Oh, great. We can put this in the fiction section too...along with the rest of the fucking bible.
As Bart Ehrman notes:
http://ehrmanblog.org/first-century-copy...rk-part-1/
Ehrman can't prove this bullshit was written in 70 AD either meaning that there could be far fewer generations of scribal changes but there have to be some. Irenaeus mentions mark in 185 so it surely existed by then and we don't even have that one.
So these people are looking over edited and mistake-ridden copies and trying to figure out where they originally came from and what they said.
No wonder they call it apologetics.
As Bart Ehrman notes:
http://ehrmanblog.org/first-century-copy...rk-part-1/
Quote:In the debate I pointed out that our earliest copy of the Gospel of Mark was P45 (called this because it is the 45th Papyrus [hence “P”] manuscript to be catalogued), which dates to around the year 200 CE – i.e., 140 years after Mark was first written. That’s our earliest copy. Between the original of Mark and our earliest copy there were something like fourteen decades of copying, and recopying, and recopying of Mark. Year after year it was copied. And the copies were being changed at every point. And then later copies were copies of the earlier changed copies. Then those earlier changed copies were lost; as were the copies based on them; and the copies based on them. Until our earliest surviving copy, P45 – which itself is not a complete copy of Mark, but highly fragmentary. Our first complete copy of Mark dates to around the year 360 – nearly three hundred years (count them 300 years) after the “original” of Mark.
Ehrman can't prove this bullshit was written in 70 AD either meaning that there could be far fewer generations of scribal changes but there have to be some. Irenaeus mentions mark in 185 so it surely existed by then and we don't even have that one.
So these people are looking over edited and mistake-ridden copies and trying to figure out where they originally came from and what they said.
No wonder they call it apologetics.
