RE: Why did God allow his words to be changed?
October 23, 2021 at 1:08 am
(This post was last modified: October 23, 2021 at 1:13 am by Oldandeasilyconfused.)
For pertinence; My best friend was a senior barrister for the Crown (Like a US ADA) A brilliant man, and the only person I've ever met who had true total recall. Saw him in action. His peers called him "The shark". Knew a great deal about the law. He was also a technophobe and computer illiterate. Knew nothing about history or literature ,was an atheist and had no interest in or knowledge of religion.
My point here is that I will defer to a lawyer in legal matters, but generally not in anything else unless he has supported his claims(s) with evidence. A person may have expert knowledge in something, backed up by at least one post graduate degree. Fabulous! To try to use that education to claim expert knowledge in unrelated fields is simply an argument from authority fallacy. Oh, having known a lot of lawyers socially, I've never seen convincing evidence that studying law made those people better thinkers. If anything they became more narrow minded and dogmatic. I'm sure there are exceptions.
Back to the topic.
Fundamentalist christians love to claim that the Bible is the inerrant word of god. well, it ain't and probably never has been, even if one accepts the claim that the Bible is divinely inspired.
As far as I'm aware the oldest extant copy of the bible is from the third century. That means from first composition till then, that bible may only have ben copied and recopied etc etc for not much over 100 years. Fantastic! BUT that meant that every other copy had ben copied and recopied by hand, for about 1200 years. Also interesting to note than in early times, many scribes were illiterate. IE they could copy, but could not read. Mistakes were made from ignorance and pieces added and subtracted at the whim of later scribes.
On top of that we have the enormous difficulty of accurately translating from Ancient Greek into a modern language.
The best explanation I've read about what the bible says or does not say is "Misquoting Jesus; The Story Behind who changed The Bible And Why" by Bart Ehrman.
"Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (published as Whose Word Is It? in United Kingdom) is a book by Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[1] The book introduces lay readers to the field of textual criticism of the Bible. Ehrman discusses a number of textual variants that resulted from intentional or accidental manuscript changes during the scriptorium era. The book made it to The New York Times Best Seller List.[2]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misquoting_Jesus
Below is a link to 'The Cathedral lecture' on the topic (Cathedral College of Washington National Cathedral) by Dr Bart Ehrman. Highly recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz-z8j67Ids
There are at least a dozen lectures on YouTube by Bart Ehrman on the full range of his writings.
My point here is that I will defer to a lawyer in legal matters, but generally not in anything else unless he has supported his claims(s) with evidence. A person may have expert knowledge in something, backed up by at least one post graduate degree. Fabulous! To try to use that education to claim expert knowledge in unrelated fields is simply an argument from authority fallacy. Oh, having known a lot of lawyers socially, I've never seen convincing evidence that studying law made those people better thinkers. If anything they became more narrow minded and dogmatic. I'm sure there are exceptions.
Back to the topic.
Fundamentalist christians love to claim that the Bible is the inerrant word of god. well, it ain't and probably never has been, even if one accepts the claim that the Bible is divinely inspired.
As far as I'm aware the oldest extant copy of the bible is from the third century. That means from first composition till then, that bible may only have ben copied and recopied etc etc for not much over 100 years. Fantastic! BUT that meant that every other copy had ben copied and recopied by hand, for about 1200 years. Also interesting to note than in early times, many scribes were illiterate. IE they could copy, but could not read. Mistakes were made from ignorance and pieces added and subtracted at the whim of later scribes.
On top of that we have the enormous difficulty of accurately translating from Ancient Greek into a modern language.
The best explanation I've read about what the bible says or does not say is "Misquoting Jesus; The Story Behind who changed The Bible And Why" by Bart Ehrman.
"Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (published as Whose Word Is It? in United Kingdom) is a book by Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[1] The book introduces lay readers to the field of textual criticism of the Bible. Ehrman discusses a number of textual variants that resulted from intentional or accidental manuscript changes during the scriptorium era. The book made it to The New York Times Best Seller List.[2]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misquoting_Jesus
Below is a link to 'The Cathedral lecture' on the topic (Cathedral College of Washington National Cathedral) by Dr Bart Ehrman. Highly recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz-z8j67Ids
There are at least a dozen lectures on YouTube by Bart Ehrman on the full range of his writings.
