How The Bible Has Changed Over The Past 2000 Years

[bornagainathiest]

 

Post #6:

 

Nothing new presented in the video. These errors or changes have been known for centuries. It is no surprise that handwritten copies of books (especially before the printing press) can contain errors so the study of the biblical manuscripts is important. The science of textual criticism attempts to re......ates there’s 10 more years of work to do on the rest of the New Testament. 

 

IH I find things very interesting that you of all our posters would admit that research allows for finding of much error introduced into a supposed wholly true document.

 

kL

 

 

The alleged errors are of no consequence. 

 

 

We reject this faith-based assertion and await a proper answer, Ironhorse.

[ironhorse]

"#OU HAV# #ON $20 M#LLION."

 

Even though there are mistakes in this message, does not the  message still come through?

 

 

I have no problem admitting some minor mistakes in some copies that  were made through centuries of hand copying, but these have never changed the meaning or message of the text.

 

For example The Dead Sea Scrolls.

 

The following from: https://bible.org/article/dead-sea-scrolls

 

The Old Testament that we use today is translated from what is called the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were Jewish scholars who between A.D. 500 and 950 gave the Old Testament the form that we use today. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, the oldest Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the Masoretic Aleppo Codex which dates to A.D. 935.5.

 

With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now had manuscripts that predated the Masoretic Text by about one thousand years. Scholars were anxious to see how the Dead Sea documents would match up with the Masoretic Text. If a significant amount of differences were found, we could conclude that our Old Testament Text had not been well preserved. Critics, along with religious groups such as Muslims and Mormons, often make the claim that the present day Old Testament has been corrupted and is not well preserved. According to these religious groups, this would explain the contradictions between the Old Testament and their religious teachings.

 

After years of careful study, it has been concluded that the Dead Sea Scrolls give substantial confirmation that our Old Testament has been accurately preserved. The scrolls were found to be almost identical with the Masoretic text. Hebrew Scholar Millar Burrows writes, "It is a matter of wonder that through something like one thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition.'"

 

A significant comparison study was conducted with the Isaiah Scroll written around 100 B.C. that was found among the Dead Sea documents and the book of Isaiah found in the Masoretic text. After much research, scholars found that the two texts were practically identical. Most variants were minor spelling differences, and none affected the meaning of the text.

[bornagainathiest]

Thank you for this factual response, Ironhorse.

 

Now, if you would please apply the same kind of rigor to the other threads that await your replies, we would be grateful.

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

[LogicalFallacy]

 IH, it is known that the Jewish scribes built their lives around preserving texts. However the text still has contradictions in it, and if a highly accurate copy is the basis for God wouldn't the Quran apply equally well? Or any other religious text? The Quran is unaltered for... 1400 years or so. Much simpler and clearer - does this prove that it's the divine word of God? What about Egyptian equivalents of their texts which are written in stone and unchanged for thousands of years?

[Jeff]

It's really cool how the Jewish scholars worked so hard to preserve the New Testament too with its info regarding the messiah coming and dying. *sarcasm*

Hardly any discrepancies from oldest to most recent?

 

This dear lurkers is what is called "cherry picking". Stick to what works in your arguments favor and ignore the rest.

 

IH with the red stained fingers. Chief cherry picker.

[TheRedneckProfessor]

How can you be certain it is still the same message god intended, if you admit there are errors in it?

[bornagainathiest]

 

Nothing new presented in the video. These errors or changes have been known for centuries. It is no surprise that handwritten copies of books (especially before the printing press) can contain errors so the study of the biblical manuscripts is important. The science of textual criticism attempts to reconstruct the original text of books.

 

Professor Bill Warren is mentioned in the video posted so I thought I would share the following on a project he and others have been working on for several years.

 

http://www.nola.com/religion/index.ssf/2011/03/changes_to_the_bible_through_the_ages_are_being_studied_by_new_orleans_scholars.html (entire article)

 

A few paragraphs:

 

Working in a cluster of offices above the LifeWay Bookstore in Gentilly, Bible scholars are buried in a 20-year project to codify the thousands of changes, verse by verse, word by word — even letter by letter — that crept into the early New Testament during hundreds of years of laborious hand-copying.

 

The first phase of the researchers’ work is done. They have documented thousands of creeping changes, down to an extraneous Greek letter, across hundreds of early manuscripts from the 2nd through 15th centuries, said Bill Warren, the New Testament scholar who leads the project at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

 

After 10 years of work and the interruption of Hurricane Katrina, the seminary’s Center for New Testament Textual Studies has logged those changes, amounting to 17,000 pages of highly technical notes, all in Greek, into a searchable Internet database for use by Scripture scholars worldwide.

Changes are long studied

 

All of those early changes are well known, and have been for hundreds of years.

Indeed, many study Bibles point readers to scores of changes in italicized footnotes at the bottom of what sometimes seems like every page.

 

But nowhere have so many changes from hundreds of manuscripts, down to the letter, been collated in a single place and made searchable for scholars and serious students, verse by verse, through two commercial Bible software products, Accordance Bible Software and Bibleworks, Warren said.

 

Nor is there an Internet tool like the one being constructed now in the second phase of the project: the deep history of substantive textual changes and the meanings behind them, rendered in one place, in English, for pastors and amateur Bible scholars, he said.

The New Testament center this fall will publish on its own website its catalogue on substantive textual changes in two Epistles, Philippians and 1 Peter. Warren said the center hopes to get Luke online by the end of the year.

 

Beyond that, Warren estimates there’s 10 more years of work to do on the rest of the New Testament.

 

It matters very little how much the Bible has changed over 2,000 years or how much work Warren et al have done, are doing or will do.

 

Genesis 1 : 1 fails and always did.

 

When taken together, four things (two principles of cosmology, inflationary theory and math) see to that.

 

Thus Christianity is decapitated - without any need to go on to the next verse, let alone deal with changes, contradictions, errors, etc.

 

 

The factual error contained in Genesis 1 : 1 is not addressed or remedied by anything from the site Ironhorse linked to.

 

https://bible.org/article/dead-sea-scrolls

 

Thus Christianity remains decapitated.