The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[abaris]

It's Greek > English. No intermediate steps.

How do you know you have the original Greek texts?

I included the Randy quote, since I can't be bothered to look up the original that was posted overnight.

But it's much more complicated than determining if the Greek texts are original. In one of my earlier posts, which Randy ignored, I said that I don't expect the campfire tales building the foundations of the Greek texts, being in Greek. The authors, whoever they were, since the historicity of the names they go by cannot be confirmed, collected tales that were floating around at the time and the region. So if they reached the region or regions where these authors were based, they already made quite a lenghty journey from ear to ear and probably got embellished with every person telling them before someone sat down to write about it.

And then we enter the scientific field again, with the definition the word history and it's understanding had in these days. Ehrman brushes over the fact, that history wasn't what we understand it to be today. It was meant to paint an ideal and less a collection of facts. Actually facts don't play any role in these days. It was mostly oral history, collections of texts that cam earlier, but without checking their authenticity as we would do today. That's true for the Roman and Greek historians of the day and that's certainly true for the authors of the NT, whom we don't even know as historic persons.

And that leads me again to the fundamental question of why. Why did they sit down and write about what they heard? Most people couldn't write at the time, so we're already talking about an elite. And then, why did they write in Greek? Well, maybe it's as simple as the authors actually being greek, but it's well to remember that Greek played the same role French did in the 18th century. It was the language of the elites. Next, in these days, it wasn't that everybody could pick up a sheet of paper and a pen and scribble at their leisure. The materials were expensive and not available to everyone. So maybe it was a commissioned work that someone paid scribes to do.