Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Spin acknowledges he has zero, so he does the "INTERNET POSTING DEFENSE". Post a lot of nothing to mask the issue, do not either support or retract the assertion, run, hide, jump.

The reason spin will not retract his memory is simple, the retraction would be in itself a demonstration that the W-H methodology was Vaticanus-Sinaiticus über alles. spin will post paragraph after paragraph of confusion just to avoid trying to come to grips with the basics.

spin would rather bluster and makes lists of nothing rather than say something simple like:

"that is an interesting question why I have that memory.. I'll look at some verses and notes and get back to you with at least a couple of examples in a day or two .. or I will acknowledge that I misunderstood the Westcott-Hort methodology and thank you for pointing out the common error .. let us reason together"

Shalom,
Steven Avery

bacht

I haven't attended church in decades, but I took it very seriously at the time.

Please tell me you're not arguing from popularity. If millions of people use Ouija boards should that induce me to try it? Would any technician or scientist work with a four hundred year-old textbook?

You should stick with your arguments about the underlying Greek text. As you said there are modern translations using this. The KJV is a marvellous relic of bygone days but about as useful as a horseshoe.

Toto

A post from avi (no 26) has been moved to this thread per his request.

I have renamed the thread to refer to Wescott and Horst. The real purpose of this split was to keep Joe Wallach's thread on topic.

And - could I ask the participants to tone down the personal comments?

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Popularity is not the issue, although there is a providential hand in how the Holy English Bible was brought worldwide and English became the lingua franca.

The translation excellence and the language skills of the Oxford and Cambridge and Westminster committee scholars and the underlying text purity are two complementary issues, and I agree that the Greek text comes first. Translation and language excellence on an inferior and corrupt text availeth us nothing.

Thus I agree that on this forum, as long or short as my posting is allowed, the underlying Greek text is far more significant. However when the King James Bible English excellence is dissed, I will say a few words. If you want more words, the best place is the forums where those issues (e.g. King James Bible and NKJV and modern versions) are standard fare discussion.

Here it would simply be a diversion from the far more consequent issue, the attempt of the skeptic and unbeliever to foist the W-H corruptions upon the believer, which then gives the skeptic a duck-shoot target for the version errors. That in a nutshell is the irony and the issue.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

bacht

Well this skeptic doesn't really care about the verion errors since they're all saying basically the same thing: that there is a God, that he gave his Law to the Jews, and then he offered his own son as a means to supercede the Law and guarantee immortality for all mankind. I don't need to know whether Cephas was different than Peter or whatever.

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Ironically, the Erasmus quote here is about the Latin Vulgate corruptions, defending his usage of Greek line readings to help bring forth an accurate Bible.

A tuff question. Probably Erasmus would have taken a stance somewhere between Scrivener and Burgon, after he stopped laughing.

A fine question. Westcott/Hort make no pretensions of knowing the original Greek, Hort going so far as to posit poetically about "primitive corruptions" with no manuscript support whatsoever. Erasmus used a lot of common sense and textual analysis, the reformation Bible scholars were textual giants whose faith and understanding were connected. My acceptance of their work is a combination of analysis and believing their work had providential guidance.

Which would never be accepted even if it were in front of our nose.

Before I answer, please indicate precisely what you are calling a "faulty Greek copy" and your basis for that view. Thanks.

The Dean John Burgon analysis has never been countered, and spelled this out in depth and specifics. The only difference is that today the corrupt text is more visible! Anyone who had read and appreciated Dean Burgon had this settled long ago. (I remembering when I was first studying this and asked James White when he was here in Bayside for his explanation for the many correctors and the corruptions.) In fact, this was one of the critical elements in my discarding the NIV and NAS a decade or two ago.

A very strange statement. Are you claiming the hundreds of cursives all have similar scribal blunders ? Or even old uncials like Alexandrinus ? What is your reason for "not disputing" a falsehood ?

You do realize the distinction between a scribal corruption and a textual corruption ? Look at the analysis of Dean Burgon on Codex Bezae where he discusses how that manuscript is 'rich' in both (placed on the ending of Mark thread today). Scribal corruption is individual to a manuscript and is often easy to gauge, because it manifests in a large group of well-known type errors. Once you understand the distinction, then you can understand how a scribal blunder can get into the textline and become a textual corruption in some later manuscripts.

I think what you mean by "we don't know anything" is that nothing can be conclusively proven to those who do not look at the Bible as a book from God. That almost goes without saying.

John 14:28 I will try to address when I have some extra time available. I realize it is an important variant for you, at least as a "test case".

Even if an authentic 55 AD full Gospel of John was produced, much closer to when it was actually written, that would prove nothing to anybody who took the no-pure-NT approach. Mostly they would simply say the dating was wrong, it was another Gospel, it was a redacted copy, it was a forgery, yada yada. Their "proof" would include how different it was from the alexandrian manuscript texts, since those are "early and reliable".

Shalom,
Steven Avery

spin

Having said nothing of any apparent substance Steven Avery rests his case about naughty Horty on it.


spin

avi

No, I mean that proof of anything depends upon presentation of convincing evidence, of which we possess none. I don't look at "the" Bible as a supposed book from God, anymore than you look at the Bhagavad Gita (="Song of God") as a "book from God". What does "the" Bible mean? KJV???
Would the Catholics agree with that? What about the "orthodox", eastern branches of Christianity? I think one needs to tread lightly when using the word "THE" in front of "bible". Too many flavors, too many sects, too many people convinced that their particular flavor is the ONLY correct version.

But, dear friend, of course he was talking about the vulgar Vulgate version, but I was referring to your comment about exploiting coptic and syriac and latin copies. Further, I believe that Erasmus would not agree with you, in condemning Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. On the contrary, I believe, absent evidence of course, just a belief, not a fact, that Erasmus would have used either Vaticanus, or Sinaiticus with pleasure, had either of them been available to him....I think his main contribution was to the idea that one search the ORIGINAL Greek documents, to discover "the" Bible, instead of relying upon Latin, in this case, versions. Erasmus would have offered the same argument, I suspect, against those who would rely upon Syriac copies of unknown, non-extant Greek texts.

Gosh. Do you believe that Dao De Jing had providential guidance? What about the Quran? (did God pull the Goat away before the entire document was eaten?) It is nonsensical to say that a spirit, non human life form created these human texts, with all their confabulations, errors, mistakes, conundra, and contradictions. Please look up the word "anthropomorphism" in the dictionary....

hmm. The evidence does not support your defeatist attitude: The dead sea scrolls confirm many aspects of the text of the septuagint... In my opinion, the central problem which is unique to Christianity, among the big religions, is that it does not have any authentic, complete documents representing the new testament, prior to the fourth century.... Dao De Jing, for example, has silk documents written 2000 years ago....There are also ivory engravings with all or most of Dao De Jing from the same era, i.e. about 500 years after the text was elaborated by Lao Zi.--> Yup, they also don't have original docs from 2400 years ago...

I consider every copy faulty, as did Erasmus. The errors in some cases were simply due to fatigue, or carelessness, or incompetence. In other cases, rather more malevolent, the fault was intentional. Incidently, such a problem with fraud, forgery and the like, exists even today. It is not a problem unique to the Palestinian region of 2000 years ago.
To answer your question then, I have no doubt that one or more of the Greek sources employed by Erasmus was as distorted, vis a vis the original text, though written in Greek, as any of our current extant versions. I have no doubt at all that some, or perhaps even all, of the sources copied from Greek into Syriac, or Coptic, or Latin, were themselves duplicates which had been altered from the original. I guess folks living today have trouble understanding what kind of effort was required back then, to make a copy of something.....

Thank you. Yes, it is far more important to me, than everything else in this too long post....For me, finding a suitable, simple phrase, of religious significance, with a clear delineation of the distinction between different "original" Greek manuscripts, should be the goal of anyone on this forum who seeks to learn "the truth".

Somewhere, back in time, someone wrote

oti o pater meizon mou estin

and someone else wrote

oti o pater mou meizon mou estin

So, I want to know, which version was composed by the original author(s) of John? Why was the second version invented? Why did someone feel compelled to change the original? What was the theological argument that led to the change in the text? How can Christians claim that "the" Bible represents a work of God, when there are two contradictory versions of something as utterly simple as this, a single word excision, or inclusion? Obviously, God is not confused about this, why are we (unless, of course, the text was created, not by God, but by ordinary mortal humans)?

Erasmus, alas, cannot help us here. Our problem is with two different Greek versions, not with a faulty Latin copy. Alas, we do not know, or, at least, I don't know, which version represents the "original". In my opinion, discovering that simple truth, would contribute to analyzing the validity, or lack thereof, in Westcott-Hort.

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

The case that was rested, closed was very simple.

spin made a claim that he cannot support on the fundamental question of the W-H methodology, that it was eclectic.

spin admitted the claim is a ZERO ! from a MEMORY ! From over a DECADE AGO !

spin keeps the claim on the table, refusing to find even ONE example verse that would demonstrate his position, not even ONE ! (there should be 100 or more to find easy if this was the case.)

spin can however wax poetic about vampire blood when he wants to avoid the issue.

The case that is closed is simple. There is no point discussing the issue with spin when the spin "scholarship" is on that level.

Spin won't even have the scholarship gumption and consistency to say:

"that is an interesting question why I have that memory.. I'll look at some verses and notes and get back to you with at least a couple of examples in a day or two .. or I will acknowledge that I misunderstood the Westcott-Hort methodology and thank you for pointing out the common error .. let us reason together"

Here is one of the more humorous spin assertions in this fiasco.



And a couple of additional classic attempts to get around his own assertion.

This last one was beautiful. A defacto acknowledgment that his original claim was nonsense. Goes together with this next one, a sickly attempt to justify the Vaticanus-Sinaticus textual dictatorship.

Let's not forget runaround spin when trying to discuss early church writers from way before the alexandrian manuscripts. I pointed out Cyprian and Irenaeus on Acts 8:37 (and lots of other verses and references could be given).

Followed by the funny attempt to handwave the two powerful and clear citations that would be given in any decent apparatus. And then even worse, spin claims he has somehow demonstrated that Ireneaus and Cyprian were not relating Acts 8:37, by ending with the spin classic !

At one point spin was almost ready to see if his claim made any sense.

In this next one spin even got closer, however he seemed to realize that there was no taking of any reading over Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in the western non-interps (like the infamous Jesus angry in Mark 1:41) so spin tried another even stranger tack. Watch !

???? Amazing. Now spin has redefined ECLECTIC as occasionally preferring the Sinaiticus alexandrian corruption over the Vaticanus alexandrian manuscript, depending on the ultra-corrupt Bezae (see the ending of Mark thread for more on Codex Bezae). Has anybody ever been quite this confused about textual theory ?

And let us finish with this some spin classics, all this to simply avoid dealing with his own one assertion that he tries to keep and run from at the same time.

This last one was a special classic. Spin makes a factual blunder of the first magnitude, one that he could research rather easily, or could simply retract pending research, and spin wants everything in the world proven since spin's memory is so accurate and so reliable and he researched this so carefully and thoroughly a decade and more back !

Amazing.
This represents the level of modern textcrit "science".

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Erasmus was very familiar with Vaticanus readings from his correspondence with the Vatican librarian. There was correspondence with Sepulveda and Bombasius. If you want more info on this, I will share some details, the above is quickly ad hoc. And there may be a thread here. Oh, I have never heard of a single case where the Vaticanus readings had any great affect on Erasmus.

Is this a Peshitta reference ?

A long story, but the short one is simple. The DSS have not proven, not even remotely, any single verse of the Tanach to be wrong. And nobody seriously claims that they have.

I do agree that all the theory in the world means little, you have to work with the actual verses for understanding.

There are a lot of variants where we cannot determine whether the source is simple scribal error or deliberate doctrinal change. I think the former is far more likely than textcrits give credit, though of course the later does occur.

The Erasmus annotations may discuss the Greek line variances.

(will try to continue before long)

Shalom,
Steven Avery