Have you simply willed yourself into confidence? Are you taking the contagious confidence of apologists and making it your own? Or, do you have some logical steps from A to B to C which lead you toward confidence?
Quite the contrary, actually. As an agnostic who was beset by Christian coworkers, I set-out to disprove the Bible. My hope was to get them off my back and perhaps even set some of them straight. In the attempt, however, I wound-up becoming a Christian. The evidence was undeniably in their favor.
How do you get from NO ORIGINALS to "what we do have is the original text."????
More on this in a moment.
When you write about events AFTER THEY HAVE ALREADY HAPPENED how can you call it prophecy?
Your assumption is that the writings came after. Why is that, I wonder? When you encounter a prophecy in the Bible that was fulfilled in great detail, do you conclude ipso facto that the fulfillment must have preceeded the prophecy? That is often the case with materialists who assume a priori that there is no such thing as prophecy. They have a philosophical precommitment to naturalism, and that prevents them from examining the evidence objectively. Thus, they are both closed-minded and circular in their reasoning.
When copyists and translators went out of their way to MAKE CERTAIN the various passages harmonized with each other---how can you call it internal consistency?
That's the beauty of God's plan. He ensured that the Scriptures were proliferated in such a way that no copyist could inject his own ideas undetected. This is particularly true of the NT. The copies were made and circulated throughout the empire. At each place they arrived, more copies were produced. And while errors, both intentional and unintentional, crept into the copies, these were geographically isolated and easy to identify when compared with the larger body of manuscripts.
ALL DOCTRINE of Christianity depends on interpretation. Interpretation of what? NON-ORIGINAL copied text... We DON'T HAVE THE ACTUAL WORDS of Jesus or his Apostles. We have pieced together reconstructions made from oral stories which were re-copied, re-arranged and edited by humans without reference to ACTUAL autograph manuscripts.
I teach adult Sunday school. When I cover the text of Scripture, there is an exercise I have to demonstrate how we can arrive at the original text with only flawed, hand-written copies. I give each student an "original" manuscript. It's in English, but I give it the characteristics of an uncial text (all upper-case with no spaces between words). Once the copies are made, I take back the originals and rip them up. All we have left are the copies.
Next, I reduce the number of copies by roughly 75%. I will ask, "How many of you have a birthday or anniversary this month?" Those who raise their hands have their copies taken. "Your manuscripts were written on papyrus and stored in a humid climate. They did not survive to the present. Now, how many of you typically drive 5 MPH over the speed limit?" That usually gets me several manuscripts. "Yours were kept in the library of Alexandria and were burned by invading Muslims."
Once there are 5 or 6 manuscripts remaining, I will photo copy them and give a set to each student. Their homework is to reproduce the original text and bring it to class the following week.
In all the years I've taught this section, not once has anyone produced a flawless copy. A few have come close, but all have contained errors (some of which are quite humorous). No two students, however, make the exact same errors. When you compare six copies, four or five will agree perfectly in a given reading. One or two will contain an error, but these are almost always different from one another. At the end of the exercise, every single student has been able to reproduce the original text--even though no autograph was available, and he/she only had imperfect and error-filled copies.
This, of course, is a simplified exercise in textual criticism. It aptly demonstrates the principal without the need for Greek or Hebrew scholarship.
The difference and the distinction make all the difference in the world.
Hopefully by now you realize that the distinction is smoke and mirrors. We do possess the original text with great confidence--far more so than for any writing from antiquity. I would encourage you, if you are interested, to learn more about textual criticism. A good introduction, though it wasn't the main purpose in writing, is The King James Only Controversy by James R. White (Bethany, 1995). And of course, I'm available if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Rufus
