Biblical manuscripts

[Mobius]

moderator note: this has been split from the thread the people have spoken.

Only one translation. Almost all modern Bibles (in any language) are translated from original-language manuscripts, and most of those are not too far removed from the originals.

You need to check your history. The "originals" simply are NOT. They've been edited so many times since being written it's scary. Plus, it was oral tradition for hundreds of years prior to being put in writing. I wouldn't bet a single dollar on the accuracy of ANYTHING documented in such a way.

[DCrazy]

Mobius, I would highly caution you against debating Bible study with Lothar.

Then again, since when has being wrong gotten in the way of your arrogant need to prove yourself smarter than everyone else?

[Lothar]

As DCrazy said, you should know better than to try to debate Bible history with either me or Drakona. But hey, it's your credibility; do with it what you will ;)

Recall that this spawned from a discussion of the movie "The Passion of the Christ", so we're specifically referring to the New Testament Gospels. I'll try to confine discussion to those. And Mobi, I suggest you leave your pop-culture history at the door. Vague assertions of "many rewrites" won't fly here.

The "originals" simply are NOT. They've been edited so many times since being written it's scary. Plus, it was oral tradition for hundreds of years prior to being put in writing. I wouldn't bet a single dollar on the accuracy of ANYTHING documented in such a way.

So, you've made two claims:

1) the ancient manuscripts we have were rewritten many times since they were first recorded, and
2) what was first recorded had been oral tradition for hundreds of years

With respect to (2), since Jesus lived from about 5 BC to 28 AD, "hundreds of years" of oral tradition would mean you're proposing the originals were written after 200 AD. Yet we have actual manuscripts of fragments of the gospels that are older than that. In particular, we have a fragment of John from Egypt from about 130 AD. We have quotations of the gospels in other ancient writings, too -- Ignatius quoted Matthew, and he died in 115 AD. So, clearly, the Gospels couldn't have been unwritten oral tradition for longer than about 80 years.

Furthermore, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all refer to Jesus' prophecy about the destruction of the temple. Now, we know the temple was destroyed in 70 AD. Had the gospels been written after this date, they certainly would have mentioned this -- "Jesus gave this prophecy, and look, it was fulfilled!" This gives us the absolute latest possible date of original authorship being within the lifetime of at least some people who would've been eyewitnesses to Jesus' life.

Luke and Acts, in particular, are meant to be histories of Christ and the church. This much is clear from reading them. Yet Luke never mentions the deaths of such figures as James, Paul, or Peter (all died in the mid-60's AD.) For a book dealing with the history of the church to leave such details out would just be silly. Therefore, any "oral tradition" or "rewriting" would've had to take place within a single generation of Jesus' death.

With respect to (1), it's true we don't have the "originals"; I covered that. But, what we do have are many hundreds of copies from widespread geographic areas, and some very old translations of the originals into Latin. Now, for a single copy of a document, it makes sense that it could be rewritten many times -- you just throw away the old version when you're done. But with a widely distributed document, it's pretty darn difficult to rewrite it, especially if the people who have copies consider it a sacred text. You have to somehow find and destroy all of their manuscripts and replace them with your modified version.

Textual criticism is actually a really fun thing to study. A good study Bible like the NET Bible will contain notes that mention all of the differences between various ancient manuscripts. There are a few things to note here:

- It's pretty easy to track, based on how an error propagates, where it started. If a typo shows up in most of the Egyptian copies of a manuscript, it's pretty clear where the typo arose. Listen carefully to this point: if we can determine when a TYPO showed up in the history of a book, it would be pretty hard to sneak a whole rewrite past.

- The actual number of errors in manuscripts spanning hundreds of miles over 3 continents, hundreds of years, and multiple languages is fairly small, and all of them are insignificant from a philosophical perspective. For example, in a randomly selected chapter of the gospels (Luke 13) there are two places where there are differences in manuscripts: (1) Some say "therefore, cut it down" while others omit "therefore" in verse 7; (2) the start of verse 27 has an odd sentence construction rendered "he will say, saying to you" or "he will say 'I say to you'" or "He will say to you" or "He will say".

Also, with respect to both of your points, recall that the gospels regularly refer to obscure political figures (such as Pilate) who would likely be completely forgotten a generation after their time. The fact that they're still accurately mentioned is a testament to the generally high quality of transmission.

Whether you trust the actual stories being told, or you think they're complete fiction, there simply isn't any historical room for the "hundreds of years of oral traditon" / "rewritten many times" position you espouse here. You'd do far better simply claiming Jesus never existed and the Gospels are total fiction than you would trying to claim you know anything about their history.

[Iceman]

[Insert Owned Pic Here]

Good read Lothar ...

[Stryker]

For a good refutation of mobius's claim, read More Than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell. It's an excellent book, giving excellent proof of the validity of the Bible.

As an example of the arguments of this book: only ONE out of the twelve disciples who originally followed Jesus died of natural causes. Most of the others were crucified or otherwise executed, suffering horribly. Why would 12 men die horrible deaths, and convince others to follow the same path, all for a cause they didn't think was right? How could people have been converted if they didn't believe in the disciples' story? How could 12 men have been so deceived that they would think that their cause was worth being killed in the most horrific manner? Why does the Bible record such minute and exact details? No other written book of religion includes so many details of so many individual people as the Bible does.

[Fusion pimp]

http://www.cs.rose-hulman.edu/~yerricde ... -mouth.jpg

Good day, Mobius.

[woodchip]

Why would 12 men die horrible deaths, and convince others to follow the same path, all for a cause they didn't think was right? How could people have been converted if they didn't believe in the disciples' story? How could 12 men have been so deceived that they would think that their cause was worth being killed in the most horrific manner?

Maybe you should ask the koolaid drinking followers of Jim Jones or the roasted marshmellows that believed in David Koresh. Down through history there has been any number of charismatic people who have led people to do any number of bizzare things.

[Stryker]

Have they led millions to suffer horrendous deaths in the worst ways imaginable?

[Genghis]

Have they led millions to suffer horrendous deaths in the worst ways imaginable?

That looks like a pretty major causal fallacy or maybe a non sequitur.

http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm

Either way, I don't think you want to base a religion's validity on it. Because if you do, you'd have to acknowledge that most other major systems of belief, both current (religions) and past (mythologies) are also valid.

[Drakona]

Some sloppy thinking on Stryker's part, but also on the part of the responses--note closely:

Why would 12 men die horrible deaths, and convince others to follow the same path, all for a cause they didn't think was right?
How could people have been converted if they didn't believe in the disciples' story? How could 12 men have been so deceived that they would think that their cause was worth being killed in the most horrific manner?

The last two questions here are way off base: People do get decieved about things, and believe them with a conviction such that they'll die for them. It happens constantly. And such people do tell compelling stories. It's sloppy thinking to suppose that the deaths of Jesus and most of his disciples guarantee the truth of his teachings.

But...

It's equally sloppy thinking to suppose that all appeals to people dying for truth must be equal. Many people have died for different religions, but not all were under the same cirucmstances. Some never know other realities exist; some are clearly crazy; some are suicidal anyway; some were killed without warning and couldn't have recanted had they wanted to.

There is a world of difference between rank and file members sacrificing for a religion, and the founder giving his life for it. That is because someone will not give their life for what they know to be a lie. Members, you can assume might be deceived--but the leader? Is he? In the case of Christianity, the founder and the entire first generation of leaders are persecuted over the course of many years and ultimately killed for what they preached. That's no proof that what they said was true, but it's sure weighty evidence that they were honest. I mean, you can give explanations--maybe they were fooled, or maybe they were liars, or maybe their plans ran deeper than we knew (or maybe the history is completely screwed up...), but... dang. It's at the very least a serious consideration.

So be careful. It's sloppy thinking to present Jesus' death as proof of the truth that his claims were true. But discarding it as not even a consideration, something "equal to all other religions" is awfully sloppy, too.

To tell the truth, I find it an interesting discussion to chase around. Who Jesus was, where the Bible came from, why he died... people have a lot of interesting opinions, and often aren't aware of what facts are out there. It's a side topic, but one I like to talk about.

Anyway, that's a rabbit trail. What I was saying was that one of Stryker's arguments has merit, if not the force of proof--the deaths of the founders at least suggest that they were honest.

That doesn't have a whole lot to do with the manuscript discussion, which is a separate discussion entirely. I don't have a whole lot to add to what Lothar said, except to underscore one point.

While it isn't true for the Old Testament, with the New Testament, there really are an abundance of manuscripts available in a wide geographic distribution, and close to the date of the original. Lothar gave more exact figures on that, but it's worth pointing out that they are organized into families--like an evolutionary tree. When typos or scribal tampering occurs, it affects all the manuscripts copied from that one, and isn't likely to affect copies far away. In particular, you very rarely get the same error in multiple families. In fact, errors are rare in general--at most a word or two per page. That gives scholars all sorts of data to work with, and justifies great confidence in what the original manuscripts said.

One interesting thing you get from that is an understanding of the practices of early Christian copyists. You can see when someone changes something because it differs from early and far away manuscripts. I can't say the copyists were perfectly faithful--they were prone to include little explanations or reflexive remarks, and to soften hard sayings--but by and large it was a word here and a sentence there--the sort of thing that leaves the bulk of the text intact. And often the addition was even noted with an obelisk in the margin. Certainly nothing like the level of rampant revising and talespinning that Mobius proposes!

Something else people don't always realize is that this isn't a small amount of data, either. We're not talking half a dozen manuscripts. We're talking literally thousands. Most other ancient texts have at most a few dozens of old manuscripts. To doubt the integrity of the Biblical texts is to cast doubt beyond hope on all other ancient texts...!

I wish I had a supporting link to give people. I learned most of this from books, and I don't know right off if there's a good web site that explains it. Maybe I'll try to hunt one down tomorrow.

[woodchip]

"Anyway, that's a rabbit trail. What I was saying was that one of Stryker's arguments has merit, if not the force of proof--the deaths of the founders at least suggest that they were honest." Drakona

So we could say the same about David Koresh. So far I see no logical basis to follow this particulr pathway. Jesus had a good philisophical story line, set in a time of roman abuses to the poor, that sync'd well and gave people something to latch onto. Set in the right climate and the right spin doctors, Koresh could have just as easily became a iconic religious figure head with attendant mass believers.

[snoopy]

Another thing that Lothar didn't mention, but I think adds to the validity of the gospels, in particular. Three of the four gospels are written as first hand accounts. So, regardless of how long lasted between the actual events and when they where recorded, the authors of Matthew, Mark, and John all claim to have been there for the events, and are recording the events as first person witnesses. Luke is obviously a second hand account, but the book itself begains with a statement of intent, to accurately represent when happened in Christ's life based on all the evidence available- Luke at least said that he was using proper historiographical procedure.

Another thing, the content of the entire Bible leads one toward a conclusion that it has not been altered after it was originally written. All other anchient histories portray the political and spiritual leaders of the nation in an almost divine way, glossing over, or not even mentioning their imperfections. The Bible is extremely different. Almost every leader's account in the Bible features more mistakes and problems that the leader had than successes. Evidence of the tendancy to idealize leaders can even be seen in the Bible- Deuteronomy contains a summary of the history of Israel, featuring a number of events that occured after the exile. These events are also told in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers- Deuteronomy was written after the fact, as the Israelites where about to enter the promised land. The intersting thing is, when the different accounts are compared, Deutoronomy almost invariably tends to shift the blame away from Moses and the leaders, and toward the people. If there had been post-editing of the material, this tendancy to shift blame and idealize leaders would have been charateristic of the whole text. Basically, the bible is an account of how people screwed up, not how people succeeded- and that's very uncharacteristic in general, and even more uncharacteristic of that time. Yes, the gospels could be interpreted as being anti-semitic, but the entire Old Testament is equally unflattering.

[El Ka Bong]

Jeebus ! .. Not another ten tonne bible thumping thread ! .. Mobi' wanted to get a rise out of us I guess !

Here: http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/sacred_mushroom2.html

... my way of getting a rise ( albeit a repeat link) about who wrote what when and why, and what were they on when they said whatever they said...

[Lothar]

Here, have a repeat rebuttal (15 chapters of it!): http://www.drugsbase.com/content.asp?parent=162&admin=

To make a long story short: the "sacred mushroom" theory is easily one of the stupidest theories anybody on the DBB has ever espoused, and that's really saying something when you consider some of the stupid theories people here have sometimes held.

[Repo Man]

Here are a few more tidbits:

We don't even need original manuscripts for the New Testament. Up to the third century, the early church fathers quoted it so extensively, that from their writings alone, we could reconstruct the entire New Testament except for six verses.

Regarding the Old Testament (the Tanak), the Hebrew scribes have a very meticulous system for copying their manuscripts. I wonâ??t bother elaborating on it here, but when they were finished copying a scroll, they could say with confidence that they had an exact duplicate of the original. As an example, up until the 20th century, the earliest existing copy of the Hebrew Old Testament was the Mesoritic Text dating from 900 A.D. The Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered in the 1940â??s) contained a complete copy of the book of Isaiah which dated from the first century B.C. Comparing the Mesoritic copy of Isaiah with the Dead Sea Scrolls yielded a difference of only three letters! That is an error rate of three letters in a one-thousand year time span. The three letters were ones that are commonly confused in hand-written Hebrew. This is similar to the confusion in hand-written English between, for example, a number â??1â?

[Repo Man]

Lothar:

I thought I heard it all, but this sacred mushroom nonsense was a new one for me! I am forever amazed at the lengths some people will go to avoid the obvious. But then again, maybe not...

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. (2 Timothy 2:3-4)

[Foil]

I thought I heard it all, but this sacred mushroom nonsense was a new one for me...

New to me, too. I guess the fact that a 15-chapter semi-comprehensive rebuttal had to be written just goes to show you how many people subscribe to this guy's ideas.

By the way, does anyone have any suggested reading on the topic at hand? I've got some good material at home for studying interpretation, but nothing on the validity and accuracy of Biblical text.

[Bet51987]

By the way, does anyone have any suggested reading on the topic at hand? I've got some good material at home for studying interpretation, but nothing on the validity and accuracy of Biblical text.

Foil, ask you questions here http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/for ... y.php?f=62 The replys are less sarcastic. There are good people there.
Bettina

[Lothar]

Foil:

Well, you can always ask in E&C and Drakona and I will do our best to help ;)

My main resource is my NET Bible from http://bible.org/. It has something like 60,000 translation notes, study notes, and text-critical notes directly linked from the relevant passages. The text-critical notes (notably, how few there actually are) are a great resource.

I also have a paper copy of the NET Bible, which has a couple of appendices that list various manuscripts, their ages, etc.

Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry has some good articles on manuscripts at http://www.carm.org/questions_bible.htm -- that's where I draw a lot of my source material from.

Unfortunately, there simply aren't any good sites out there that compile all of this information.

EDIT: my dad just sent me to a link to the "making of the NIV" site, which has some nice chapters on manuscripts and translation. http://www.ibs.org/niv/mct/index.php

Also, http://www.geocities.com/bible_translation/ has a ton of links, but I can't vouch for them.