squiz

Why should only Christians stand up for this story? Surely, if the evidence is on the side of the story being included, then knowledgeable people who are not committed to Christianity would also come to the same conclusion.

Personally I was at first rather disappointed to learn that this was an interpolation. It is such a great story.

Roger Pearse

Firstly, some manuscripts of John do not contain this passage. It is also found attached to some manuscripts of Luke. These statements are facts, and can be verified easily enough.

From this we infer -- unavoidably, in my view -- that the passage has a different history to the rest of the book. Let's face it, if it was part of the book, the same as all the rest, why is it floating around separately, and absent from some? People don't tend to omit just one bit of material.

What is that 'different history'? Well, of course we do not know. We have no factual information to go on, other than that it seems to be known at an early date (how early you will have to research -- I don't have any special info) and that it is floating around in different places.

A possible inference from this is that it comes from somewhere else. Speculation says that it may be a bit of "common knowledge"; something that an apostle or someone authoritative mentioned in a sermon once; or perhaps an episode from some other, now vanished text (remembering that Luke 1 tells us that lots of people who knew Jesus and the apostles wrote accounts, all now vanished).

None of this has any bearing on the question of whether it is authentic, or whether it was apostolic in origin; merely on whether it was originally part of the text of the gospel as John wrote it. Nor has it any bearing on the date at which it was written, which seems to me clearly very early.

The rest of what gets said would seem to be speculation masquerading as data.

Hang on; this is a minority position among Christians, you know. Atheists like to flay Christians who adopt it, and as far as I know it isn't actually true. The point about the KJV is that it is translated from late mss; modern translations tend to be made from critical editions, generally based on much earlier manuscripts.

Well I'm as fundamentalist as it gets, here in the UK. But, you know, we don't really have the right to throw up unconsidered statements in atheist fora and demand that others fight for us. Do we?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Um, Bart Ehrman is a renegade, engaged in bashing his former religion.

Yes, that is how he earns his living. But you are appealing to him as an unbiased and indifferent authority writing merely out of technical interest, and this he very definitely is not.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Joan of Bark

And who is? I'll wager that no textual critic is unbiased and indifferent; all will have personal religious or non-religious prejudices. But the fact that Ehrman deconverted while studying in a fundamentalist environment makes him more objective than a critic who has spent his or her entire life as a believer or non-believer.

Ehrman also claims (in Misquoting Jesus) that his wife is a believer. I doubt he would attack Christians in that case.

chrisengland

I,m not entirely shore if there is any such thing as an un-biased source.
Perhaps ther is I don't know.

Chris

graymouser

1. The King James Version is not from the Majority Text. The MT is a reconstruction from the "majority" of the Greek-language manuscripts of the New Testament, most of which come from the Byzantine Empire. The KJV is an archaic translation of a different composite text, the "Textus Receptus," an early attempt at textual criticism to reconstruct the then-obscured Greek text.

2. You're reading some pretty whacked-out KJVO stuff if you think that Aleph (Sinaiticus) and B (Vaticanus) are from the "Roman stream." Most KJVOs I've come across have denounced Aleph and B more correctly as Alexandrian text-types.

3. "Omissions" and "mistranslations" in modern Bible versions are relative. If you are measuring relative to the KJV, you're using a worthless circular criterion for omission or mistranslation.

Martian Astronomer

Okay, I'm not a Biblical scholar, but two things jump out at me here.

First, when you're discussing the word "YET" and the Taphas-rape translation, your main complaint is that you don't like the implications if the newer translations are correct. This says nothing whatsoever about which text is more accurate. However, when you determine which translation that you like based on what you think it should say, aren't you placing yourself in a position of judging the Bible? I mean, you have claimed a few times that you know what is right and wrong from the Bible and no other source. Are you now in the position of judging what the Bible should say from what you think is right and wrong? (I suspect that you'd probably use some sort of hermeneutics defense to this criticism, but as near as I can figure, it still means that you are judging the Bible.)

Second, your claim
is bogus on its face. Right off the top of my head, The Skeptic's Annotated Bible uses the KJV - in fact, many of the inconsistencies and absurdities that it points out are simply due to the KJV translation. The best example I can come up with is Exodus 20:13 "Thou shalt not kill." Throughout the next several books, God commands Israel to kill a whole lot of people. Is God contradicting himself? The easy response to this criticism is that the word "ratsach" should have been translated "murder," not "kill," or that there should at least be some clarification. The KJV says "kill" though. There are quite a few others examples. I could go on.

If I remember, I think Farrell Till uses the KJV in some of his criticisms as well, though somebody can correct me if I'm wrong.

The reason most skeptics nowadays don't use the KJV is actually because it contains more errors and mistranslations than other, more modern translations. Most of the time, if a skeptic uses the KJV, the Christians that oppose him will accuse him of attacking a strawman.

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(As an aside, I'm of the belief that the "YET" passage in John makes much more sense in context with the word omitted. Jesus says that he doesn't want to go up to Jerusalem, since it isn't "his time" yet - implying that it wasn't time for him to be killed. The fact that he goes in secret later on adds to that. I'm sure you disagree. I'm mostly content to take the word of the people familiar with the manuscripts. Start a thread if you want to argue with them, since I don't have much else to say about the passage.)

Ben C Smith

I love the story; it is beautiful. It is also ancient, known in some form as early as Papias.

But I personally doubt it is original to the gospel of John.

I have a page about it whose principal goal is to present the patristic evidence surrounding the passage up on my website. It might help you organize your thoughts, at any rate.

Ben.

Roger Pearse

Good for you, Ben. A collection of data is precisely what is needed.

My opinion (which is worthless) is that it is not by John, but that it is a genuine anecdote of Jesus, originating from the apostolic circle, and canonical.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

squiz

Your choice of language is interesting to say the least. When someone "deconverts" from Christianity, you call them a renegade. When someone criticises Christianity, they are "bashing" it. How do you justify such strong language?

Ehrman says that he deconverted from Christianity as a result of his studies and not the other way around. To me this means that he had the courage to discard beliefs that were no longer supported by the evidence. Why does this make him more biased than scholars who remain true to their faith despite all evidence, even if it means having to perform some spectacular mental gymnastics to reconcile the contradictions.

I seem to remember you describing a group of French Dominican monks as "unbelievably scholarly". Would you describe them as less biased than Ehrman?