*Note Subject Change Subject was "Rikk Watts on Genesis 1" and is now "Copying the Bible"
Caroline Wong wrote: > Both errors are likely. People could deliberately > add words to bolster the text and make it sound > better. Wait just one minute, please. If you were copying the Scriptures, you would try real hard to copy it accurately, would you not? Would *YOU* truly add words to bolster the text and make it sound better? I'm talking about *YOU*. Think about this carefully. I would venture to say that if you were copying the Holy Scriptures, you would not add any words at all to make it sound better. I know that I would not. Caroline Wong wrote: > In fact, Christians have been known to write whole > books and letters and attribute them to Paul or John > or some other Apostle. There was a lot of controversy > and uncertainty so adding words make things more plain. You are confusing outright forgery with monks copying the sacred text. When scribes were copying texts, they were very careful NOT to add words and NOT to subtract words. With this underlying paradigm at work here, which mistake is most likely to take place? Would the addition of words or the omission of words be the most likely to occur if your modus operandi was trying to copy the text exactly and not add or subtract words? I think the omission of words would be the most likely mistake. Caroline Wong wrote: > Biblical scholars were quite surprised when they found > early manuscripts which did not contain lots of stuff like > the ending to Mark or the story in John about the woman > caught in adultery. Mark can be explained by saying the > manuscript lost its ending but how do we explain John :-) > We don't. We just put a note and say it's not in the early > manuscripts. You give up on explanations way too quickly! It could be that the guy doing the copying was called to lunch by his buddy and when he came back, he picked up his copying efforts in the wrong place. It also could be that the part of the text he was copying from was damaged. Maybe he spilled his coffee on it, and so he planned to come back later when he could get an undamaged copy. I haven't examined these manuscripts myself directly, but I have read reports of those who have that passages like Mark 16 actually have a large blank space where the omitted passage would fit. It looks like indeed the copyist planned to come back later and fill it in. This suggests to me that the copy he was working from was probably damaged in that place. Caroline Wong wrote: > If copyists lost words as they copied, the later manuscripts > would have less words than the early ones. Now you are thinking, but your assumption here is that all later manuscripts were copied from all earlier ones. This is not true. Many times copies were made that became a dead end. In other words, no further copies were made from them. I think this is the case with these two older manuscripts. We need to keep this fact of TWO manuscripts in mind because you talk about older manuscripts and some people might get the idea that there are a bunch of them. The truth is that we are talking about TWO manuscripts which differ significantly from about 5,000 manuscripts that have a more recent date. The big question is how this could be, which is why Westcott and Hort came up with their Syrian recension theory. They postulated that these older Egyptian manuscripts were right but the majority of other manuscripts were wrong because there was a big mistake made early on from which all these other copies were made. It makes much more sense that these two older manuscripts in Egypt are the ones which were mistaken, especially when you consider that the Sinaiticus text was found in a trash can at Saint Katherine's monastery. (Incidentally, for trivia's sake, I would like to mention that I have visited this monastery and spent the night there.) Furthermore, the text was in all capital letters with no spaces between the words. Was this perhaps some fun experiment some monk was doing because of his boredom with copying texts all day long? For all we know, it was a teenager given the task as homework, and he didn't even want to be doing it. Maybe he was playing around with it like a modern day teenager does with video games. If he was not a teenager, maybe he was someone just trying to make the Word of God more encrypted? Who knows, but when we consider that the monks at this monastery had such little opinion of this Bible that they threw it away in the trash can, one must wonder why the modern scholars want to put so much stock in it. The only thing it has going for it is its older date. Is that really enough? Peace be with you. David Miller. ---------- "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer every man." 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