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ProtestantismMiracles & the NT
« Previous 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Next » » pink101 - Au Contraire, Mon Ami In response to People in Power posted by BrianTubbs:. Were these leaders powerful enough or strong enough to create a new religion and force it on the people who claimed to be Christians? Absolutely not. . au contraire, mon ami . In fact, that seems to have been what had been going down with all the local bishops running their own bailiwicks. And, it looks to me as though that was the deciding factor as to why Constantine called the conference to decide on a single text. . But, of what significance is that to us today? . -- posted by pink101
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The early Christians (and, by that, I mean first and second century) believed what they believed BECAUSE they believed it was all true - NOT because they were TOLD to believe it or were compelled/forced to believe it. The orthodoxy that arose in the first and second century did so on a foundation of truth, not fear or manipulation. » pink101 - Au Contraire, Mon Ami In response to Au Contraire, Mon Ami posted by BrianTubbs:. I think you're giving common people a great deal of integrity they never enjoyed. . History unfolded long eras before common people did a lot of original thinking on their own. . . -- posted by pink101 » Migisi - Conspiracies Everywhere In response to Conspiracies Everywhere posted by BrianTubbs:
-- posted by Migisi
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Was there some corruption in some of the manuscript copies? Yes. But there are TOO MANY COPIES for any monolithic, grand conspiracy to take over the entire process. I'll grant that the medieval Catholic Church DID suppress the Scriptures in order to give itself more power. That's what fueled people like Wycliffe and Tyndale and Luther. But by the time the medieval Church had that power, there were too many copies of manuscripts in circulation for them to conrol. Their power and influence was due more to illiteracy and poverty among the masses than anything else. But the Catholic Church's reach didn't extend as much into the East, which is why conservative Protestants traditionally have trusted the Received Text (it being based on manuscripts emanating primarily from the Byzantine world, rather than the western Catholic world). Yet even utilizing the Westcott-Hort texts, there is still much more agreement than disagreement in the texts. The Bible has tremendous manuscript evidence backing its credibility.
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I'll grant that, during the Dark Ages (which is why they were called the "Dark Ages") that millions of people were steeped in poverty and illiteracy. But there were a lot more educated people during the high point of the Roman Empire than left-leaning historians care to admit. And there are signs of such education going back even further. Some of the ancient wonders show signs of brilliant engineering. But, yes, the collapse of the western Roman Empire ushered in a long period of illiteracy and poverty. The Dark Ages are aptly named. But, with the rise of the middle class and the Renaissance and Reformation, things began to change. » pink101 - Au Contraire, Mon Ami In response to Au Contraire, Mon Ami posted by BrianTubbs:
-- posted by pink101 » Migisi - Too many manuscripts In response to Too many manuscripts posted by BrianTubbs:. ...there were too many copies of manuscripts in circulation for them to conrol. . Based on fragments, incomplete and illegible manuscripts, missing books and verses, translations of translations of translations, scribal errors, doctrinal corrections, word/phrase/verse additions and omissions... copies of copies contaminated by all these. . A good article (IMO) worth reading: New Testament Manuscripts and Text Types http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/ntma... . (snippet) The Text Types of the New Testament "As we have seen elsewhere, the early manuscripts of the New Testament are not error free. In fact the scribes make all types of errors imaginable, some unintentional and some intentional. The vast majority of these errors occur during the first four centuries CE. Thus the extant manuscripts today is a vast sea of confusion that needs to be sorted out for any sense to be made of them." . ----------------------- . And this one: Manuscript Fallacies http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/manu... . (snippet) In Conclusion: An Obvious Point "Finally we must note that a very often made assertion by evangelicals and fundamentalist -that the large number of surviving manuscript and their relative lack of deviations prove that the New Testament is "true"- is patently false. At best all these claims about the sheer number of manuscripts and their faithful reproduction can do is to show that the New Testament as we have it today is what the original authors wrote. It does not follow from this that what they had written is true. . "Since this rather obvious point does not seem to have permeated fundamentalist circles yet, I have to give an example here. . "Suppose we find a couple of old manuscripts of a document of an ancient, now-defunct, religion. The two manuscripts are more or less identical except at a few verses. Let us say that there is one verse where there is a discrepancy which cannot be resolved easily. This verse [when translated into English] is given in the two manuscripts as: . Manuscript "A" : The moon is made of sweet cheese. Manuscript "B" : The moon is made of swiss cheese. . "Suppose that at a later date, in something akin to the discoveries at the dead sea, thousands more manuscripts of this document dating to times earlier than these two manuscripts were found. Upon studying these new finds, it is found that they all support the reading given in Manuscript "B". This means that textual scholars can now be certain that the verse , in its original form, reads "The moon is made of swiss cheese." We have now reached a state of textual purity as far is this verse is concerned. It is uncontaminated by later additions, deletions or amendations and we know that this was what the original author of the manuscript wrote down. . "Note, however that textual purity does not equate to factual veracity or to epistemological truth. The statement that "The moon is made of swiss cheese." is still false. . "Indeed this point is so often missed by fundamentalists and evangelicals that even the reknowned textual scholar, Bart Ehrman, had to assert this in his textbook The New Testament: An Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (2000): . 'At one time or another, you may have heard someone claim that the New Testament can be trusted because it is the best attested book from the ancient world, that because there are more manuscripts of the New Testament than of any other book, we should have no doubt concerning the truth of its message. Given what we have seen in this chapter, it should be clear why this line of reasoning is faulty. It is true, of course, that the New Testament is abundantly attested in the manuscripts produced through the ages, but most of these manuscripts are many centuries removed from the originals, and none of them perfectly accurate. They all contain mistakes-altogether many thousands of mistakes. It is not an easy task to reconstruct the original words of the New Testament. . 'Moreover even if scholars have by and large succeeded in reconstructing the New Testament, this, in itself, has no bearing on the truthfulness of the message. It simply means that we can be reasonably certain of what the New Testament authors actually said, just as we can be reasonably certain what Plato and Euripides and Josephus and Suetonius all said. Whether or not any of these ancient authors said anything that was true is another question, one we cannot answer simply by appealing to the number of surviving manuscripts that preserve their writings.'" . (italics are the author's) -- posted by Migisi
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In the meantime.... http://www.carm.org/evidence/textualevid... « Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Next » Please follow the guidelines set forth in the Suite101 Posting Etiquette when adding to the discussion. |
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Brian Tubbs
