peanutaxis

Need arguments against this:

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Toto

This graph (also available here) involves a sleight of hand and a complete misrepresentation.

Yes, there are many surviving copies of the NT, compared to other ancient manuscripts. That's because Christians did the copying and producing through the late Roman empire and the middle ages. But that doesn't prove anything about the content of those texts.

But the claim that there is only 40-70 years between the date of writing of the text and the earliest surviving copy is baseless, unless you think that the texts were written in the second century (if you think that, you think that they are fictional in any case.)

And again, that has nothing to do with the truth of the content of the texts, or how faithfully they were reproduced between the time they were written and the time you read them.)

aeebee50

Seems like Professor Dan Wallace at Dallas Theological Seminary is working on this argument.http://thinkingmatters.org.nz/2012/0...ancient-texts/

It seems to boil down on who you want to believe.

Imnotspecial

According what we know today (science) we know that the NT is bullshit. So who cares how many copies have been made early or later.

Toto

No, it doesn't.

No one bases a religion on the text of Euripides or Herodotus. No one thinks that they are inerrant or divinely inspired documents.

Christian apologists try to claim that ancient documents are entitled to respect, and that historians automatically give the benefit of the doubt to all ancient manuscripts. This is nonsense.

There are some Christians who claim that the original documents were inerrant, but that they were not transmitted perfectly. (There are, in fact, many variations in the documents, some of which are theologically significant.) This graphic seems to be aimed at countering that argument - but even there, it fails.

Then there are Christians who try to claim that if we reject the accuracy of the Bible, we have to give up Plato and all of Western Civ, because they are ancient documents. This is just a silly argument. No one values Plato because the words are written in an ancient document, but because of the content of the document.

So this is just a muddle of arguments that don't make any sense.

Zenaphobe

The Book of Mormon has exceeded 150 million copies, and a first edition (177 years old) was auctioned off about 5 years ago.

Everything in the Book of Mormon must be very reliable. Very, very reliable.

Toto

==moved here from ABR==

stephan huller

And let's not forget, especially with respect to the Pauline corpus, the existing material is a 'correction' of older material. It doesn't matter how many times you scan a fake nude picture of Kate Upton. It's still her head on someone else's body.

PhilosopherJay

Here is the list of the top selling single volume books:

A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens 200 million[1]
Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 200 million[2]
The Lord of the Rings J. R. R. Tolkien English 150 million[3]
The Hobbit J. R. R. Tolkien English 100 million[4]
Dream of the Red Chamber Cao Xueqin 100 million[5]
And Then There Were None Agatha Christie English 100 million[6]

Quantities of copies of a book published or preserved does not relate to the fictional or non-fictional quality of a book.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

aa5874

Your post show how BOLD people are in promoting propaganda.

It is UTTERLY FALSE that there are Jesus stories DATED 40-70 years of the supposed time of Jesus.

ALL the New Testament manuscripts found are DATED no earlier than the second quarter of the 2nd century and later.

This is precisely why we cannot move forward in this discussion. Some seem to be only interested in repeating KNOWN debunked claims.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...stament_papyri

Please, there is ZERO credible evidence that Jesus, the disciples and Paul did exist in the time of Pilate.

And further, because we KNOW when Joseph Smith wrote Stories about Jesus in the Mormon Bible does NOT mean the Jesus in the Mormon Bible did exist.