The Bible (a discussion)

@Romeo Fabulini,

Well, then you certainly know how the work was done in a scriptorium. And you are educated about the results and how and why the mistakes were made.

Gensfleisch aka Gutenberg, by the way, invented just one printing press. The first one.
I don't think that troops of the Electorate of Mainz were called SS and/or had been to Russia around 1400 (or any time later).
But perhaps you can illuminate my lack of historical knowledge - especially, if are a member of that SS unit

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@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

Many people can look at it and say that it seems like fiction.

And that it "seems like fiction" to them might be because they are frightened that it is not fiction when understood properly. And they show no sign of wishing to understand it properly preferring instead the simple and pedantic, distorted guidance of those seeking to exploit the common desire to discredit the Christian teachings on sexual activity.

Understanding The Bible is not within the mental capacity of the common man anyway. The common man is simply the unwitting beneficiary of its truth.

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@Frank Apisa,

The charge that people are frightened is easy to make. It is a belief and a self-congratulatory one into the lovely bargain.

"The truly frightened people can't" is a guess masquerading as a fact.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

But perhaps you can illuminate my lack of historical knowledge - especially, if are a member of that SS unit

We've seen he has the correct mentality.

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@Romeo Fabulini,

Quote:

Good point; if the Bible really had been edited and prettied up over the centuries as atheists claim, they'd have certainly cut that bit out in case it confused people.

Indeed, and the differences in versions would be far worse. These books received special attention from copists.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Quote:
Good point; if the Bible really had been edited and prettied up over the centuries as atheists claim, they'd have certainly cut that bit out in case it confused people.

Indeed, and the differences in versions would be far worse. These books received special attention from copists.

You people people are completely beyond deluded. You are ******* lunatics.

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@Wilso,

Wilso wrote:

300 year game of Chinese whispers.

That is certainly a likely result, and can be seen in , for example, the flood story in Genesis. The contradictions there are very likely the consequence of more than one author.

The significance of the long time lag between the time of the putative Jesus and the oldest copies of the so-called gospels that we possess is that the time could have been used to produce accounts which essentially agree with one another. Matthew, Mark and Luke are the synoptic gospels, and it would have been important to assure that they were all telling the same story. John is a problem for them, because that boy was writing as though he were on drugs. I know of no scriptural tradition which does not have hundreds of years between the time when they were alleged to have been formulated and the oldest existent coppies, and that includes the alleged teachings of the so-called Buddha.

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@Setanta,

Paper is perishable.

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@Wilso,

You don't know what you're talking about. The oldest copy of Plato's Republic is dated circa 900 AD. I guess that's 1300 years of Chinese whispers?...

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@Olivier5,

Paper became available in the Middle East in 751AD. What was available before then is verbal and on stones.

Egypt invented papyrus paper, but it was not practical in many ways. From Wiki.

Quote:

Papyrus was first manufactured in Egypt and Southern Sudan as far back as the fourth millennium BCE.[3][not in citation given][4] The earliest archaeological evidence of papyrus was excavated in 2012-2013 at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient Egyptian harbor located on the Red Sea coast. These documents date from ca. 2560-2550 BCE (end of the reign of Khufu).[3] In the first centuries BCE and CE, papyrus scrolls gained a rival as a writing surface in the form of parchment, which was prepared from animal skins.[5] Sheets of parchment were folded to form quires from which book-form codices were fashioned. Early Christian writers soon adopted the codex form, and in the Græco-Roman world, it became common to cut sheets from papyrus rolls to form codices.

Codices were an improvement on the papyrus scroll, as the papyrus was not pliable enough to fold without cracking and a long roll, or scroll, was required to create large-volume texts. Papyrus had the advantage of being relatively cheap and easy to produce, but it was fragile and susceptible to both moisture and excessive dryness. Unless the papyrus was of perfect quality, the writing surface was irregular, and the range of media that could be used was also limited.

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@cicerone imposter,

Papyrus, my bad, is perishable.

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I don't know what that idiot Olive Tree is on about. I didn't mention paper. So, for example, the oldest surviving example of the alleged teachings of the putative Buddha were written on bark. There is no record of any earlier copies. That copy written on bark has survived either slightly more than or just slightly less than 2000 years. The so-called Dead Sea scrolls are on parchment, and use a soot based, un-fixed ink.

The point of what i was saying has nothing to do with "materials science."

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@Setanta,

Quote:

you can lead a human to knowledge, but you can't make him think

.

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@Setanta,

Well educated people do not use the expression "Chinese whispers" to denote confusion and incomprehensibility because it is thought to be derogatory towards China and its people and culture.

Such people would never allow themselves the easy indulgence of using the same word three times in a short sentence.

If Setanta does not accept that Jesus existed and that The Bible has no credible historical authenticity one has to wonder why he exercises himself on the subject in a manner which prevents him being able to engage with it on a dispassionate intellectual level.

What exactly is he attempting to achieve? He most certainly has never read The Book.

The KJV was a very large project of composition and it was intended to be preached to a mainly illiterate audience which was readily given to superstitions and Pagan influences as diverse as the various geographical locations in which it was circulated. It was intended to unify, entertain and edify. And to get this show on the road.

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@spendius,

And when it comes to inventing witty names for characters Setanta has a great deal of catching up to do to match the names in The Bible.

When King David was suffering from a "heat" deficit a search was mounted for a lady who might warm him up. One Abishag was selected.

The use of the word Jebus is un-scholarly unless an explanation is offered relating to the Jebusites in Canaan and the name being in use to designate what is now called Jerusalem.

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@Setanta,

My point is simply that copies get lost, damaged, burnt etc, whatever the material used to make them. The oldest SURVIVING copy of a book is often much posterior to the date it was composed, because the first copies got lost.

Therefore it is stupid to refer to the first three centuries of the CE as "chinese whispers". The transmission was not oral for the most part. The current consensus is that the synoptics were written towards the end of the first century, and John during the second century.

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@Olivier5,

And by the way, the Dead Sea scrolls are written on a variety of materials including parchment but also papyrus and copper.

Before the discovery of the dead sea scrolls, the oldest extent copies of the Jewish bible (tanakh) were masoretic texts from the middle ages, circa 1000 AD. The scrolls included a near complete Isaiah, which was compared with the masoretic text (from 1100 years later):

Quote:

This copy of Isaiah contains many minor differences from the later Masoretic text (the text which forms the basis of the modern Hebrew Bible). Most of the differences are simply grammatical (for example, spelling certain words with an extra letter that does not alter the pronunciation).[citation needed]

I'll dig this. Would be interesting to know more about these differences. My argument here being that copists can be reliable, even over more than a thousand years.

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Quote:

Frank Apisa said re the Bible: Many people can look at it and say that it seems like fiction.
The truly frightened people can't. They are afraid to do so.
You can't...can you?

If the bible was squeaky-clean it'd be too good to be true, but even atheists admit it's full of jarring bits and contradictions.
Obviously if writing teams over the centuries had wanted to spruce it up by editing out those bits to make it look good, they'd have done so long before now.
Instead, they left all the puzzling bits in, therefore the Bible has the ring of truth about it.. Smile

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@Olivier5,

Well, Captain Stupid, i did not refer to "Chinese Whispers," a term with which i was completely unfamiliar until i read it here. However, you have provided us with a tour de force of your muddled thinking, which not only usually has no evidentiary basis, but which often contradicts what you have already claimed. For example, i only responded to your stupidity because it was a one liner which i read before i realized it was just another case of you attempting to argue, just because you like to argue, and not becuase you have any basis for your argument. In that silly rant . . .

Olivier5 wrote:

Paper is perishable.

and then . . .

Olivier5 wrote:

Papyrus, my bad, is perishable.

Yet now you say that parts of the Dead Sea scrolls were written on papyri. So how do you account for those papyri surviving, after having attempted to claim that there are no copies of the so-called gospels which survive which are any earlier than the early 4th century, because papyri are perishable?

The accepted canon of the so-called gospels was based on the scholarship of Origen of Alexandria. Eusebius Pamphilus, author of the Nicene Creed, established the accepted canon of the so-called gospels based on the work of Origen, whom he idolized. Eusebius Pamphilus is considered the "father of church history." I don't find it at all odd that no copies of the so-called gospels survive from any earlier than the lifetime of Eusebius, given that Eusebius worked to hard to establish the accepted cannon based on Origen's scholarship.

Before you come along and shoot your big mouth off about topics such as this, i suggest you make the effort to educate yourself, Mr. Scientific Culture.

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@Romeo Fabulini,

Romeo Fabulini wrote:

Quote:
Frank Apisa said re the Bible: Many people can look at it and say that it seems like fiction.
The truly frightened people can't. They are afraid to do so.
You can't...can you?

If the bible was squeaky-clean it'd be too good to be true, but even atheists admit it's full of jarring bits and contradictions.
Obviously if writing teams over the centuries had wanted to spruce it up by editing out those bits to make it look good, they'd have done so long before now.
Instead, they left all the puzzling bits in, therefore the Bible has the ring of truth about it..

They are not puzzling parts, Romeo...they are contradictions. If, however, you want to think the Bible has the ring of truth about it...go for it.

1 Reply

The Bible (a discussion)

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