Amlodhi

Hi judge,

There are several that are of particular interest to me because they reflect a dichotomy between the adoptionist view and the pre-existent Christ view. Also, some that reflect a similar dichotomy between Jesus as separate from God and Jesus as God.

I will pull up my references and try to post those on here tomorrow. As for tonight, I'm planning to go slip into a coma.

As always,

Amlodhi

Amlodhi

Hi judge,

Sorry it took me so long to get around to this. If you're still lurking around, here are some of those doctrinally motivated corruptions that I mentioned were interesting to me.

Jesus' mother finds him in the temple:

Luke 2:48 ". . . Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing." (KJV)

One important Greek witness ('C'vid, Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus), and two Old Latin mss. ('e', palatinus & Carinthianus) read:

"Your relatives and I . . ."

Also, a number of witnesses, including Old Latin and Syriac (a, b, ff, g, I, r, syrc) read:

"We . . ."


In Luke 2:43 ". . . his (Jesus') parents . . ."

A wide range of other Greek and versional witnesses (and the KJV) read, ". . . Joseph and his mother . . ."


John 1:13 "Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." (KJV)

Tertullian apparently knew of at least one copy in which, instead of the plural verb "were", the singular "was" was used here. Thereby changing the sense of the verse to refer to Christ's supernatural birth rather than the nature of Christian conversion. Tertullian accuses the Valentinians of tampering with the text and also cites the singular form. (de carne Christi, 19 & 24).

Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. III, 16,2 ; 19,2) and the orthodox forgery, the Epistula Apostolorum also cite the verse in the singular as support for the pre-existence and miraculous birth of Jesus.

And yet, out of every known Greek manuscript and all the versional evidence, the one solitary attestation to the singular reading is in the Old Latin manuscript 'b' (Veronensis).

Thus, rather than being a "heretical" alteration by the Valentinians, it appears more likely that it was one of the attempted orthodox corruptions that never made it into the TR.


Luke 9:35 (at the transfiguration), "This is my beloved Son; hear him." (KJV)

Most of the earliest and superior witnesses (p 45, p75, Sinaiticus, B, L, 892, 1241, etc.) and AV, NASB, NIV, read "this is my chosen Son", or "my Son, my chosen one".

Luke 3:22 (at the baptism), "Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased." (KJV)

Virtually all of the earliest witnesses read, "Thou art my beloved Son; today I have begotten you."


John 1:34 "And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God." (KJV)

A range of early and significant manuscripts (p5, Sinaiticus, 77, 218, b, e, ff, syr) read, ". . . that this is the elect of God" or ". . . that this is God's chosen one."

References:

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford Univ. Press, N.Y./Oxford, 1993.

The Text of the New Testament, Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, William B. Eerdmans pub., Grand Rapids Mich. 1995.

Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek, B.F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort, Hendrickson pub., Peabody Mass., 1988.

The Scofield Reference Bible, Rev. C.I. Scofield, D.D., Oxford University Press, N.Y.

The Comparative Study Bible, the Lockman Foundation, Zondervan pub., Grand Rapids Mich., 1999.

The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Alexander Roberts, D.D. & James Donaldson, LL.D., 10 vol., Hendrickson pub., Peabody Mass., 1994.


These are just a sampling of the type of corruptions I'm referring to. Also, while these all relate to a dichotomy between an adoptionist and the "orthodox" view, other examples appear to indicate a similar type of dichotomy between other so-called "heretical" views and the presumed "orthodoxy".

IMO, the examples above (along with the many others extant), seem to bear strong witness that an original concept, that Jesus (as man), either at baptism or crucifixion, was "chosen" as Messiah, was eventually extrapolated into the later "orthodoxy" of pre-existence and miraculous transubstantiation.


Again, sorry this took so long to get posted, judge. If you are still lurking around, I will be interested in your comments.

Amlodhi

long winded fool

True. So we do have a precedent for additions to the text. But since these additions were excluded as older manuscripts were translated and the addition was found to be apocryphal, this means that modern Bibles are more accurate than older Bibles. This shows that any alterations made by the Catholic church do not survive in Bibles today, even in the ones produced by the Catholic church. (This alteration doesn't appear in the NAB)

What I'm saying is that the oldest manuscripts are the most reliable, and those are the ones that are used to translate today's Bibles. When there are variants, the oldest variant is the least likely to have been altered. Most manuscripts are far older than the 16th century, therefore any alterations made beyond the earliest date we have for a manuscript no longer exist in most Bibles.

Why? They aren't mutually exclusive. Do you disagree that most Bibles are not translated from the last version available, or that older manuscripts are more reliable than newer ones?

I'm not claiming that the Bible is inerrant. I claim simply that the Bible is closer to the original text than any other manuscript we have from the time. The Bible is essentially more accurate (even if it's not completely accurate) than the Illiad and the Oddessy. When these discrepancies are used to discredit the validity of the Bible, one must be far more skeptical of Homer, Plato, and even Shakespeare. If we seperate our personal agendas and biases and look at things from a critical viewpoint, the Bible is a more trustworthy document (as far as an accurate representation of books written almost 2,000 years ago) than any other.

That said, it doesn't mean that today's Bible is a perfect representation of the books it contains. Your arguments refute the notion of word for word inerrancy of scripture in terms of historical accuracy. I do not argue this. I was responding to the OP:

There is no doubt that the early catholic church chose which books to include in the Bible, and I concede that there is evidence of historical alteration of the text. What I dispute is that an 'abridged' version is what we read today. These alterations cannot be said to have survived, because when manuscripts vary, the oldest version is always the version used to translate the book in most Bibles. This doesn't mean that older manuscripts won't be found in the future that dispute what we read today, but this is true of any historical text. While obviously both discrepancies and alterations exist in the history of Bible translation, today's Bible is closest to the original individual books contained therein. It is closer to the original even than today's translations of Homer and Plato.

Of all the imperfect greek and hebrew documents written millenia ago, the Bible is the least imperfect.

Vorkosigan

LWF, first, there are literally thousands of texts, original ones, written by the original hand, that exist from that time. These range from inscriptions in rock, to diaries in the hand of their own pulled from tombs in China, to grocery lists pulled out of scrap heaps in Egypt.

Clearly incorrect; as a I said above, there are numerous texts that are far more accurate. Additionally, almost a fifth of vocabulary of the Old Testament (~1,500 words) is unknown; it consists of words that occur only once and for which the context is useless in helping determine the meaning. There are many similar instances in the New Testament as well. Carrier has an article on it here; read the second half.

"I have examined a mere two of nineteen problems, in 1 Timothy alone, a book that takes up less than four pages of English in the New American Standard Bible. There are one thousand, four hundred and thirty eight significant deviations (again excluding spelling errors; Barbara Aland, et al, The Greek New Testament, 4th rev. ed., United Bible Societies, 1994, p. 2) in the whole of the Greek New Testament. Of those, I estimate almost a third, like the problem in 4:10, cannot be resolved with any certainty, even after the full exertion of critical scholarship and paleography."

Vorkosigan

Amlodhi

Hi lwf,

As I said from the beginning, this depends on how you are defining the "catholic" church and where in time you place its origins. If you are talking about the capital "C" Roman Catholic church after about the 4th or 5th century A.D., then I have no major problems with your statement.

If, instead, you are talking about the emerging dominant "orthodoxy", i.e. the "catholic" (in the sense of universal) church of the first two or three centuries A.D., then I have several problems with your statement.

And it is in the second sense described above that I have been responding to you based on your first post to me in this thread; in which you stated:

And the italicized portion of your statement above has been shown to be patently false.

So we need to remain strictly aware of this distinction and put this Catholic issue to rest:

> I agree that the Catholic church from c. 400 A.D. onward has likely made no changes to the text that we are currently unaware of.

> I do not agree that no alterations were made. And I do not agree that our modern bibles are a credible reconstruction of alleged "autographs".

So if, from here, you should decide that you want to debate the textual issue further, either on this thread or another, I would prefer to leave the term "Catholic" out of it entirely and concentrate solely on the issues of textual criticism and comparative manuscripts.

Fair enough?

Amlodhi

long winded fool

And the ones that were chosen to appear in the Bible have been under the most heavy scrutiny for centuries, are corroborated by numerous other sources, appear many more times throughout history than any other texts, and are therefore the most likely to be accurate of any of those other texts. This proves nothing, but it calls into question claims of glaring errors and omissions in the Bible when the truth is that the works of Plato are far more "altered, jumbled, and incoherent" than the text in the Bible. It may not be perfect, but it is less imperfect than any other ancient text simply because it has been under the most historical study and research by far of any other text. If you have to trust a transcription of parchment written millenia ago, the Bible should logically be at the top of your list, as it is without a doubt the least likely to contain massive alterations and questionable sources. And when errors and alterations are discovered, it is the most likely to be quickly reissued without them. In other words, the book is not only heavily researched, it is open to the most rapid correction of any other book as additional evidence becomes known.

Conspiracy theories (and I'm not necessarily claiming that these are the theories of anyone here) work because they throw out the overwhelming evidence and concentrate solely on small instances of very hard to uncover but undeniably contradictory evidence. Contradictory evidence exists everywhere. Read enough literature on the subject and you're likely to believe that we've never visited the moon. Religious conspiracy theories are that much more convincing because the people who subscribe to them often have an emotional interest in discrediting religion. It's important to remember that "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit" is not a scientific mindset in the face of overwhelming external evidence. Good scientists are not lawyers. There is nothing at all wrong with pursuing alternate theories, but it is very easy to go from being a reputable scientist to a fringe "nut-job" when you happen to forget that all that evidence you discarded in the pursuit of your own alternate theory still exists. If we just look at the evidence you collected, we may well be convinced: (I once entertained the idea of a face on Mars, thanks to Rick Hoagland,) But if we look at all the evidence, the theory comes into perspective as what it actually is: A well researched story that would make a good plot for a novel.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Your logic doesn't add up.

Simply because something is heavily scrutinised, this doesn't mean that it's true to the original. Because those who scrutinised these texts didn't have the originals...

They scrutinised these texts mostly just to make sure they are uniform.

Not at all... Nobody tried to alter the texts of Plato because they didn't like their theology. OTOH many biblical passages had been altered deliberately because of theological concerns.

Yours,

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hi, lwf,

I think you got it exactly backwards!

As someone who studied textual criticism for a long time, I'm sure that Bibles today (I mean the NT here) are _far less_ trustworthy than the Bibles 150 years ago.

All modern versions of the NT are based on Westcott & Hort Greek text. But, as I've argued extensively in the past, this 19c text was in fact an UNQUALIFIED DISASTER.

For every passage they improved, they've made 10 worse!

See this, for example,

Westcott & Hort fraud
http://www.trends.ca/~yuku/bbl/whfraud.htm

Yes, they claimed to base their "new improved version" on the oldest sources available. But this, in itself, means absolutely nothing. Because it's one of the basic rules of textual criticism in regard to manuscripts that "recentiores non deteriores", i.e. "the more recent is not the more inferior".

So the whole of modern textual criticism seems to be based on this elementary fallacy of taking the earlier texts to be automatically more reliable.

What I'm saying is that in fact the KJV is still far superior to anything the modern textual critics have come up with!

Sounds paradoxical, but I'm really serious when I say this. (I'm not saying this because of my religious beliefs. In fact, I'm mostly an agnostic.)

Also, you wrote:

>>And I'm looking for that "Jewish" New Testament. I'll let you know the title and author when I find it.<<

I don't think you'll find it, because it doesn't exist...

Regards,

Yur

long winded fool

This is true. I don't claim it's true to the original. I claim that it is as true as it can possibly be to the original at this time, as it is translated as accurately as possible from texts as close to the originals as possible. Alterations occuring after the oldest texts unearthed are not relevant.

Nonsense. The Bible is scrutinized by many secular historians for accuracy with the original texts. Today's Bible is not a vehicle for a living person's theology, it is as accurate a representation of ancient theology as any text from the time can be. We can debate the ancient theology, but I find it very difficult to believe that the text from where we get our understanding of this theology is any different than the theology it was originally intended to convey. Differing interpretations, fuzzy translations, or missing passage here or there do not connote an altered, abridged Bible designed to further catholic agenda. And if we refer to any ancient christians as catholics, then this is like saying the Koran is meant to further Islamic agenda. Isn't this assumed? And the fact that the Bible furthers christian agenda in no way indicates that it must be abridged and contains different information than was originally intended by the authors of the books. Again, it's a reasonable theory, it's just not supported by any convincing evidence, since any other text in an ancient language from the same time period would have similar discrepancies, and probably alot more.

But unless those few actual alterations occured before the oldest manuscripts we have, they are irrelevant because they are no longer present. The fact that people have, in the past, tried to alter the Bible is not relevant to today's Bible. Anyone can learn Greek and Hebrew and check the accuracy of the Bible for themselves. There is no room for conspiracies or secret agendas here. The Bible we have today is as accurate as it can possibly be with the evidence available.

long winded fool

This makes perfect sense, however it is only arrived at post hoc. You cannot use this rule of thumb to discount the oldest texts until you find a text that is older and different than the newer one. It's a catch 22 that simply reminds us not to put too much faith in one version. I fully accept the possibility that newer texts may be superior to older ones, but first I have to find an even older one that matches the newest one more closely than the older text. This axiom merely shows that today's Bibles may be more accurate than the Bibles of the middle ages.

A better phrasing as far as historical study goes is: "the more recent is not necessarily the more inferior," because most of the time the more recent is the more inferior when it comes to documents. The game of telephone is the perfect example of this axiom. While it is possible for the second to last kid to get the message right and the second kid to get it wrong, this is highly unlikely. If you have a tape recording of each kid's whispered message, the closer you get to the first kid, the better your chances of getting the right message, even with the catch 22 of recentiores non deteriores.