(September 23, 2019 at 3:40 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(September 23, 2019 at 3:29 pm)mordant Wrote: Yes and no.
We have good copies of the originals.
The bigger problem remains that the manuscripts are full of fabulist nonsense and not even those who profess to follow them, agree on WTF they mean.
No, don't have 'good copies of the originals'. Being very generous with the dates, the Gospels and the Pauline epistles were all completed no later than 110 CE. The oldest complete NT extant is the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates (probably) to about 350 CE. There is simply no reliable way to determine how many additions, deletions, interpolations, etc were conducted in the intervening two and a half centuries (regarding Paul's letters, at least - the case is even worse for the synoptics).
Boru
Well actually there are ways. I am not qualified to fully explicate them, but the fact is we have fragments much older than any particular codex and we can see that nothing of substance (and often literally nothing) changed between those older fragments and the newer ones. We know the scribal traditions and ethos and their commitment to careful copying. We have current translations based on significantly better source material than the older ones and nothing consequential has changed.
Of course some of the people doing this vetting have vested interests in making sure any such evaluations come out as much in favor of them as possible. But the manuscripts themselves are mostly available for anyone to look at online, so it's not like a bad faith argument wouldn't have a high probability of being exposed by a rival.
But I guess my basic point is that the actual CONTENT of the scriptures are so self-contradictory and incoherent and mythical and fabulist that we really don't have to resort to attacking the provenance of the text. It's a load of bullshit anyway.
And I find the ignorant argument that keeps surfacing among some atheists that the Bible is a load of crap because it's not just "copies of copies" but, some think, "translations of translations", to be embarrassingly ill-informed.
