(August 29, 2015 at 11:40 pm)Aractus Wrote:Your position is that some guys named Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the "New Testament" in the First Century and that their work survived intact.(August 29, 2015 at 3:43 pm)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: As a poster pointed out, there are no surviving original manuscripts. So of course later story-tellers added new details to the oral stories when they wrote them down. The guys who wrote the Islamic hadiths did so centuries after Mohammed supposedly bit the dust and they are ful of all kinds of BS details. People will always support their favorite religious lies. It's basic human nature.
You really need to start learning Wyrd. Islam believes that the original wording of the Bible was lost, and therefore Muhammad was tasked with fixing it. It's an elaborate lie that the bible was "systematically altered over time" and this has been proven by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course that doesn't mean that what we have today is exactly what was written down in 700 BC or whenever it was that the Old Testament was written, since most scholars do believe that the Pentateuch in particular was written down in stages by multiple authors.
That doesn't apply to the New Testament. Each NT author has their own style, their own unique vocabulary which fingerprints their work. In particular I'm talking about Paul and Luke who both wrote quite a bit, and even though Paul used scribes (and Luke probably did as well but he doesn't explicit say so) their style is recognisable from their works.
The gospel of Mark could have been written down in stages, and this has been theorised. It appears that both Luke and Matthew had an earlier version of the gospel from which they copied into their works. Most scholars believe they also had a sayings document similar to "Thomas".
My position is that the primary source material was oral with a few bits and pieces of ragged scrolls. An English committee wrote its version of all of that in the illustrated Codex Amiatinus around the year 700AD. The Bible simply didn't exist before that.
Later on other writers divided the books into chapters and added numbered verses and probably changed the sequence of the books themselves.
During later rewrites the writers added some little gems to support their political bosses, such as King James. And they changed the names of some of the major characters to make it more user friendly.
In the meantime everyone and his brother was busy churning out extra BS to support the Big Lie, just like the hadith writers made up BS to support Mohammed and the Koran that Uthman's committee wrote at his direction.
And since most people, including priests and preachers, don't know the real Ten Commandments it's useless to cite them as authority figures about the Bible.