have anyway). It consists of selecting original writings, copying, editing, translating, presenting and God knows what else. Just like nicotine is harmless when it is left alone to grow wild so too would the original "Acts" have been harmless until someone cultivated it, put it in an attractive package, marketed it, been motivated by Prophets, and telling people that consuming it in large doses was good for your Physical/Spiritual health. But in order to minimize subsequent whining let's move forward to a more substantial potential error:

# 649

"Acts 1: (KJV)

4 “And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me.�

Compare to Mark 16: KJV)

7 “But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.�

“Luke’s� Jesus tells his crew to tarry in Jerusalem. “Mark’s� Jesus’ crew is told to go to Galilee for further instruction.


JW:
For a book that primarily claims to be a link between Jesus and the subsequent Church it gets off to a bad start. "Acts" implies that the disciples were instructed to wait in Jerusalem after Jesus died. "Mark", a primary source for the author of "Acts", indicates that the disciples were instructed to go straight to Galilee after Jesus died. So "Acts" appears to significantly contradict a primary source of "Acts". How does that affect its supposed historicity? Will Price ever deal with questions like this or will he first write another article claiming that "Revelation" is historical?

As Vinnie's Gay Jesus would say Price, "Deal with it."



Joseph

ACKNOWLEDGE, v.t.
To confess. Acknowledgement of another's faults is the highest duty imposed by our love of truth.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Error...?yguid=68161660

http://hometown.aol.com/abdulreis/myhomepage/index.html

Toto

JW - could you check the abdulreis webpage? It is missing some links to later pages, and I could only get up to error # 737, referring to Acts 17. I think there are more errors than that in Acts.

And it really needs a comprehensive index page.

I suspect that Peter Kirby was more put out by the technical ineptitude of the web work than your theology.

PS - you can't copy and paste one of the shortened links that vBB creates.

Vinnie

Vinnie's gay Jesus article was a spoof of modern scholarship...

Dean Anderson

There is a delicious irony in the fact that these two adjacent "contradictions" contradict each other (as can be seen from the bolded portions).

So does "πνευματος αγιου" (used in both verses) mean "Spirit" or "Holy Spirit" then? The commentary for verse 3 says that there is no "holy", but the commentary for verse 5 says it is "spirit holy".

JoeWallack

JW:
My prayers have been answered. First of all, let me to say to anyone who may become suspicious at how this comes out that I don't know Pervy and I have never worked with him before. That being said the only rule I follow here is never to argue with moderators.

Rather than just blurt out the answer though let's give Pervy some clues so he can try and solve the delicious irony of this potential error in 1001 Errors:

1) My translation above is KJV (always the best clue).

2) The Blue Letter Bible shows the Greek based on the KJV!

3) Here is the NIV translation:

Acts 6:3 (New International Version)
New International Version (NIV)
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society

3 "Brothers, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them"


JW:
Now why would NIV translate "spirit" if the underlying Greek is "holy spirit"? Please, no help from Peter or Vinnie. Bede, Pearse, jump right in.



Joseph

Vinnie's Gay Jesus. Person. The fleshy part of the trinity.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Errors...yguid=68161660

http://hometown.aol.com/abdulreis/myhomepage/index.html

Dean Anderson

Fair enough. Some English translations say "Holy Spirit" (or even "Holy Ghost") and some say merely "Spirit". It tends to depend on whether they are taken from the Textus Receptus or the more "Alexandrian" Westcott-Hort text.

The oldest English translation I can find is the beautiful Wycliffe translation - which is older than either the 1550 Stephanos TR or the 1881 Westcott-Hort text. That one is taken from the Latin Vulgate and uses "Holy Ghost" (well, it actually uses "Hooli Goost" - you've got to love that 14th century spelling!)

That's nice for you. What does the "Blue Letter Bible" have to do with anything?

Because the NIV is primarily taken from the Westcott-Hort text which misses out the word "αγιου".

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether in this particular pair of verses (and note that we are here talking specifically about the accuracy of this particular pair of verses - not making sweeping general statements about the TR vs the W&H text), the W&H text or the TR is more likely to be accurate to what was written by the author of the passage.

Normal textual criticism issues would tend to indicate that the "simpler" of the two is more accurate - but in this case we are not talking about a story having details added and being exaggerated over time. We are talking about a difference of a single word.

It is reasonably easy for a scribe to accidentally add a word that he thinks should be in the manuscript he is copying but which he does not find.

However, it is far easier for a scribe to accidentally skip a word whilst copying.

This does not particularly narrow down which version is more accurate in this case, but looking at the context of the passage, it is obvious that the two verses (verses 3 and 5) are referring to the same thing. Verse 3 says to find a person "full of the [Holy] Spirit", and verse 5 says that Stephen was found and was "full of the Holy Spirit".

Since verse 5 is obviously a mirror of verse 3, indicating that Stephen is exactly the sort of person that verse 3 is talking about, the context leads us to think that both verses should have the same wording.

Therefore, in this particular case, the TR probably has it right (since it has the same wording in both verses) and the W&H probably has a skipped word.

andrewcriddle

IMO the argument works the other way. The fact that one would expect the same usage in verses 3 and 5 would make scribal harmonisation very likely.

In general a difference in phraseology between two adjacent passages is an indication that this is probably the original reading before later harmonising copyists got to work.

Andrew Criddle

Dean Anderson

I think that argument would be stronger if the passages were less closely related.

If passage A mentions 'X', and passage B mentions something close to 'X', then a harmonising scribe is indeed likely to assume that they are talking about the same thing and 'correct' one or the other as you say.

However, here we are looking at two sentences within the same passage where the second sentence is a clear answer to the first.

The first has the Twelve saying "You need seven people with quality 'X'", and the second - the sentence immediately after the statement - says that the people thought the statement was a good idea and that they chose Stephen because he had quality 'X'.

These sentences are so close together in context - with the second directly following, addressing and answering the first - that unless there is a clear indication that one of them is a later interpolation, I do not see how anyone could reasonably conclude that they were originally talking about different things but were "harmonised" to make them the same.

It seems far more likely to me that they were originally the same and that a word was later skipped during copying.

Note that I am not ruling out the possibility of the word being added to harmonise the sentences - indeed, I mentioned it in my previous post - I merely think that given the context it is far less likely to have happened than for a word to have been accidentally skipped.

Chris Weimer

Might I add that trying to navigate through that is horrible, and I couldn't even find 1001 errors, the last time I checked. However, when you have pneuma hagion and it's translated as the Holy Ghost more than one time, it's still only one error. It's one error repeated many times, yet only one error. Moreover, it isn't even an error since the gospels often left out definite articles where one should have been, a key characteristic of Biblical Koine.

I do want to say though that for all its faults, there is some good in the site, and has pointed out to me many of the more minor features that I would have otherwised missed. I just wish the person who made the site would dedicate a little more energy to it so it isn't so much of a hell-hole.

Toto

JP Holding dignifies the 1001 Errors in the Christian Bible site by attacking it here