Glenna Rose wrote:
writes:
You're right Charlie. Or, you would be if that is how things happened.
There are roughly a million copies of the Bible distributed -each week-
and it is available in roughly 2,300 languages. "Oral histories" came to
an end with Moses.
This isn't the parlor game of 'pass it on' played by a bunch of giggly
kids ... this is "pass it on" played for keeps by serious-minded adults
with their eye on the ball
It is one thing to declare that the scriptures were adulterated. Knowing
humans, it seems almost certain that they were. It is quite another to
prove it.
Bill
Actually, Bill, on a recent broadcast on NPR (actually perhaps as long as
a year ago), they talked about just that. Each time the Bible was
re-copied, the person copying might put notes in the margin. Often when
it was copied the next time, the person making that copy incorporated the
notes into the text. Therefore, the Bible that was translated into
multiple languages might actually be not exactly the same as (or quite far
from) the original text. They gave a specific example of a well-known
story from the New Testament where they actually had copies of the text in
its original forms (the ones copied by each scribe) that showed the
various steps of this well-known story and how the one commonly accepted
is not at all the original. The oldest text they found only reported the
deed, the "modern" version has punishment included, a quite severe one at
that. That being from the New Testament; one can only imagine how the
years from Moses forward were altered (not to even address the "blips" in
the oral recounts prior to writing). When they have the in-between copies
in the ancient form, that pretty much indicates the Bible used today is
not as each part was written originally, not even allowing for the
translation and culture errors. Heavens, even the Apostles who were there
wrote different things about the same events as presented in our "modern"
books.
I think you should be using something other than NPR as a source of
theological reference. There are numerous books that discuss the history of
the canon. In actuality, the copying of scripture was taken very
seriously, there were numerous checks and cross-checks to assure that
documents were copied correctly. In Old Testament times, a single error on
a page led to the entire page being destroyed; they had a mechanism set up
in which the letters across and down were added up and checked (an analog
to our modern checksums). It's been several years since I attended a
lecture on this subject, but as far as New Testament, there are several
codices that trace back to just after the first century AD. Their origins
are geographically separated, but their contents are in agreement. Some of
the codice have missing sections in comparison to one another, but this is
not indication of something added elsewhere, it is more akin to sections
that either were not completed or lost.
As far as the comment regarding how the apostles wrote different things
about the same event, the best analogy for this is having several
eyewitnesses recount an event. Each person sees the event from a slightly
different perspective (while believers assert that scripture is inspired,
we also recognize that God used people in that activity who wrote about
what they saw and heard). So, while one person might focus on the color,
make and model of a car involved in the event, a second eyewitness may only
indicate a "vehicle" was involved and describe "the man" who was the
primary actor in the event, while yet a third person will talk about
the "three people" who were involved. None of these eyewitnesses would be
wrong or incorrect, they are just describing from a different view of the
same scene.
... snip
--
If you're going to be dumb, you better be tough