Friend says bible has changed from original

  • Thread starter Thread starter Adamski
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
What we must remember is that the Holy Spirit works through those scholars that bring us to authentic understanding of what Scripture is all about: Logos, Jesus Christ.

One of the fruits of the Holy Spirit is unity, and bringing us into the fullness of Christ.

I cannot base my faith on interpretations of men or dissensions among men. I can only bring myself to believe in that which is not only authentic, but the means to bring me to the truth.
The fullness of knowledge of Christ is in the Catholic Church.

The more I grow in my faith as a cradle Catholic, the more I can realize that the Church is bringing me into communion with the Holy Trinity – the primary vocation of a Catholic.

It took many people many years to assemble Sacred Scripture. And we are always finding greater understanding and illumination of its truth through scholars.

The Church and study of Scripture is intended to bring us into communion with God and with our neighbor.
 
nmgauss said:
Are you saying that when St. Paul wrote his first letters in the years 40-50 AD, the Trinity had already been established as a key doctrine? Even before the Gospels were written in 65-100 AD, the Catholic faith was firmly established? Even before Irenaeus and Athanasius established key doctrines,** you are saying the Catholic faith was already whole?**
Click to expand...
Yes, nmgauss. Whole and entire.

That’s why you can’t argue “The Bible is questionable as your source for doctrines” with Catholics.

Now, to be sure, our understanding of this faith given to us, once for all (see Jude 1:3), has developed*. As our understanding deepens, or is applied to modern issues that were not present in NT times, doctrine is explained or understood better. That’s why we have a living and breathing Church to assist us in this.

*Examples of this are the development of the terms “hypostatic union” and “Trinity”.
 
It would help if your Friend could produce the original so as to compare the canon to Friend’s original.

The synoptic gospels have their origin from what biblical scholars refer to as the document of Q that references the original gospel of Mark from which the synoptic gospels record their similarities. Then go on to record their eyewitness accounts.

The synoptic gospels prove their authenticity because they have different eyewitness accounts recording the same historical events that took place in the presence of Jesus Christ Truth.

I believe your Friend’s argument is unreasonable and unrealistic when measured up against recorded history which disproves the invented arguments of transcriptions of the text.

One false (Muslim) argument basis it’s logic on one letter found from an ancient biblical text in a (Brittan) Museum that also revealed differences of ink used to transcribe the letters on the page.

The argument is ridiculous because it discounts the pain staking task of making the ink and the high cost of purchasing ready available ink for the scholars to transcribe documents, not to mention these transcriptions are made while the Church suffered persecution from both pagan Rome and the Jews.

If a Catholic Bishop or Catholic Christian was found with such letters from the apostles in their possession was met with torture or food for the Lions.

**The argument the Friend raises is a Johnny come lately, that argues from afar without any ancient documents to support your Friend’s position. It becomes speculation at best and never proves any facts to discredit the canon of scripture which blood was spilled to maintain the Truth of the Canon.

There is never no life blood spilled that supports your Friend’s false view, only the life blood suffered by the Apostles, Saints, and Martyrs who give witness and testimony with their lives for the Canon we have today.
**
Peace be with you
 
PRmerger said:
The Catholic faith was whole and entire before a single word of the NT was ever put to writ.
Click to expand...
This is quite true. Not to mention the moral code of the early (and later) Church was heavily influenced by people like Cicero. Even a recent Pope (JPII) used to like to cite him.
 
Gabriel_of_12 said:
The synoptic gospels have their origin from what biblical scholars refer to as the document of Q that references the original gospel of Mark from which the synoptic gospels record their similarities. Then go on to record their eyewitness accounts.

The synoptic gospels prove their authenticity because they have different eyewitness accounts recording the same historical events that took place in the presence of Jesus Christ Truth.

I believe your Friend’s argument is unreasonable and unrealistic when measured up against recorded history which disproves the invented arguments of transcriptions of the text.
Click to expand...
First of all, the synoptic gospels were not necessarily written in their entirety by Mark, Matthew, or Luke. Nobody knows for sure who wrote the gospels. In some cases, differences in style and wording indicate multiple authors of a single book.

One of the problems with ancient Greek texts is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and no spaces used to separate words. This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text. The words godisnowhere could mean quite different things to a theist (God is now here) and an atheist (God is nowhere); and what would it mean to say lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable? Was this a normal or a supernatural event?
 
The third century church father, Origen, once registered a complaint about the copies of the Gospels at his disposal:
The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.

Cited in Bruce M. Metzger, “Explicit References in the Works of Origen to Variant Readings in New Testament Manuscripts”
 
nmgauss said:
The third century church father, Origen, once registered a complaint about the copies of the Gospels at his disposal:
The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.

Cited in Bruce M. Metzger, “Explicit References in the Works of Origen to Variant Readings in New Testament Manuscripts”
Click to expand...
Origen is NOT an early church father.

Rather, he is classified as an early ecclesial writer.

As such, it’s not helpful to quote him as representative of anything orthodox regarding early Christian beliefs.
 
PRmerger said:
Origen is NOT an early church father.

Rather, he is classified as an early ecclesial writer.

As such, it’s not helpful to quote him as representative of anything orthodox regarding early Christian beliefs.
Click to expand...
However he is a great source to see what early Christian belief looked like during his time.

It was centuries later, not when he lived, that his writings were questioned. Centuries of doctrinal development that would have been fairly unrecognized as “orthodox” to Origen and his contemporaries.
 
Publisher said:
However he is a great source to see what early Christian belief looked like during his time.
Click to expand...
The problem with quoting him though is that it may not be representative of Catholic beliefs so it’s misleading to use him as a source for this.
It was centuries later, not when he lived, that his writings were questioned. Centuries of doctrinal development that would have been fairly unrecognized as “orthodox” to Origen and his contemporaries.
Click to expand...
This doesn’t sound quite correct. If his writings had not been questioned early on he would have been given recognition by the Catholic Church as a saint.
 
nmgauss said:
Do you want to follow the teachings of the Church because they appeal to you without knowing the origin of these teachings? For the vast majority, that is what faith is all about. Determining the differences between guesses of Jesus’ teachings (they are guesses because no documents survive from that era) versus the Apostolic Creed versus the teachings of the Church today may not appeal to you. It can be unsettling. Believing in the infallibility of the Pope and Bible may appeal to some without knowing whether there is justification in believing this. I have to agree that if it makes you feel good, then by all means go for it.

For Dr. Ehrman, he needed to know the original teachings. If the original teachings were truly inspired, then what were they? He needed to know. And through his many years researching the history of Christianity, he came to the conclusion that Christianity as we have come to know it did not, in any event, spring into being overnight. It emerged over a long period of time, through a period of struggles, debates, and conflicts over competing views, doctrines, perspectives, canons, and rules. The ultimate emergence of the Christian religion represents a human invention. People invented Christianity, not Jesus, and not God.

Whether one stresses the continuities or the discontinuities in the development of early Christianity, it is clear that the beliefs and perspectives that emerged among Jesus’ later followers were different from the religion of Jesus himself. Paul was not the only one responsible for this set of theological innovations, this invention of what we think of as Christianity. He may not even bear the grestest responsibility among those who transformed the religion of Jesus into the religion about Jesus. There were numerous Christians involved in these transformations, the vast majority of them lost in the mists of antiquity, unnamed Christians, thinkers, and preachers who reinterpreted the traditions of Jesus for their own time, whose reinterpretations were guided and molded by historical and cultural forces that we, living later, can sometimes only surmise and ponder.
Click to expand...
Perhaps Bart Ehrman may have made this conclusion, but despite his great work on textual criticism, he’s not infallible, and he’s not without his critics.

For one thing, his mentor, Bruce Metzger, did believe in the accuracy of the New Testament. Ehrman himself has admitted that the vast majority of textual variants are of no real consequence to the meaning of the text or to Christian doctrine.

amazon.com/Text-New-Testament-Transmission-Restoration/dp/019516122X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280440150&sr=1-2

In this work that he did with Metzger, Ehrman agrees on the reliability of the New Testament. Even in* Misquoting Jesus* (pg 252), he states the following:

"Bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him.* And even though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement – maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands. The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.**"*
 
So how do all these comments affect the main question? Has the Bible changed from original?

What is original? The authors of the Bible cannot be identified accurately. The first edition copies of the original writings have not survived. Using Origen as an example, one can get a glimpse into the problems facing ancient Biblical writers. If you want to have faith in your favorite edition of the Bible, no matter how it may be different from the original, then go for it. There are many translations of the Bible. Some from Greek and Hebrew into English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Russian, Coptic, Ethiopian, etc. There can be no 100% uniformity among the various editions. They all differ from one another, mostly in details.

Even the fact that there are different books in different flavors of the Bible shows how complex an answer to this question may be.
 
nmgauss said:
So how do all these comments affect the main question? Has the Bible changed from original?
Click to expand...
The Bible has not changed from its original in any significant way.

The kerygma has been consistent for the entirety of its proclamation, from the first preaching of Christ to the paradosis of the Apostles, until the death of the last Apostle.

It was whole, and entire, and the Bible reflects this kerygma correctly.
 
nmgauss said:
So how do all these comments affect the main question? Has the Bible changed from original?

What is original? The authors of the Bible cannot be identified accurately. The first edition copies of the original writings have not survived. Using Origen as an example, one can get a glimpse into the problems facing ancient Biblical writers. If you want to have faith in your favorite edition of the Bible, no matter how it may be different from the original, then go for it. There are many translations of the Bible. Some from Greek and Hebrew into English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Russian, Coptic, Ethiopian, etc. There can be no 100% uniformity among the various editions. They all differ from one another, mostly in details.

Even the fact that there are different books in different flavors of the Bible shows how complex an answer to this question may be.
Click to expand...
The Bible is still far better attested than any other ancient document. The New Testament in particular blows out of the water any other ancient document. If you accept the authenticity of the Illiad, the Odyssey, the Gallic Wars and various other works of ancient history, then you have to accept the New Testament. It has for more manuscript copies and evidence, the first copies that we have are far older than any of its competitors (relative to its date of origin), and its original words have not changed significantly. There is no corruption of Christian meaning. There has been no discovery of anything that would radically change the traditional Christian understanding of doctrine.

Historians accept even biographies of Alexander III (“The Great”) of Macedon that were written hundreds of years after his life but are still considered reliable. This idea that there has somehow been a change in text to make it unrecognizable to the original is simply false.
 
nmgauss said:
Are you saying that when St. Paul wrote his first letters in the years 40-50 AD, the Trinity had already been established as a key doctrine? Even before the Gospels were written in 65-100 AD, the Catholic faith was firmly established? Even before Irenaeus and Athanasius established key doctrines, you are saying the Catholic faith was already whole?
Click to expand...
Yes that is exactly what he is saying the Trinity was already established as Doctrine prior to the compilation of the Bible. The Catholic faith was already whole, true and established before the first ‘Bible’ as we know was compiled.
 
Origin was a great scholar but went really off the deep end in his later writings…some even called him a heretic.

I think as Catholic what is important regarding the reading of Scripture is, of course, you have to go back to the author’s intent and times he lived in…which requires alot of scholarship on our end. And that we understand Scripture on various levels and senses…and most of all, it took many people, many years…a communion within the Holy Trinity for the Church to discern which books to use for public revelation and that which is private. A so much was settled by the Church a long time ago…

Christ instituted only one Church and it did not start off in error, or then fall off into error…or go into error later in the interpretation of Scripture. One can read different translations such as the New American Standard or the Jerusalem Bible, etc…but that what is critical is that the Sacred Scripture is bringing us to fullness in Christ and the deposit of faith.

Thus, this truth of Christ in Scripture must be continued from one generation to the next, from the beginning of the Church to the present…no gaps or breaks in the Holy Spirit guiding us.
 
nmgauss said:
So how do all these comments affect the main question? Has the Bible changed from original?

Even the fact that there are different books in different flavors of the Bible shows how complex an answer to this question may be.
Click to expand...
So what? And what about it? It does not affect the Church, both east and west…because our teachings do not rely on the Bible alone and the authority of the Church does not rely on the Bible.

It only affects those that tether their legitimacy and existence for being a church on the Bible alone.
 
nmgauss said:
This is wishful thinking. Look at the following:
christiandmi.org/docs/tracts/21-HowTheTrinityBecameAChurchDoctrine.pdf
Click to expand...
So why do you give credence for this website and their contention on the Trinity?

What is your basis for believing what they tell you?

Did you bother to check their roots? Looks like they trace their roots from Charles Russell…One of these groups developed around the leadership of Charles T. Russell, a lay preacher and Bible student, who devoted his life and considerable fortune to promulgating the clearer understanding he had come to. A prolific writer, he developed an organization that was world-wide in scope, and after his death in 1916 became both fixed in thought and restricted in freedoms. A number of Christians left this organization early, in 1909, or in the ensuing years upon his death, for greater liberty in Christ. Two of the groups formed in 1909 became known as the New Covenant Fellowship and the New Covenant Believers, not that their members chose these names, but from designations by others who used it as a description to differentiate them from other groups.
 
KathleenGee said:
Origin was a great scholar but went really off the deep end in his later writings…some even called him a heretic.
Click to expand...
What difference does it make in my example? His theological positions have nothing to do with his problems with poor source material.

Origen wrote a piece called “Against Celsus”, a pagan, in which he accuses Celsus of maligning the Christian copyists for their transgressive copying practice seventy years before Origen’s work:
*Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and they change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in face of criticsm.
*

It’s interesting that in this instance, it was “outsiders” who Origen named as heretics, who he claims, maliciously altered the sacred texts.

Here he was not about to accuse Christians of doing this in spite of the fact that in another of his writings he was complaining about the poor quality of manuscripts submitted to him by Christian scribes.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top