New Exhibit shows that the modern day 'Bible' can not be trusted..

[truthpusher]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/20/AR2006102001756.html?nav=rss_print/style

A Testament To Change: Early Scraps Of the Bible

Rare Fragments Show Evolution of Scripture

By Alan Cooperman

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 21, 2006; C01

If 40 percent of Americans refuse to believe that humans evolved from earlier hominids, how many will accept that the book we know as the Bible evolved from earlier texts and was not handed down, in toto, by God in its present form?

The fossil evidence for human evolution is permanently on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Hard evidence that the Bible took its present shape over centuries will be on display for the next 11 weeks, from today through Jan. 7, across the Mall at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

(snip)

These are documents with the proven power to shake faith. That's what happened to Bart D. Ehrman, author of the 2005 bestseller "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why."

Ehrman was a born-again Christian from Kansas when he entered Chicago's Moody Bible Institute at age 18. After three decades of comparing ancient manuscripts in their original languages to try to determine the earliest, most authentic text of the New Testament, he is now an agnostic.

"I thought God had inspired the words inerrantly. But when I examined the historical texts, I realized the words had not been preserved inerrantly, and it would have been no greater miracle to preserve them than to inspire them in the first place," said Ehrman, now chairman of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

(snip)

"There's nothing here that's going to shape or challenge people's beliefs, except on one point," she said. "It will challenge the belief that the Bible originated in the form we have today, rather than being the result of the very complex process of a lot of people of faith using scriptures to help them live God-focused lives."

Her eyes flashing, pink cheeks turning pinker, Brown warmed to her point.

"If people come looking to find something new about Jesus, they won't find it in this exhibit. That's not what it's saying. But it is saying that we didn't start out with this," she said, producing a red Gideon's Bible from her Washington hotel room and giving it a resounding thwack with the palm of her hand.

(snip)

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/20/AR2006102001756.html?nav=rss_print/style

[madrchsod]

1. ?

nothing really new. many religious scholars understand this concept of the evolving religious history of the semite tribes. yes it is unfortunate that a large percentage of the religious community do not understand or reject this truth of religious evolution

[truthpusher]

2. of course.... nothing new...any thinking person can always conclude...

....that most writings that have gone through an evolution of transcription are not the same as they were originally written....


...but we are not talking about thinking people here...

these are the same people that beleive the earth is only 6,000 years old!

I like the fact that these folks will be tempted to visit the exhibit and be confronted with the fact that they are being manipulated and that the Bible is no more the word of God than anything else.

[zanne]

7. Anybody who's played "telephone" as a kid has a clue

How could it be the words of God when it was passed down as oral history from one generation to another for thousands of years? How many witnesses to a car accident see it the same way? I don't know how people can take the bible literally unless they absolutely need to.

[ClintonTyree]

3. When people are told from childhood onward........

that the bible is the unerring word of god it's hard to dissuade them later in life. Critical thinking has a lot to do with it. I was raised in a religious home but I was always one to question everything. I could not believe just because I was told to believe. I'm a "doubting Thomas", as it were, hence my worship of The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Now THERE'S something I can believe in! ;)

[displacedtexan]

4. The saddest part. about this story for me..

...is that I have relatives who think the Bible was originally written in English.

You can imagine the blank stares I used to get after mentioning the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

[HamdenRice]

9. Fundies think the Bible was written in English

I knew someone was going to mention that. I remember reading something about that a few years ago -- that a teacher in the south found that most of his fundie students believed that the Bible had been written in English and that therefore the ancient Jews, Romans, and Christians spoke English.

How do you reach people like that with info from the reality based community?

[okasha]

13. Well, they all speak English on TV.

Are you saying the TV isn't inerrant? :P

[zeemike]

5. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof

And I read the whole article and found nothing of that.
They did mention the Dead Sea Scrolls but did not mention that the fragments that they have match word for word the text we have today.
That seems to suggest that at least that part of the old testament did not evolve as predicted but some how made it intact through much copping by hand.
I remain skeptical until I see real evidence, not just someones logic that says it must be so because of human error

[annabanana]

6. "word for word"?

In which language?

[alfredo]

8. Thizzlamic

[Igel]

11. Hebrew and Aramaic.

Stereotypes have always made people feel good, but many fundies have the Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic versions in their homes (Thayer's lexicon for Greek, and Genesius', for Hebrew, are standards in some churches), or get to the underlying languages through things like Strong's Concordance.

There are a lot of early CE writings. Some date to the early 100s. Many aren't canonical; there were numerous sects (they'd have been called heresies, which this former fundie knows from the fundie sermons he heard merely means 'factions' or things that produce factionalism). Each sect had it's own group of writings.

Writings corresponding to most of the epistles and gospels are fairly accurate, but there are a lot of minor differences. For the last 150 years textual criticism's been an on-going enterprise, with some logically useful heuristics worked out; unfortunately, it's a rather well-established field, so the way you make a name these days is with outrageous claims. (Rather the same as in historical Slavic linguistics: you marshall the evidence you can for something truly groundbreaking, you get some followers, but in 20 years nobody agrees.)

Of course, the same goes for the Qur'aan and any other book of sufficient antiquity (the same, by the way, for many pre-Christian classical Greek texts). There are some accepted differences. But while the Muslims did a fairly good job of extirpating as apostasy most variant readings, some texts survived; others survived, but where confiscated when the government found out they survived. Islam (by which I mean most Muslims) are at the stage of textual criticism that Christians were at in 1300. Which is to say, it's essentially banned, and research brings death threats.

Mostly it's mainstream and superficial fundies (if I may coin a phrase) like Baptists that are stupid enough to think that the NT was originally written in English. People that are serious about their fundamentalism or about their Bible study don't make that trivial mistake--no Bible dictionary or commentary would allow that mistake to survive.

[LostinVA]

10. I had two years of Koine Greek is college

And, a big part of what we learned was the "evolution" of the canon -- especially the NT canon. There is loads of proof! Good grief.

These Greek classes are also what make me realize that Christianity did NOT have a bedrock foundation in reality.

[Igel]

12. But there's a necessary assumption here.

One must distinguish between evolution of the canon and evolution of the texts in the canon. (How one takes this evolution is a matter, largely, of belief.)

The article makes this necessary distinction poorly. In fact, one could easily make the inference that given the extant texts of books in the canon one can rather readily track how significant passages, possibly entire books, were altered--and the doctrines, presumably, with the passages. While this might be a possible inference, it's not a true one.

There are numerous variant readings; most of them mean little. A couple are mildly significant. The variants are useful for constructing genealogies, and on occasion for understanding some phrase.

As for the evolution of the canon, its meaning is also an inference. One can conclude that God preserved what he considered important for the faithful, the kind of thinking seen in OT prophetic writings and in some canonical NT texts; or one can conclude the entire enterprise is a human endeavor, in keeping with most secular research and scholarship. Neither belief is falsifiable since neither actually makes any predictions amenable to testing, and therefore neither assumption constitutes a sound hypothesis.

[Sam1]

17. If God preserved what he considered important for the faithful

rather then inspiring the whole Bible. Then to quote Linus "The theological implications of that alone are staggering!"

Much of the evolution and alteration of the text took place before there was an accepted canon.

[zeemike]

15. I always hear that

There is loads of proof, yet when asked for the proof given is very think and mostly speculative. Some that I remember is that the style indicates that someone else wrote it or that there are things like Luke did not mention what John did so that proves bla bla bla.
We must not be talking science here because that would not be proof in some scientific discussion.
Proof would be text written in the first century that is very different than we have now and that we do not have. And it is not enough to point to some other cannon to say that because there were other written cannons that the first has been altered.
I probably should just stay out of this altogether because you have stated the conclusion before you have seen the evidence' "that Christianity did NOT have a bedrock foundation in reality." and so no one could successfully argue anything else with you.
And I understand it because miracles like what Jesus is said to have preformed are imposable right?
And If I say they are not I am just stupid, crazy, or delusional, and should be ridiculed even though I am not a fundie, not even close. And that people like me share the same values as you do as a liberal.
That is the part of science I do not like, the certainty that they and only they know what is truth, and all that disagree with them are just stupid. and yet science has no answers to some very basic questions.
\But what the hell I will shut up now.

[struggle4progress]

14. Article claims Ehrman considers the 'pericope de adultera' a medieval ..

.. addition to John's gospel.

I'm not an expert but suspect this is a misunderstanding on the part of the reporter, While there is no question that some early mss do not contain the pericope, it apparently provoked some early bitter deletion/reinsertion disputes.

And it seems to occur in a number of copies regarded as being from the fourth or fifth century: http://www.textexcavation.com/gospelmanuscripts.html

[bryant69]

16. I suppose the real question is what do you trust your bible to do.

Bryant
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