Posts by sir82

26

"Misquoting Jesus" - New Book by Ehrman

by sir82 in

this book was just published in the last month or so, i'm about 1/2 of the way through it.. the author describes the difficulty in discerning what exactly really were the original, right-from-the-pen words of the original writers of the new testament.

basically, the oldest surviving manuscripts were written decades, in some cases centuries, after the originals.

all copies were made by hand by untrained amateur copyists for the first 3 centuries after the books were written (until professional scribes started copying).. by comparing the thousands of ancient hand-copied manuscripts that still exist, there have been found anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 distinct errors in the copying process.

sir82

Yadda,

In my original post, I made this request:

I'd be interested in hearing comments from Christian apologists, as well as, um, anti-Christian apologists(?)

I am looking for comments from both "sides" of the aisle. I am well aware that many on this forum are atheists, or at least have no inclination to believe in God as the Bible presents him. However, I am also interested in the opinions of others who, even after being lied to and/or mistreated by the JWs for year or even decades, have emerged with a strong faith in God. I respect that, I admire it. I wish I had their faith.

I wanted to hear from them, something along theses lines: "Even though there are problems with the manuscripts, I still believe the Bible is the Word of God for [whatever] reasons." I am interested in the [whatever]. Obviously, I can (and should) read a variety of books on the topic, and I do plan to read more. That will give me a broader picture, and, as you say, help me make up my own mind.

But I was curious about the reaction of Bible-believing Christians to the arguments made in the book. I presented, in an abbreviated form, some of the problems presented by the author, for the benefit of those who had not yet read this book, as it was published very recently.

I would expect that someone who has such a stong faith, though, would have considered these topics beforehand. That their faith would have overcome these obstacles. I want to know how faith overcame these obstacles, for particular individuals.

I fear, though, that many who have such faith have never considered these questions. I know that I never did during decades of full-bore JWism. The Society said "The Bible is true, we can rely on it", and that was good enough for me. I was totally in the dark as to the issues raised in this book. It was, in retrospect, a blind faith.

I am curious about your comment:

some author that trashes the gospels

1) I'm not sure, but I'm guessing you have not read the book. Have you read anything by the author? Or just snippets of opinions of the author, presented by other "world class historians"?

2) Perhaps I'm missing something. If someone says "Author X trashes the gospels", I would expect him to write something like "The gospels are full of lies, that crap never happened, Jesus was an impostor, and Christians are misled stooges".

What I read instead in this book is, "The original writings were made 2000 years ago. For 1500 of those years, all copies were made by hand. There are demonstrable problems in how those copies were made, as evidenced by [A, B, C, D, etc.]. Here is how some persons have tried to resolve the problems. Yet, there are still doubts as to what words originally came from the author".

Raising questions, and pointing out problems caused by scribes who lived centuries after the original writings, is "trashing the gospels"? Sorry, I just don't see it.

26

"Misquoting Jesus" - New Book by Ehrman

by sir82 in

this book was just published in the last month or so, i'm about 1/2 of the way through it.. the author describes the difficulty in discerning what exactly really were the original, right-from-the-pen words of the original writers of the new testament.

basically, the oldest surviving manuscripts were written decades, in some cases centuries, after the originals.

all copies were made by hand by untrained amateur copyists for the first 3 centuries after the books were written (until professional scribes started copying).. by comparing the thousands of ancient hand-copied manuscripts that still exist, there have been found anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 distinct errors in the copying process.

sir82

Yadda,

Sir, all I'm saying is don't take Mr Ehrman's word for it, Narkisos's, or anyone elses

Absolutely, I agree. I am just beginning to search out a variety of viewpoints. After decades of considering only WT-written explanations, I am enjoying fresh perspectives.

However, you also write

justification to either believe in God or find an excuse to abnegate moral responsibility to God.

So, my 2 choices are "believe in God" or "find an excuse to abnegate moral responsibility to God"? I took only one course in logic, but that sounds suspiciously like a "false dichotomy".

Everyone is motivated at least to some extent by certain subtle presuppositions, assumptions, biases

Are yours showing here?

26

"Misquoting Jesus" - New Book by Ehrman

by sir82 in

this book was just published in the last month or so, i'm about 1/2 of the way through it.. the author describes the difficulty in discerning what exactly really were the original, right-from-the-pen words of the original writers of the new testament.

basically, the oldest surviving manuscripts were written decades, in some cases centuries, after the originals.

all copies were made by hand by untrained amateur copyists for the first 3 centuries after the books were written (until professional scribes started copying).. by comparing the thousands of ancient hand-copied manuscripts that still exist, there have been found anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 distinct errors in the copying process.

sir82

I realize you are quoting from another reviewer, but it seems to reflect your viewpoint, so I will ask:

Ehrman continues his one-side attacks on Christianity

How is a work which attempts to point out the problems with statements like "the text of the New Testamount is 99.5% pure" an "attack on Christianity"?

Obviously the vast majority of the thousands of errors are extremely minor - spelling differences, omiited words which can be inferred from context or other mss., etc.

But the problem I have is the several century gap between the original writings and the oldest known manuscripts. Assuming the original penmen were inspired by God, were the copyists also inspired? All of them? If not, which ones? Were the copies of the inspired or un-inspired copyists used in the copies we base our current translations on? If some copyists were inspired, why are ther some errors in their mss. too? Does that mean there were errors in the original writings? If the copyists were not inspired, and the writings we have are based on their works, why should we believe them?

The easy answer is "God made sure it was done correctly". I'm beyond the point where the easy answers are satisfying.

26

"Misquoting Jesus" - New Book by Ehrman

by sir82 in

this book was just published in the last month or so, i'm about 1/2 of the way through it.. the author describes the difficulty in discerning what exactly really were the original, right-from-the-pen words of the original writers of the new testament.

basically, the oldest surviving manuscripts were written decades, in some cases centuries, after the originals.

all copies were made by hand by untrained amateur copyists for the first 3 centuries after the books were written (until professional scribes started copying).. by comparing the thousands of ancient hand-copied manuscripts that still exist, there have been found anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 distinct errors in the copying process.

sir82

gap 25 years between original and copy

For a credit card sized fragment containing a few verses of John chapter 18.

For the other 99.999998% of the New Testament, the gap is significantly larger, at times centuries.

claims like "until 3rd century copies were done by unproffessional copists" ar just plain stupid... that seams more projection of your own attitude to New Testament then fact backed claim.

Not my claim, but the author's. He does present a convincing argument, though (read the book for details)..

If you don't believe in Jesus, then why do you care about New Testament anyway.

That's just it, I want to believe in Jesus. I want to live eternally in paradise. I want to believe the promises. But all I have to go on is the New Testament. If it can be demonstrated that the words in the New Testament were certainly copied incorrectly, then how can I have faith?

historicans can explain this.

The only "historicans" I've read that support the view that the Bible is "99.99% original" seem to have started with the presumption that that is the case, or at least they have a vested interest in the Bible being so accurate. If the Bible is not accurate, their whole belief system, there whole life, comes crashing down about their ears. That tends to push the results of such study decidedly in one direction.

And there is one small factor which is not present in any other historical text - God himself. Jesus promised that his Words will last forever.

What if he was misquoted?

Generally, it seems that a lot of the arguments that the Bible is essentially unchanged boil down to "God made sure the essential message was preserved". If God was that involved, why not preserve the original documents, so there would be no doubts, no need for hundreds of different translations, many of which contradict each other in key teachings?

22

Now on www.reexamine.org - Counsel to Watch Tower Missionaries

by reexaminer in

you can get this on the main downloads page, or directly here: http://www.reexamine.org/images/counseltowatchtowermissionaries.pdf.

contract) between missionaries and the watch tower.

someone would recieve this after completing the giliad training school.. also, we now have the pay attention book, and the od book in polish, as well as german and english.. reexaminer.

sir82

What a hoot! Did you see the part on bonuses for making your time 12 months in a row?

I don't remember, where is it in the Bible that Jesus paid bonuses to the apostles? Or maybe the 150 fishes in the last chapter of John was the prophetic antitype of this practice?

I think there are a few ex-missionaries that have posted on this board in the past. Anybody know if the current book (this one is from 1974) is very different?

26

"Misquoting Jesus" - New Book by Ehrman

by sir82 in

this book was just published in the last month or so, i'm about 1/2 of the way through it.. the author describes the difficulty in discerning what exactly really were the original, right-from-the-pen words of the original writers of the new testament.

basically, the oldest surviving manuscripts were written decades, in some cases centuries, after the originals.

all copies were made by hand by untrained amateur copyists for the first 3 centuries after the books were written (until professional scribes started copying).. by comparing the thousands of ancient hand-copied manuscripts that still exist, there have been found anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 distinct errors in the copying process.

sir82

How can you possibly have more mistakes than words in your text? Read other books to get a balanced view. Where is your proof? Post some.

Simple illustrative example:

Original text of a made-up sentence:

My dog has fleas.

Copy 1: My dog had fleas

Copy 2: My fog had fleas

Copy 3: Thy flog had fleas

Copy 4: Thy fog had fled.

Copy 5: Thy fog's bad head.

There are 5 manuscripts, each of which has an error. Each succeeding copy repeats the error, and adds at least one new one. There are only 4 words in the original sentence, but there are 5 differences among the 5 copies. There are more differences in the manuscripts than in the original sentence.

There are 5000+ known copies of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Each one is different from all the others in a few, or dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of places. I.e., every time a manuscript was copied, the copyist made numerous mistakes. Easy to understand, given the lack of punctuation, capitalization, or even separation of words in written Koine Greek.

It is quite certain that similar errors must have been made in the hundreds of manuscripts made between [the original writing of Paul, or John, or whoever] and [the earliest known manuscript, dated to centuries after the orignal].

26

"Misquoting Jesus" - New Book by Ehrman

by sir82 in

this book was just published in the last month or so, i'm about 1/2 of the way through it.. the author describes the difficulty in discerning what exactly really were the original, right-from-the-pen words of the original writers of the new testament.

basically, the oldest surviving manuscripts were written decades, in some cases centuries, after the originals.

all copies were made by hand by untrained amateur copyists for the first 3 centuries after the books were written (until professional scribes started copying).. by comparing the thousands of ancient hand-copied manuscripts that still exist, there have been found anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 distinct errors in the copying process.

sir82

This book was just published in the last month or so, I'm about 1/2 of the way through it.

The author describes the difficulty in discerning what exactly really were the original, right-from-the-pen words of the original writers of the New Testament. Basically, the oldest surviving manuscripts were written decades, in some cases centuries, after the originals. All copies were made by hand by untrained amateur copyists for the first 3 centuries after the books were written (until professional scribes started copying).

By comparing the thousands of ancient hand-copied manuscripts that still exist, there have been found anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 distinct errors in the copying process. As the author says, "There are more variations among out manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament."

The key point is made by the author: How can one begin to understand what the words of the New Testament mean, if one cannot be sure of what the words are?

I'd be interested in hearing comments from Christian apologists, as well as, um, anti-Christian apologists(?) on the following questions:

Given that there are hundreds of thousands of variations on thousands of manuscripts spanning centuries, and that no complete manuscript of any book can be dated to within a century or 2 of its original writing, how can one derive life-altering philosophies based on a single word of text, or even a phrase?

E.g. was the Word "God", or "a God"? How can people argue on and on endlessly about this, when the original papyrus that John wrote on is long gone, and the earliest manuscripts that contains those words (and all other manuscruipts containing "proof texts" for and against the trinity) were written hundreds of years after the original, and every single manuscript that did survive is rife with at least dozens of copying errors which are compounded over and over again?

(I don't mean to turn this into another interminable Trinity thread, that was just the most obvious example that came to me).

I admire the more rational, thoughtful Christians for their faith; I would like to have such faith, but the more I read & learn, the harder it gets.

210

Real 'BIG' news WTS sued biggie worker compensation

by DannyHaszard in

jehovah's loses comp case

church may be forced to pay millions

by jess wisloski.

sir82

If I missed comments on this aspect of it, I apologize...

If this were to become common knowledge among the R&F, what might the effect be?

How would it look if "Jehovah's earthly organization" is fighting appeal after to appeal to avoid paying compensation to its own workers, injured on Bethel property and/or while working for "Kingdom Interests"?

Or, if they stop the appeal, and word gets out that the Society is paying $thousands ($millions?) in workers comp premiums and.or settlements? "How much of my 'World Wide Work' contributon is going to pay for injuries caused by the carelessness of Bethel overseers?"

Seems to me that no matter what the outcome, publicity will be bad for the Org.

17

Lots going on in JW-world

by watch the tower in

in the past month or so we've seen..... - the article that was published by baylor university (the big news).

- announcement of massive layoffs within the wts.

- the wts losing the worker's comp suit.

sir82

About the downsizing and cutting in costs, isn't that qute normal that a company tries to minimize the costs? That's a smart thing to do, what is the problem?

Of course, for a "worldly" company!

But The Society is not just any company. They are engaged in the "most important work being carried out on the face of the earth"!

And we all know how JWs are told how thousands of streaming in...5000 baptized per week! "10 men grabbing the skirt of a Jew"..."the little one becomes a thousand"..."Jehovah is speeding it up in its own time"...

How does one reconcile the above with: Flat or negative growth in 70 countries....Memorial attendance declining...obviously declining meeting attendance in many locations...and now the latest straw, 25% of the US Bethel work force laid off. "Wait a minute, I thought the work would be expanding right up until the end!"

Which straw will break the back of the next JW "camel"?

210

Real 'BIG' news WTS sued biggie worker compensation

by DannyHaszard in

jehovah's loses comp case

church may be forced to pay millions

by jess wisloski.

sir82

The ruling was made by a "Worker's Compensation Law Judge", according to the article.

Does that mean it was tried in a "normal" court, or is there a special setting for Worker's Comp issues?

I.e., to whom did they appeal? And how high up can the appeals go?

The WTS is getting more and more leary about pursuing cases up to the Supreme Court level. But on the other hand, if they don't continue to appeal, this sets a costly precedent.

I think there are some sweating lawyers in Brooklyn!

By the way, I'd bet a large percentage of my paycheck that exactly 0 of the layoffs will come from the legal department.