|
|
|
|
|
Users viewing this topic:
none
|
|
Login  | |
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/3/2008 8:12:49 AM
|
|
|
earthless
Posts: 4832
Joined: 4/11/2005
From: where bbq pigeons roast....
Status: online
|
Do know that the veracity for Scripture being God's Word for all of mankind is astounding. We have historical evidence, manuscript evidence, archaeological evidence, the science of statistical probability, etc..
The Bible keeps proving itself to an unbelieving world with each turn of the archaeological spade.
_____________________________
Probing Today's Religious Movements | Promoting Doctrinal Discernment & Critical Thinking | Providing Reasons for Christian Faith & Ethics
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/3/2008 11:25:37 AM
|
|
|
groovymovieman
Posts: 174
Joined: 4/17/2005
Status: offline
|
quote:
Do know that the veracity for Scripture being God's Word for all of mankind is astounding. We have historical evidence, manuscript evidence, archaeological evidence, the science of statistical probability, etc..
The Bible keeps proving itself to an unbelieving world with each turn of the archaeological spade.
I agree. I don't think many of our tranlations are as good as they could be, but the truth still comes through.
_____________________________
To a pharisee, "Truth is more important than love."
To the spiritually healthy, "Love is the most important part of truth."
www.familyroommedia.com
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/3/2008 11:29:56 AM
|
|
|
rcjames
Posts: 4618
Joined: 7/15/2005
From: Oklahoma
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: groovymovieman
I agree. I don't think many of our tranlations are as good as they could be, but the truth still comes through.
Hey groovy, a banner day; I agree completely with your post.
Thanks
RC
_____________________________
Just a country Preacher's humble opinion
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/4/2008 11:19:26 AM
|
|
|
groovymovieman
Posts: 174
Joined: 4/17/2005
Status: offline
|
quote:
Hey groovy, a banner day; I agree completely with your post.
Thanks
RC
Hold on, I'm going to go mark this on my calander and pop open a bottle of grape juice and celebrate! Care to join me? 
_____________________________
To a pharisee, "Truth is more important than love."
To the spiritually healthy, "Love is the most important part of truth."
www.familyroommedia.com
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/4/2008 2:51:24 PM
|
|
|
terryjohn
Posts: 378
Joined: 3/23/2007
Status: offline
|
All translation involves interpretation and unfortunately as language is not an exact science two men can look at the same thing and get totally different meanings. Nevertheless, the issue is not that this translation is better than this or that these men did this for in reality our faith is not in words but in Spirit for we do not beleive in dead words on peices of paper but in a risen living God.
Faith demands that God has faithfully left us His word and this word must lead us to Christ and Chirst alone. I care very little about men killing each other over how best to translate this verse or that verse for I would see Jesus and only those of a pure heart can. Men have many evil desires but God is capable of using them for good, hence, a man may try to pervert the word of God but in doing so only goes to confirm and promote the truth. You could say the truth will always come out.
Now with regard to the church at Roman having something to do with the formation of the bible, we must remember that Paul never suggests that they were anything other than christian and that God built up this organistion like Israel at the time to fulfill His purposes. That is He used the might and resources of the empire of Roman to do what men could not. They preserved the faith and faithfully transmitted what God has done in Christ. Let us not suggest there were no men and women of faith in the early church of Roman for there were and many of them died for it. And even if there were evil men in it for their own selfish desires they did not know the value of what they were dealing with and left much of it to men of faith.
When you come to think of it, how much of the bible do we have to read or understand before we have faith in Christ? Is it possible to have read none of it and still believe in the love and righteousess of Christ alone after hearing a two minute presentation of the gospel? I guess I am saying I don't care how you say it, the message remains the same.
The above goes to show us that it is not about the words but the meaning. If it is just about words or our putting our faith in them then we have put our faith in the wrong things for satan is a twister of words. Your could say that scripture is infellible but how would we know that being fellible men? Even if scripture were perfect, we would never know it if we first did not have faith and love in Christ. The truth is men and women found faith and hope in Christ and rejoiced and died for it without ever having read the new testament. Yes men can pervert scripture but faith can't and as faith has persisted so too has the message of the gospel. Hence, do not concern yourself whether this man uses these words or these gramatical structures or even this langauge for the mesage is always revealed through faith and faith alone. It is almost like each generation has handed on not a book but a faith, love and righteouness of God. We worship the word but the word was with God and is God and now we see Him in Christ. It makes me wonder if men are trying to come to the Father through scripture rather than through Christ.
In the end, debates of the kind you mention are nothing but the faith, love and righteouness of Christ is everything. You say you can have no faith if scripture can be proved to have been falsified but unless you can prove that that love and righteouness of God is meaningless and of no value, faith in Christ will continue to be found and continue to move men and women to attempt great things for God. In fact, after 2000 years of satan doing his best, faith, love, rightoeuness and joy in Christ is still found, for men of courage have withstood the onslaught of satan and been found faithful while many were not.
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/4/2008 3:00:24 PM
|
|
|
blue1914
Posts: 280
Joined: 6/21/2005
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: rcjames
quote:
ORIGINAL: groovymovieman
I agree. I don't think many of our tranlations are as good as they could be, but the truth still comes through.
Hey groovy, a banner day; I agree completely with your post.
Thanks
RC
Me Three
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/4/2008 3:43:19 PM
|
|
|
GroupW
Posts: 1494
Joined: 11/16/2007
Status: online
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: glimmerinthedark
I'm a born again christian, and believe in God's word. However recently i've been hearing that the Bible was manipulated. Some say the Romans edited it for whatever reasons. Others say that throughout history the Bible was touched up and rearranged. Can someone explain this? I feel like i'm losing faith whenever I think about these claims. 
There's actually a decent book on this topic. It's written by a fellow who is no friend of evangelical Christianity (Bart Ehrmann) but even he in his writing is forced to admit that the evidence we have today would lead us to believe that we have a very good representation of what the original texts probably looked like. In his estimation, we have a text at our disposal which faithfully recreates the vast majority of what was in the original manuscripts. Really not too shabby for being 2 thousand years old!
BT
Edit: So basically, there is some truth to the statement that it's been fiddled with but that only tells a small and inflammatory part of the story. Fortunately today we can also reliably tell the "fiddled" from the "unfiddled" due to a very good archaeological record. We should all be grateful to the army of scholars who've reconstructed these texts for us and to the vast, vast majority of scribes in antiquity who did their work WITHOUT the fiddling.
< Message edited by GroupW -- 4/4/2008 3:50:39 PM >
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/4/2008 3:53:28 PM
|
|
|
deermousie
Posts: 1194
Joined: 9/26/2007
Status: offline
|
The Bible was written over a period of about 4000 years by about 40 people: kings, prophets, fishermen, a Gentile doctor, a priest, a shepherd, a tax collector, and so on, and they all agree. Get 40 people together and see if they agree on anything! The "scarlet thread" of redemption by the Messiah runs through every book (except Esther, where God isn't mentioned, but there's still good stuff there).
We don't have the original texts that were inspired by God, but the oldest ones we have are 98.4% indentical. The "problems" are like a missing punctuation or a misspelled word. We have more copies of Scripture than there are of Shakespeare's works, and they are more identical than Shakespeare's works, which are only 400 years old.
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (and Chaldean for a few chapters of Daniel) and was translated into Greek around 200 B.C. by 70 OT scholars (hence, the text is called the Septuagent, meaning 70). The New Testament was probably finished by 90 A.D. (only 57 years after the Crucifixion, so most of the writers were eye witnesses or hung out with eye witnesses) and is written in Koine Greek which is the most accurate language mankind has ever had.
When you look at the Bible in your hand, it was probably translated from the oldest texts in Hebrew and Greek into English (once!) by a committee of Hebrew and Greek Christian scholars. Most Bibles on the market fit this description.
There is no book in history that's as close to the original manuscripts as the Bible. God said the Bible is "God breathed." (2 Tim. 3:16)
About the sources of your anxiety: bad guys who hate God can't hurt God so they have to make Christians stop believing in God. The fastest ways to do that is to insist that Jesus didn't rise from the dead and that the Bible isn't accurate. Smell the sulfur?
A great reference book is "Evidence that demands a verdict" by Josh McDowell. A easier version of this is called, "More than a carpenter" by Josh. Go give your faith a party!
_____________________________
Want to know where a certain word or phrase in the Bible is found? www.biblegateway.com Yay!
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/4/2008 4:14:00 PM
|
|
|
WesP
Posts: 1761
Joined: 11/28/2005
From: Where God needs me to be
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: laminatedworm
quote:
ORIGINAL: glimmerinthedark
I'm a born again christian, and believe in God's word. However recently i've been hearing that the Bible was manipulated. Some say the Romans edited it for whatever reasons. Others say that throughout history the Bible was touched up and rearranged. Can someone explain this? I feel like i'm losing faith whenever I think about these claims.
Well I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but there is overwhelming evidence that supports scriptures have been tampered with. And they obviously have. One can simply read the bible and see that much has been changed or removed. Not every change is detrimental mind you, but some changes or additions very much are.
The biggest downfall to the idea that the bible is infallible is a simple concept really. NONE of the original manuscripts exist. Period. Even copies of the copies of the copies of the copies do not exist. Our earliest known copies are from 2nd century AD, 150-200 years after the death of christ. So there is no way to go back to the original source to see how it compares.
It's like the secret game. You whisper a secret into the ear of a neighbor, they whisper it into their neighbor and so on and so forth. By the time it reaches the end, the story has completely changed. There were no printing presses, no copy machines, no scanners. If you wanted a copy of the book, you had to sit down and copy the entire thing word for word. This creates even more of a problem because of the literacy rates of the time were horrid. As is expected. That's why most of the times scriptures were read publicly so those who could not read, could hear.
Bart Ehrman give a good example of this, he states that the earliest known manuscripts of Mark do NOT have the last 12 verses. And in a sense...the writing style does not flow with the rest of the book at all. To go even further, open up an NIV bible and you will see a footnote stating that the most reliable early manuscripts do not have Mark 16:9-20. You can even view it here Mark 16:9-20 at Bible Gateway.
If the earliest known scriptures do not have these versus, what does that mean? Only one thing, it was added later.
And to think: God promised us that His word would not pass away! 
_____________________________
Peace,
Wes
___________________________________
<--- BTW, this is the true function of corn! It is to help the oil industry and its functionaries, not detract from them!
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/4/2008 5:10:19 PM
|
|
|
robto
Posts: 154
Joined: 10/10/2006
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: deermousie
We don't have the original texts that were inspired by God, but the oldest ones we have are 98.4% indentical.
Since we don't have the originals, how could you possibly know about the 98.4% identical?
quote:
The "problems" are like a missing punctuation or a misspelled word.
Well, in many cases, yes. But in other cases, whole verses are inserted or are missing. For example, the Last Supper in Luke exists in a short version in some manuscripts and a long version in others.
_____________________________
The Theory of Almost Everything: Everything you always wanted to know about elementary particles but were afraid to ask
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/4/2008 5:23:40 PM
|
|
|
deermousie
Posts: 1194
Joined: 9/26/2007
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: robto
quote:
ORIGINAL: deermousie
We don't have the original texts that were inspired by God, but the oldest ones we have are 98.4% indentical.
Since we don't have the originals, how could you possibly know about the 98.4% identical?
98.4% identical to each other. Scores of copies, all almost exactly alike. No other historical texts have such a large number of copies or are so close to each other.
quote:
quote:
The "problems" are like a missing punctuation or a misspelled word.
Well, in many cases, yes. But in other cases, whole verses are inserted or are missing. For example, the Last Supper in Luke exists in a short version in some manuscripts and a long version in others.
Which manuscripts are you referring to? See "Evidence that demands a verdict" - there is more to the story than I've put here, and it would take a lot of space to explain. Someone has already laid it out and better than I could. McDowell takes on Higher Criticism, too, in the second volume.
_____________________________
Want to know where a certain word or phrase in the Bible is found? www.biblegateway.com Yay!
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/4/2008 6:39:11 PM
|
|
|
Seul_Chemin
Posts: 3
Joined: 4/3/2008
Status: offline
|
People will find any excuse to deny God's Word. The most favorite one is to deny the Bible's infallibility. Even if you prove 100% the Bible the unbeliever will still make excuses in order to ignore God.
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/5/2008 1:04:35 AM
|
|
|
phyl2
Posts: 227
Joined: 4/12/2005
Status: offline
|
quote:
Well I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but there is overwhelming evidence that supports scriptures have been tampered with. And they obviously have. One can simply read the bible and see that much has been changed or removed. Not every change is detrimental mind you, but some changes or additions very much are.
Actually, the evidence is overwhelming that we have the true word of God exactly as He preserved it and as He gave it. It is interesting, though, that you say on the one had "One can saimply read the bible and see that much as been changed or removed." but on the other hand claim that we don't even know what was in the originals because they are long gone.
quote:
The biggest downfall to the idea that the bible is infallible is a simple concept really. NONE of the original manuscripts exist. Period. Even copies of the copies of the copies of the copies do not exist. Our earliest known copies are from 2nd century AD, 150-200 years after the death of christ. So there is no way to go back to the original source to see how it compares.
The earliest known copies are from the 2nd century AD, true, but that is NOT 150-200 years after the death of Christ. Jesus' death and resurrection happened mid-30's AD, so your claim of 200 years is way off. But, we aren't dating from the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are dating from the time it was written, which in the case of the last book was around 90 AD. So, early to mid 2nd century AD is not that long after the NT was written.
quote:
It's like the secret game. You whisper a secret into the ear of a neighbor, they whisper it into their neighbor and so on and so forth. By the time it reaches the end, the story has completely changed.
Copying manuscripts is way different from the secret game. In the secret game, the message is whispered into the ear, with the listener not always hearing correctly, and not allowed to ask questions to make sure they heard correctly. That's what makes the game so fun. But, in manuscript copying, you have the text in front of you, you see exactly what was written, and you can go back and check your work and correct it.
quote:
There were no printing presses, no copy machines, no scanners. If you wanted a copy of the book, you had to sit down and copy the entire thing word for word.
It's true, copying by hand was very difficult, however, the manuscript evidence shows that the accuracy of the Biblical manuscript copies is phenominal. First it is incredible that the earliest known copies dates as close to the original manuscripts as they do. If you take other ancient documents, such as the works of Plato or the writings of Caesar, the earliest known copies are around 1000 years after the original documents were written.
Second, the number of Biblical manuscripts that we have today is also phenominal. There are over 5000 Greek NT manuscripts or manuscript fragments known to us today, and then there are the ancient translations manuscripts. There are around 8 or 9000 manuscripts in Latin, and I believe the total number of NT manuscripts is around 2400. But, the other documents that I mentioned have only a handful, some have only 5 or 6, some have around a dozen, I think one has around 100.
Third, although there are some differences textually in the Biblical manuscripts, the agreement amongst them is actually incredible, whereas those other documents have a much higher incidence of textual variances. And, since we have such a great number of manuscripts as we do, we can pretty accurately determine which variant is the correct one.
quote:
This creates even more of a problem because of the literacy rates of the time were horrid. As is expected. That's why most of the times scriptures were read publicly so those who could not read, could hear.
Literacy rates have nothing to do with it. It wasn't illiterate people who were making the copies. But, I have an idea that the literacy rates were not as horrid as you think they were!
But, we have other means of confirming that scripture was accurately copied, and that is found in the works of the early Christian writers and the Biblical quotes that they wrote. I have read that if all copies of the Bible were to ever be destroyed, it could reasonably well be recreated using the Biblical quotes that are found in the works of the early Christian writers.
Yet another evidence that our Bible is accurate can be found in the copies - some copies were copied in Africa, others in Europe, and others in Asia, yet with that diversity of geographical areas, there is a very close agreement between the copies when compared from one geographical area to another.
quote:
Bart Ehrman give a good example of this, he states that the earliest known manuscripts of Mark do NOT have the last 12 verses.
Yes it is true, some of the earliest manuscripts do not have this passage, and there is one other passage where the situation is similar, some manuscripts have it, others don't. This has been the case since early in Biblical history. We have the testimony of some of the early Christian writers that some manuscripts had those passages while others didn't. For these instances, we can ask for the guidance of the Holy Spirit concerning them. He has been given us in order to guide us into all truth, and we can be sure that He will!
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/5/2008 1:14:50 AM
|
|
|
phyl2
Posts: 227
Joined: 4/12/2005
Status: offline
|
quote:
Well it obviously did pass away otherwise the originals would still be in tact and held firmly in place.
You don't know that they aren't intact somewhere. I believe they very well could be, and only God knows where. When He chooses, He can bring them to light.
quote:
Do you not think that if you were god, and you really wanted your words to be forever, that you might make your original documents that contained your original spoken words a little more protected than that?
His word is forever, whether we acknowledge it or not. In fact, it is forever, even if all written copies are destroyed.
God left us a lot of proof that He exists, yet He chose to leave it in such a way that we don't have 100%, undeniable proof that He exists. He takes us almost there, but then leaves that last step to be a step of faith. I believe it is the same way with His word. He left us a vast amount of evidence that His word is perfect and preserved accurately. But, He again arranged it so that the last step is a step of faith.
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/5/2008 1:21:40 AM
|
|
|
phyl2
Posts: 227
Joined: 4/12/2005
Status: offline
|
quote:
The whole problem with all of this is that if this is supposed to be a perfect word, there should be no room open for interpretation. An omniscient god would have foreseen this and surely created a better method for getting his point across. Especially considering that majority of the world didn't speak Greek or Hebrew...
As I said, He gave us ample evidence with which to believe, leaving that last step open to be a step of faith. We have been given enough evidence, it is up to us to chose whether we want to believe the truth. If we chose not to believe it, that is our choice, not because there is not enough evidence.
And, when the New Testament was given, the majority of the word DID speak Greek (and the Old Testament was already translated into Greek). And when large areas of the world began to cease to speak and read Greek, the Bible was translated into the languages they did speak, so they still had the word of God.
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/6/2008 5:39:39 AM
|
|
|
SnapDraggin
Posts: 20
Joined: 2/10/2007
Status: offline
|
Translating a Bible isn't easy, and to give an example, here is something said by someone who collects manuscripts, regarding Mary..
"The Vulgate implies a state of having been filled with grace; the Greek, as translated by Erasmus, suggests that the grace was already there. This may seem like hair-splitting to us, five hundred years later and accustomed to a variety of Bible translations, but half the theology of the late Middle Ages hinges on an exact understanding of God's relationship to the Virgin Mary at the moment of the Incarnation." ~ Christopher de Hamel
With that said, to add, Origen put together a magnificent long-lost manuscript called the Hexapla. It was done to compare the Old Testament Greek against the Hebrew and each other, mainly to try and curb corruption in the texts. So, even as early as the 2nd and 3rd century, the church fathers knew about corruption in the texts.
Saint Jerome was commisioned to "update" the Old Latin with the New Latin (not very welcomed) and he started working on the Vulgate, also studying Origen's Hexapla. The Vulgate actually only got accepted hundreds and hundreds of years after Saint Jerome wrote it, where some apocryphal books got added to Jerome's original Vulgate. The orignal Vulgate only differs with one book (The letter to Laodicea) from say, the KJV of today.
Our three oldest texts are called the Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinius, but are called by scholars who study them, Magnificent Freaks. Comparing them to the Textus Receptus of Erasmus (Martin Luther's time) and to the copied (byzantine) manuscripts throughout the centuries, the Magnificent Freaks are unique, even differing to each other in literally thousands of places, as well as differing with the Textus Receptus. Most modern translations come from the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus.
So, you have basically 2 camps; The Westcott & Hort Greek follows the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus, and the Textus Receptus follows roughly 5000 Byzantine manuscripts, which only differs in a couple of hundred places.
It's really no reason to lose faith in the Bible, but I feel that some of the stories relating to the history of the Bible, doesn't really supply us with all the facts, but rather opt for a nice sounding story where some details are left out. Digging deep into these things and trying not to be biased about it, taught me alot more about God's Word than I knew before.
Regards
Snappy
|
|
|
|
|
RE: Manipulated Bible? - 4/6/2008 7:57:12 AM
|
|
|
amyk
Posts: 668
Joined: 5/9/2005
Status: offline
|
Even if the writer of Mark did not write the conclusion to Mark, it does not follow that this conclusion is false. Somewhere along the way, if it was not in the original, someone who compiled the gospel of Mark believed that this conclusion was appropriate to put there, and apparently this was accepted by the Church. So, I have no problem with accepting it even if it was written by someone else. I do not believe anything in the conclusion contradicts the rest of the Bible and I have no reason to believe the conclusion is not truly God's word to us. But even if some do not feel they can accept that conclusion, this in no way changes the parts of the Bible that are very clear.
I think the fact that Biblical scholars freely admit that there are variants and questionable verses, etc. actually supports how confident we are in all the non-questionable parts of the Bible. And we Christians are realistic about translation not being perfect and even about the possibilty that some things are not in the original - I think this kind of openness is remarkable.
|
|
| | | |
Forum Tools
Printable Version
