RE: Rewriting the bible
November 7, 2014 at 5:41 am
(This post was last modified: November 7, 2014 at 5:44 am by Aractus.)
(November 7, 2014 at 3:21 am)Minimalist Wrote: He's about the foremost historical critical scholar of early xtian texts going.No he isn't, he's just one, and much of his assertions are fringe ideas even among critical scholars.
Quote:He should stick to that field instead of trying to find a "historical jesus" but he knows his shit when it comes to the documents themselves. He is not out on his own there. He is speaking of the culmination of 300 years of study....which you'd know if you read the book.Ehrman claims that the original NT texts are all altered to the point that the original texts are unrecoverable; most critical scholars do not agree with this.
Try this:
- Clever publicity pays! So much so, in fact, that by means of an attention-getting, controversial title and subtitle, a book about textual criticism of the Bible (one of the drier subjects of Biblical science) has become a New York Times best-seller. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Ehrman has already written several successful books on the Bible, among them the companion volumes The New Testament: A Historical
Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, and The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader (New York: Oxford UP, 1997 and 1998). Thee present volume is written in the same spirit: informative, critical, yet ultimately respectful of the sacred texts.
...
The treatise as a whole contains a good deal of stock-in-trade information as well as a number of enlightening insights, many of which will surprise the non-specialist, for whom the book was written. For these features the reader will be grateful.
At the same time however, Ehrman’s methods may raise the hackles of more knowledgeable readers. He spends a good deal of time pointing out the inconsistencies, indeed the contradictions, to be found in the Bible. But there is nothing really new in this regard, except for the fact that many readers have deliberately or unknowingly overlooked them.
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Ehrman is conflicted on how we can get back to anything like the original text, the text the original author actually wrote. Not surprisingly, this lack of a letter-perfect “original text” does not seem to have alarmed either simple believers or scholars (and especially scholars) for millennia. Do we really fret about not having the original texts of Homer or Cicero or Plato? Do we not understand them well enough without such texts, from the entirety of their massive works. “It is an enormous problem,” says Ehrman. Not really!
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Similar comments can be made about the Markan ending (Mark 16:9–20), about which Ehrman makes much ado. Any annotated version of the Bible or one-volume commentary will inform the reader that these verses are a later addition by an unknown scribe intended to complete a perceived lack of coherence in the verses that precede it. But again, so what?
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In conclusion, these observations, singled out from many others that could be made, are not meant to denigrate Ehrman’s contribution, which contains much of value. His own odyssey of conversion from naive Fundamentalism has made him an enthusiastic apostle of Biblical criticism. But the content of his criticism is not really as earth-shaking as it is made out to be. “Misquoting Jesus” is too harsh a judgment.
Bernas, Casimir. 2007. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. Cistercian Studies Quarterly, Vol. 42 Issue 2, pp. 211-213. ISSN: 10626549.
The book is as the above scholar points out intentionally sensationalised and some of his claims are exaggerated for publicity.
For Religion & Health see:[/b][/size] Williams & Sternthal. (2007). Spirituality, religion and health: Evidence and research directions. Med. J. Aust., 186(10), S47-S50. -LINK
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"That's disgusting. There were clean athletes out there that have had their whole careers ruined by people like Lance Armstrong who just bended thoughts to fit their circumstances. He didn't look up cheating because he wanted to stop, he wanted to justify what he was doing and to keep that continuing on." - Nicole Cooke
The WIN/Gallup End of Year Survey 2013 found the US was perceived to be the greatest threat to world peace by a huge margin, with 24% of respondents fearful of the US followed by: 8% for Pakistan, and 6% for China. This was followed by 5% each for: Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, North Korea. -LINK
"That's disgusting. There were clean athletes out there that have had their whole careers ruined by people like Lance Armstrong who just bended thoughts to fit their circumstances. He didn't look up cheating because he wanted to stop, he wanted to justify what he was doing and to keep that continuing on." - Nicole Cooke