The Historical Jesus

[h311inac311]

Now for sure you are the one who is missing my point about the over-abundance of available copies.

This abundance of copies that you talk about don't count because they were created many centuries later, in medieval times, and they are copies of gospels that were written centuries after the supposed death of Jesus.

"The first time we get a complete copy of the gospel of Matthew.... is 300 years later." - Bart Ehrman. Yes, paper doesn't last very long expecially when books are expensive and good books tend to be used rather than placed on display. Have you ever seen what can happen to one of our modern books after it has been used over and over in less that 50 years? I've seen people walking around with Bibles in my church where every page is dog-eared and some of the paper is turning yellow. 

Used books don't last very long. But let's say that the first copy is 400 years old, what does this do to discredit it?

You see, the issue is that we don't just have 1 copy, if all we had was a single line of letters one being a copy of the first and the 4th being a copy of the 3rd then we would have a big problem because if the 3rd letter was corrupted then that would automatically mean that the 7th would be as well. 

What we have instead, however, is a manuscript tradition that goes back to the original. Lets say that we make 3 copies of the gospel of Mark. As I said earlier (but all of you have ignored this so far for obvious reasons) if we have, even a fragmentary, or a highly suspect copy that's riddled with errors we can still discern the original by comparing the copies one to another.

Consider this collection of 3 fragmentary copies.

The ___  ______
___  cat  ______
___  ___  jumped

Are you guys smart enough to discern the original message? How could that be possible if all we have is 3 manuscripts that are only 33% accurate to the original? 
What Bart Ehrman is expressing is a reasonable doubt, however I'm still waiting for someone to back up this doubt with something historical as opposed to an appeal to evidence that hasn't been found yet.

We cannot claim with certainty the exact words which Mark originally wrote, however, we still do have a very strong case that more than 95% of what he has written is preserved within the manuscript tradition. 

Beyond this complaint there is the fact that language changes over time. For instance we know that the ancient Greek of the first century didn't even have spaces, if you can believe that. imaginehowharditwouldbetoreadsomethinglikethat. Once spaces were discovered as an easier way to read and write Greek they became essential and scholars started using them all the time. The only problem here is that now we have to add spaces to an original which had none. And so the copies that are from 500 A.D. are automatically going to have many variances that seperate them from the original. Beyond this you have the fact that an agreed upon spelling is almost never permanent, if it is even present at all. I'm not gonna bullshit you guys and pretend to be fluent in ancient Greek. However, I am able to read the original 1611 King James version despite the many spelling changes which have occurde since then. 

My point here is simple, if you're going to claim that you know that a piece of writing has a significant error in it could you please tell me where that error is and explain to me how you know it to be an error. Because if you can't do that then all I can say about your argument is that it is historical speculation. We're talking about events which occurred more than 1800 years before video cameras were invented so there will always be room for doubt. Even today when people see a miracle on camera they will say, "well that must be photoshopped,". Regardless of the evidence the sceptic has the privilege of always being able to demand more. So no matter how many gospels there are, no matter how many letters there are, no matter how many copies there are, the sceptic will either demand one more or they will demand one earlier.