Putting things in perspective

Religious debate is gonna get this thread moved if y'all aren't careful.
 
dmccormack said:
Number of original manuscripts unaltered by scribes?
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Couldn't the same be said for the books of the bible?

The writings of the ancient world have been translated so many times that something of the original meaning is lost - even if it's not through bad faith, the simple fact is that when you go from Sanskrit to Greek to Latin to French to English, things change.

For instance, the Psalm 121 could be translated from the original Latin in any number of ways: "I will raise my eyes unto the mountains, from whence cometh mine succor;" "I will lift my peepers in the hills, salvation will come to me;" "I shall look to the hills, my aid will come to me from there." All of those are quite literal and accurate (well, not the the "peepers" part) translations of the Latin (which itself was translated from some other previous language, as it wasn't orginally written in Latin; and that presumes that levavi oculos in montes is what was written by the original translator to Latin); all of them convey significantly different meanings, and that's only for about the most minor passage in the bible there is.

So, you're simply dealing with that problem with any ancient manuscript. And, with the bible, there's the additional dimension of wholesale revisions such as the King James version.

In other words, you run into major problems with any ancient text, especially when they're ones where you're not relying on the ancient text itself, but the "several-translations/editions/revisions-later" version.

So, when we read ancient texts that aren't the original ancient texts, and unless we're knowledgeable enough to be able to put those texts in context with the time (which none of us are), we have to take them all with pretty big grains of salt.
 
Obi Heed Kenobi said:
Couldn't the same be said for the books of the bible?
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No.

In the case of the Old Testament, there fewer Hebrew manuscripts as Jewish scribes ceremonially buried imperfect and worn manuscripts. Many ancient manuscripts were also lost or destroyed during Israel's history.

The Old Testament text was standardized by the Masoretic Jews by the sixth century A.D., and all manuscripts that deviated from the Masoretic Text were evidently eliminated. But the existing Hebrew manuscripts are supplemented by the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint (a third-century B.C. Greek translation of the Old Testament), the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Targums (ancient paraphrases of the Old Testament), as well as the Talmud (teachings and commentaries related to the Hebrew Scriptures).

There are over 5,000 Greek New testament manuscripts, around 8,000 Latin manuscripts, and 1,000 manuscripts in Syriac and Coptic.

There are also thousands of citations of New Testament passages by various contemporaries (one scholar has shown that 90% of the NT could be recreated base don these secondary sources alone).

In contrast, the typical number of existing manuscript copies for any of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, or Tacitus ranges from one to 20.


(Reference: http://bible.org/article/how-accurate-bible)
 
mantakos said:
My initial point was that there's nothing in any purportedly divinely inspired mythology that demonstrates any kind of scientific knowledge or other kind of prediction that the designer of the universe, or any omniscient deity, would surely know, but that the "scribes" would not.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of incorrect science typical of what a person living at the time of the mythology's composition might believe. The authors of the Bible would have no way of knowing the true nature of those lights in the sky, their commonality with our Sun, nor about the commonality between our planet and those lights that wander differently from the others, nor about evolution, nor that there's nothing inherently unique about the Earth, so they wrote a mythology that's consistent with the extent of their knowledge. This doesn't earn them much in the way of "plausibility", because everything is exactly the way it would be if they were just recording their mythology, which, of course, they were.

You proposed an example you thought proved prescient knowledge (that rain comes from clouds). I argued that your example is not valid. I'm not sure what makes this "wandering".
-harry
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OK, let's concede clouds.

What do you do with this: He hangs the earth on nothing.
 
"Dear God"

, hope you got the letter, and...
I pray you can make it better down here.
I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer
but all the people that you made in your image, see
them starving on their feet 'cause they don't get
enough to eat from God, I can't believe in you

Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but... I feel that I should be heard
loud and clear. We all need a big reduction in amount of tears
and all the people that you made in your image, see them fighting
in the street 'cause they can't make opinions meet about God,
I can't believe in you

Did you make disease, and the diamond blue? Did you make
mankind after we made you? And the devil too!

Dear God, don't know if you noticed, but... your name is on
a lot of quotes in this book, and us crazy humans wrote it, you
should take a look, and all the people that you made in your
image still believing that junk is true. Well I know it ain't, and
so do you, dear God, I can't believe in I don't believe in

I won't believe in heaven and hell. No saints, no sinners, no
devil as well. No pearly gates, no thorny crown. You're always
letting us humans down. The wars you bring, the babes you
drown. Those lost at sea and never found, and it's the same the
whole world 'round. The hurt I see helps to compound that
Father, Son and Holy Ghost is just somebody's unholy hoax,
and if you're up there you'd perceive that my heart's here upon
my sleeve. If there's one thing I don't believe in

it's you....


---Andy Partridge (unaltered by scribes)
 
dmccormack said:
No.

In the case of the Old Testament, there fewer Hebrew manuscripts as Jewish scribes ceremonially buried imperfect and worn manuscripts. Many ancient manuscripts were also lost or destroyed during Israel's history.
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So if I understand what you are saying. The word of G-d was imperfected and needed rewrites from time to time to make sure it was up to date?

But in the 6th Century AD the word was finally written down correctly and has not needed any updates so all that silly science stuff figured out since then is just wrong?
 
smigaldi said:
I see no reference to round. It could be a flat rectangle hanging on nothing. Not even gravitational forces
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True - but they knew it was round, and since they could conceivably walk from Cape horn to Norway (with a few rivers), they may have figured out that the world wasn't resting on anything, so I figure that leads to the idea of "Hanging the world on nothing" cause we are basically hanging in space. Except, we aren't - cause we hang on Gravity.

dmccormack said:
"round" isn't used in Job.

"Hangs on nothing" is.
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Which is technically wrong - we hang on Gravity.

That was not known in 600 BC
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You have no way of knowing that. We have testimony from Aristotle that the earth being round was common knowledge only 200 years later. Today something goes from obscure to common knowledge quite quickly - thanks to the internet. Back then, common knowledge took a long time to go from being "new" to "common".
 
dmccormack said:
No.

In the case of the Old Testament, there fewer Hebrew manuscripts as Jewish scribes ceremonially buried imperfect and worn manuscripts. Many ancient manuscripts were also lost or destroyed during Israel's history.

The Old Testament text was standardized by the Masoretic Jews by the sixth century A.D., and all manuscripts that deviated from the Masoretic Text were evidently eliminated. But the existing Hebrew manuscripts are supplemented by the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint (a third-century B.C. Greek translation of the Old Testament), the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Targums (ancient paraphrases of the Old Testament), as well as the Talmud (teachings and commentaries related to the Hebrew Scriptures).

There are over 5,000 Greek New testament manuscripts, around 8,000 Latin manuscripts, and 1,000 manuscripts in Syriac and Coptic.

There are also thousands of citations of New Testament passages by various contemporaries (one scholar has shown that 90% of the NT could be recreated base don these secondary sources alone).

In contrast, the typical number of existing manuscript copies for any of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, or Tacitus ranges from one to 20.


(Reference: http://bible.org/article/how-accurate-bible)
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To all of that, I say "so what?"

The number of original sources isn't the issue.

The issue is that those original sources were translated from the original language into another language, and then translated into another language, and then translated into another language, and then translated into another language, and then translated into English, and then completely rewritten with such terms as "thine, whence, thou" with the King James four centuries ago, and then revised a few times since. With the Bible especially, you have both translation issues and more "political" issues such as "how do we write this so it sounds 'holier'" (which is a major criticism of the KJ bible).

In other words, what you're reading today is in no way reflective of the original writing, no matter how authentic the "original" is or how many copies have survived.

Even for something where we do have the original, like De Bello Gallico, try reading an English version translated directly from the original, and then try reading the actual original. Big-time differences.

And then, consider that the Bible hasn't gone through that just once, but about 10 times (and that's conservative). You get a general idea of the original meaning, but to suggest that what you're reading is what was actually written 2+ milennia ago just doesn't hold water.

I don't mean any offense by it, but if you're going to say that modern-day translations of something like Plato might have been altered by later transcriptionists and translators...you have to acknowledge that the exact same thing happened with both the New and Old Testaments. It's just how it is.

For instance - caelum in Latin means both "heaven" and "sky." I can, in completely good faith, translate that Latin word in either way. But to say "I look to the skies" and "I look to the heavens" in English is to say two completely different things, and the same thing happens when you go from original langauge into Greek into Latin into French into English.
 
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Obi Heed Kenobi said:
To all of that, I say "so what?"

The number of original sources isn't the issue.

The issue is that those original sources were translated from the original language into another language, and then translated into another language, and then translated into another language, and then translated into another language, and then translated into English, and then completely rewritten with such terms as "thine, whence, thou" with the King James four centuries ago, and then revised a few times since. With the Bible especially, you have both translation issues and more "political" issues such as "how do we write this so it sounds 'holier'" (which is a major criticism of the KJ bible).

In other words, what you're reading today is in no way reflective of the original writing, no matter how authentic the "original" is or how many copies have survived.

Even for something where we do have the original, like De Bello Gallico, try reading an English version translated directly from the original, and then try reading the actual original. Big-time differences.

And then, consider that the Bible hasn't gone through that just once, but about 10 times (and that's conservative). You get a general idea of the original meaning, but to suggest that what you're reading is what was actually written 2+ milennia ago just doesn't hold water.

I don't mean any offense by it, but if you're going to say that modern-day translations of something like Plato might have been altered by later transcriptionists and translators...you have to acknowledge that the exact same thing happened with both the New and Old Testaments. It's just how it is.

For instance - caelum in Latin means both "heaven" and "sky." I can, in completely good faith, translate that Latin word in either way. But to say "I look to the skies" and "I look to the heavens" in English is to say two completely different things, and the same thing happens when you go from original langauge into Greek into Latin into French into English.
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Not true and you prove the point yourself when you say X means Y.

My first language is French and I can adequately translate anything I can say to English (except some jokes, as cultural context is needed to make something funny).
 
What do you do with this: He hangs the earth on nothing.
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Well, what are the choices?

The idea that there should be emptiness "underneath" the Earth, if you go far enough down, seems pretty necessary by intuition, as you have to account for the Sun and Moon moving across the sky, i.e. they sure seem to go "underneath" us, and then come back up again on the other side. I don't know that I've heard any mythologies that suggest that the Earth just goes on, downward, infinitely.

While there are certainly a variety of mythological answers for "what holds up the Earth", e.g. it rides on somebody or something's back, note that this tends to have paganistic implications. If the Old Testament tradition is that there was nothing, and then the Earth was created, and that God did all this, and that there is only God, then what is it supposed to be "hanging on", if not nothing? This really just suggests the lack of "additional mythology", i.e. we don't have a spare demi-god to stick down there to hold the thing up.

Of course, note that the idea of it "hanging" on anything is fallacious, it implies a notion that things fall "down" without understanding that this means "toward the center of the Earth". The suggestion seems to be that if there wasn't anything holding up the Earth, that it would be plummeting downward, but fortunately the will of God is holding it in place. But, of course, the Earth doesn't really "hang" at all, though we're running the risk of getting into overly literal translation issues, here.
-harry
 
dmccormack said:
Not true and you prove the point yourself when you say X means Y.
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Yes, true.

"au fait"
being conversant in or with, or instructed in or with.

conversant: familiar by use or study
instructed: furnished with knowledge

"He was always au fait on the latest events."
He was always studying the latest events.
He was always being instructed on the latest events.

He was studious.
He had dilligent teachers.

One phrase, two possible valid interpretations, your native language.

Only one such example.
 
Greebo said:
Yes, true.

"au fait"
being conversant in or with, or instructed in or with.

conversant: familiar by use or study
instructed: furnished with knowledge

"He was always au fait on the latest events."
He was always studying the latest events.
He was always being instructed on the latest events.

He was studious.
He had dilligent teachers.

One phrase, two possible valid interpretations, your native language.

Only one such example.
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Hmmm.. I've never heard or used that particular phrase...

"au temps" or "bien savant" or some such conveys "He's up on stuff.."
 
I just went hunting for french phrases and their meanings and found one with two definitions that were *similar* on the surface but led to very different meanings.

If it's that easy for me to find a French to English example of how translation can change meaning, it astounds me that you would brazenly claim that because you can "adequately" translate French to English that its impossible that over the thousands of years that have passed, that the Old and New Testaments could have varied in meaning at all.
 
Greebo said:
I just went hunting for french phrases and their meanings and found one with two definitions that were *similar* on the surface but led to very different meanings.

If it's that easy for me to find a French to English example of how translation can change meaning, it astounds me that you would brazenly claim that because you can "adequately" translate French to English that its impossible that over the thousands of years that have passed, that the Old and New Testaments could have varied in meaning at all.
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Well, my "brazen" claim contradicted an earlier post that translating from French to English implies incomprehensibility.

It doesn't. Language is imprecise at times, but -- on the whole -- the sense of meaning of a phrase or sentence or even entire poem can be conveyed through translation.

Many well-educated professionals have done significant study of Biblical transmission and don't have the "problems" posed here by some who likely have done little or no study in transmission.
 
dmccormack said:
Not true and you prove the point yourself when you say X means Y.

My first language is French and I can adequately translate anything I can say to English (except some jokes, as cultural context is needed to make something funny).
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How is it not true? I'm not saying that Language A can't be translated into Language B in a manner sufficient to convey the general context of what was meant in Language A when the translator speaks both A & B and is sufficiently versed in the culture of both A & B such that he knows that the word "caelum" in A should be translated as "sky" instead of "heaven" in B.

But, that's just not the situation when dealing with ancient texts. There's a huge difference between that and a contemporaneous, face-to-face, translation. First, we're talking spans of ~2,500 years instead of seconds - variations in culture, meanings, etc. Second, we're not just talking A to B. We're talking A-B-C-D-E-F-G. Third, throw in highly politicized (think Spanish Armada, papist dogs v. English heretics, within living memory; aside from the religious implications) - to the point of being questionable even when done - revisions, and that complicates the issues even more.

I'm not saying that today's translations don't convey the general sense of what the bible said when it was originally compiled (and, even when it was originally compiled, you're still dealing with the foregoing issues, because many of the individual books were really old when the bible was put together).

All I'm saying is that if you're going to accuse the translation that Harry posted earlier of suffering from alterations detracting from the current understanding of the original writing, then you have to acknowledge that the bible suffers from the same problems.

It's not a problem specific to the bible - it's a problem whenever you deal with any ancient writing that's gone through repeated translations and spans cultures. In other words, it's the same for Homer, Plato, Cicero, and Matthew/Mark/Luke/John.

2,000 years from now, people will have the same problems with the great works of today. It's just how it is.
 
dmccormack said:
Well, my "brazen" claim contradicted an earlier post that translating from French to English implies incomprehensibility.
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I didn't imply incomprehensibility at all, nor did I say anything about the problem being merely with French-English. In fact, if I remember correctly, my posts were in response to your assertion that a translation isn't reliable because of possible changes since it was written in ~2,600 years ago.

...
Many well-educated professionals have done significant study of Biblical transmission and don't have the "problems" posed here by some who likely have done little or no study in transmission.
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Just as many have found significant difference - both in actual words and in implied meanings.

It's not necessarily intentional. It's just an inherent drawback in translations that span multiple languages, cultures, and millenia.

As I said, I can, in entirely good faith, translate a single Latin word as either "sky" or "heaven." Unfortunately, the implications of the translator's choice on the receiving end are significantly different - for a variety of reasons. And that's just one word in a language that's merely one step in the origins of today's English bible.
 
Many well-educated professionals have done significant study of Biblical transmission and don't have the "problems" posed here by some who likely have done little or no study in transmission.
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One thing I've noticed about Bible scholars is that they tend to be members of a religion associated with their text, which is a bit of a conflict of interest.

The earliest fragments of papyrus that represent the oldest available transcription of the Bible text are all still hundreds of years older than the time of their purported original writing. There is simply no "appeal to authority" that can hand wave away the obvious question of "in what ways were they changed over the course of those centuries?", particularly when there are known examples of changes made subsequent to those earliest manuscripts.
-harry
 
dmccormack said:
Not true and you prove the point yourself when you say X means Y.

My first language is French and I can adequately translate anything I can say to English (except some jokes, as cultural context is needed to make something funny).
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really? that's pretty cool. where did you grow up?
 
One thing in the bible is true making the whole thing prescient? What about all the stuff that was wrong? Couldn't the one true thing be the blind squirrel finding the nut?
 
woodstock said:
really? that's pretty cool. where did you grow up?
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I was born in NY, and at 6 months my mother and I moved back to Quebec where I lived until I was 4 1/2. Then we returned to Brooklyn -- where I spoke nary a word of English my first day of school!

"William! Are you listening to me?!" :dunno:
 
Obi Heed Kenobi said:
I didn't imply incomprehensibility at all, nor did I say anything about the problem being merely with French-English. In fact, if I remember correctly, my posts were in response to your assertion that a translation isn't reliable because of possible changes since it was written in ~2,600 years ago.
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Then you're positing a discussion about the nature of language and transmission over time, not the reliability of manuscripts. My point is that there are thousands of manuscripts that have proven to be consistent whereas other ancient literature -- Aristotle, for example, has only a small few.

I don't agree that thoughts and descriptions can be irrecoverably altered simply by the passage of time.
 
dmccormack said:
Then you're positing a discussion about the nature of language and transmission over time, not the reliability of manuscripts. My point is that there are thousands of manuscripts that have proven to be consistent whereas other ancient literature -- Aristotle, for example, has only a small few.

....
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Well, sort of.

It depends on what you're relying upon. If you're capable of translating, I don't know, Aramaic directly into English, and capable of understanding the context of the Aramaic words such that you can find an English words that appropriate conveys the meaning of an Aramaic word - then I would absolutely agree that if you have an Aramaic document that is the original document drafted, you would have a translation that's reasonably reliable in conveying the meaning.

But, that's not what we have. We have documents in Latin that are translations of documents in Greek that were translations of documents in something like Sanskrit - each of which was translated a few centuries after the predecessor, which may itself have been a translation. We have documents in Aramaic, that may or may not be originals. And so forth.

It's not like the US Constitution, where we know that we have the original. Instead, we have things that we think we can date as having been drafted at pretty close to the time the actual original was drafted. But, there are very few things from the ancient world for which we can definitively say "this is the original."

So, the problem is two-fold. The first issue is with the authenticity of so-called "original manuscripts" - we just don't know that they're original. The second is with translations - even assuming a document to be the original, there's not anyone who can reliably translate certain words into the modern-day English equivalent, for a host of reasons, be it the fluid nature of language, the impossibilty for a modern-day American to understand 6th-century B.C. Mediterranean culture, etc.

It's nothing personal, it's nothing against the Bible, it's nothing against anyone who's ever tried to translate anything in the past. It's a simple acknowledgment that it's a problem inherent in the research of ancient documents and cultures.

So, even if something is translated today from THE original, you just can't place too much stock in the meaning being exactly what was meant 2,500 years ago in a different culture and language. It's certainly not impossible to get it right or even incredibly close (for instance, I'm reasonably confident in my ability to translate Caesar and Cicero into English in a manner that conveys what they originally meant) - but it's impossible to say, in certainty, that something is an absolute copy.

So, all I'm saying - anything that's translated has an inherent degree of unreliability.

Heck, not to turn it political - but with things that are 30 years old, and written in English, we'll often find ourselves arguing over what it means/meant. It's just a problem unique to language, be it written or spoken.
 
Obi Heed Kenobi said:
Well, sort of.

It depends on what you're relying upon. If you're capable of translating, I don't know, Aramaic directly into English, and capable of understanding the context of the Aramaic words such that you can find an English words that appropriate conveys the meaning of an Aramaic word - then I would absolutely agree that if you have an Aramaic document that is the original document drafted, you would have a translation that's reasonably reliable in conveying the meaning.

But, that's not what we have. We have documents in Latin that are translations of documents in Greek that were translations of documents in something like Sanskrit - each of which was translated a few centuries after the predecessor, which may itself have been a translation. We have documents in Aramaic, that may or may not be originals. And so forth.
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Not exactly.

That was true for the King james Version which used the Textus Receptus as its foundational document, but since 1611 there has been a tremendous amount of Bible scholarship (and not all of it by partisan boosters).

Various ancient manuscripts have been identified and dated. As I mentioned earlier, we also have documents and fragments by very early writers that quote long sections of the Gospels and epistles, thereby contradicting or supporting what we had to date.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed sinaticus, receptus, and other texts.

So far the manuscript evidence for the Old and New Testaments is overwhelming -- in fact, it exceeds the US Constitution, of which there only a limited number of copies.
 
dmccormack said:
Not exactly.

That was true for the King james Version which used the Textus Receptus as its foundational document, but since 1611 there has been a tremendous amount of Bible scholarship (and not all of it by partisan boosters).

Various ancient manuscripts have been identified and dated. As I mentioned earlier, we also have documents and fragments by very early writers that quote long sections of the Gospels and epistles, thereby contradicting or supporting what we had to date.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed sinaticus, receptus, and other texts.

So far the manuscript evidence for the Old and New Testaments is overwhelming -- in fact, it exceeds the US Constitution, of which there only a limited number of copies.
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How did we get on this anyway?

For some reason, I'm reminded of Han Solo saying, "boring conversation anyway," and then shooting the microphone. :)
 
So far the manuscript evidence for the Old and New Testaments is overwhelming -- in fact, it exceeds the US Constitution, of which there only a limited number of copies.
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I'm not sure what you mean by this. You can see the original hand-written US Constitution, the actual paper that bears the signatures, on display at the National Archives.

The number of "original copies" of Biblical texts is zero, there exist no "originals". The oldest scraps of text are still dated at over 100 years beyond the deaths of the nominal authors. And as you go to complete renditions of whole books, you're getting into the 200 to 300 year range. Note that the US Constitution isn't even this old, yet.

So while the constitution is preserved in original form, all Biblical text we have today are known to be copies. It's certainly "reassuring" to find that text from the 200s and 300s matches the traditional manuscripts drawn from later sources, but there's simply no accounting for anything that might have happened in those first 100-300 years.
-harry
 
mantakos said:
I'm not sure what you mean by this. You can see the original hand-written US Constitution, the actual paper that bears the signatures, on display at the National Archives.

The number of "original copies" of Biblical texts is zero, there exist no "originals". The oldest scraps of text are still dated at over 100 years beyond the deaths of the nominal authors. And as you go to complete renditions of whole books, you're getting into the 200 to 300 year range. Note that the US Constitution isn't even this old, yet.

So while the constitution is preserved in original form, all Biblical text we have today are known to be copies. It's certainly "reassuring" to find that text from the 200s and 300s matches the traditional manuscripts drawn from later sources, but there's simply no accounting for anything that might have happened in those first 100-300 years.
-harry
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The Constitution is on display - I've been there many times. It's an interesting parallel as the interpretation of those words remains the full time task of legions of scholars in and out of law.

Yet the number of validated (made by Congress) contemporary copies is less than the contemporary copies of the New Testament.
 
Yet the number of validated (made by Congress) contemporary copies is less than the contemporary copies of the New Testament.
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What are you considering to be a "contemporary copy" of the New Testament? The earliest scrap of paper with any partial New Testament text on it is from about 150AD.

I would say that if the earliest scrap of paper you have is dated to a period well after the death of the author, then you have no contemporary copies.
-harry
 
mantakos said:
What are you considering to be a "contemporary copy" of the New Testament? The earliest scrap of paper with any partial New Testament text on it is from about 150AD.

I would say that if the earliest scrap of paper you have is dated to a period well after the death of the author, then you have no contemporary copies.
-harry
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The New Testament books were written between 55 and 90 AD. The community responsible for hiding the Dead Sea Scrolls disbanded in 68 AD.

There are fragments in the Dead Sea Scrolls of NT Gospels.

Thus the earliest manuscripts are contemporary to the authors -- unparalleled in ancient writing.
 
Please take the religious debate to the spin zone.
 
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jesse said:
Please take the religious debate to the spin zone.
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So far this has been a civil debate on the nature of manuscripts and language.

The fact that the New and Old testaments is part of the debate does not make it "religious."

However, to help it end on a civil tone, I'll respectfully bow out.

Thanks to all the fellow pilots who engaged. It was an interesting discussion.
 
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Come now, you guys. The original languages of the Bible were/are rich in allegory and idioms. Too, the context of the verses must be preserved if one is to present a substantive argument.

EDIT: I hadn't seen Obi's post (#67) until just now.
 
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dmccormack said:
So far this has been a civil debate on the nature of manuscripts and language.

The fact that the New and Old testaments is part of the debate does not make it "religious."

However, to help it end on a civil tone, I'll respectfully bow out.

Thanks to all the fellow pilots who engaged. It was an interesting discussion.
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Okay Dan. I disagree. Not going to take this any further as Tristan is dragging me around the fair and I am likely to step in horse **** while concentrating on replying.
 
The New Testament books were written between 55 and 90 AD. The community responsible for hiding the Dead Sea Scrolls disbanded in 68 AD.
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What New Testament text exists in the Dead Sea Scrolls? My understanding is that it contains none.
-harry
 
I fail to see how having multiple copies of the same document increases the validity of it's interpretation and translation.

There are boundless copies of the Constitution available online, written in most of our nation's primary language, and we can't agree on what it means...
 
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