Isaiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls

At least you've dropped your harping on the irrelevant question of pre-DSS changes to Isaiah. I will content myself with that much. Have a good day.

Mostly because Moeller's page doesn't refer to them. That list appears to intend to be inclusive. That is what the problem is, that nobody lists them. Since Moeller doesn't even refer to them it is a fair guess that they are included in that page of insignificant differences, and since the sites that refer to 13 "significant" differences do not bother to describe them, they can't be all that significant.

Well you seem to enjoy having this argument that you made up all by yourself. It really has nothing to do with me or anything I said. The DSS Isaiah is used by many, and I cited a couple -- many more where those came from -- to show that at least one Bible book has remained unchanged since then, and that this has implications for general complaints about Biblical changes since then. Nobody would claim this applies to possible changes prior to that, and I certainly didn't. I also didn't refer to specific charges because I wasn't thinking of specific charges, only general charges. There probably ARE some specific charges but it wasn't my topic. You want to hold me to some argument of your own about specific charges but it isn't my argument so I think I should just leave you to your argument. I'm sorry you can't follow this. I really don't get it. It's quite simple and you are making it into something it just isn't and never was.{EDIT: Perhaps I should add that I'm just talking about charges made by the average person, not by scholars. Maybe that is the problem here, I really don't know. It's similar to the situation with the Nicene Council. That became a big issue because somehow the average person got the idea that that Council threw out valid Biblical books, so the answer is that no, the books that were not included in the canon were excluded because they were NOT valid. Now maybe the Nicene Council didn't actually determine the canon to any such extent in any case, but the principle is still true -- the answer to the average person is that the canon was not established by political or otherwise nefarious means, but on the basis of church determination of what was valid. With this Isaiah scroll thing I'm also just referring to "what people say" about the supposed alterations in the Biblical text over the centuries, the kinds of complaints about the Bible that come up on message boards all over the internet for instance, not from scholars. The scroll proves that at least for one book since the time of the DSS that idea is false. There are many other issues involved and many other answers, but for this one point it ought to be clear enough on its own.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-11-2005 11:12 AM

No, Mr. K, it is LONG PAST time for YOU to admit you were wrong as you have done nothing but blame me for some bizarre misunderstanding of your own. Sorry but that's the way it is.

Yeah, that line bothered me there too. It's a strange one, because there is no way to establish which are the older versions since the earliest manuscripts have long since disintegrated. I don't know what they base that on. The idea is silly too because there were many many many different lines of manuscripts from the earliest times and who knows which version went which direction. All the churches had copies of at least some of the books.Yes that line appears to confirm the idea but I don't think it amounts to much myself. As I said I personally rely on my own spiritual judgment that the verses are consistent with the whole. How so? There is nothing in that statement to say how old those two are. Actually you have ignored the evidence that counts by focusing on this one line and a quote that doesn't even mention age at all. The fact is that the enormous majority of the texts in existence include the passage and it has been affirmed by major Christian authorities over the centuries, and that evidence outweighs that one unprovable assertion that the noninclusion is older, and the opinion of mere scholars who don't have the authority of the Church behind them.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-11-2005 12:59 PM

No I have merely "failed to support" YOUR assertion, not my own. You are the one who made up the whole nonsense about specific charges. I never said a word about specific charges. And the DSS does refute the common charges just fine, as the fact that many many many Christian sources use it for just that purpose.But yeah, after a while a person can only give up on this Madhatter's tea party here.

Sorry, duplicate post.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-11-2005 07:02 PM

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Faith writes:
Yes that line appears to confirm the idea...
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That line as well as the other (date not that ambiguous)...

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Fine. He has his very vague unprovable date and I have the fact that the huge preponderance of manuscripts contain the passage. I'd say this trumps his appeal to a date he focused on out of the entire discussion of the merits of the Mark passage. We're talking something like 45 texts that don't have the passage to more than 5000 that do. {MUCH LATER EDIT: I had this wrong. It's 600+ that include the passage to 2 that don't.} AND the passage has the weight of historical Church support behind it too. Vague date on the one hand, super majority and authority on the other. He wants to go with a vague date, fine, I'll go with the historical majority AND authority. We'll call it a matter of taste I guess.

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...support the idea that the changes many, such as PaulK, point to occur before the DSS which, in turn, makes your subsequent claim that since the Isaiah DSS backs up the modern version of Isaiah, post-DSS, irrelevant.

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Nonsense. The relevance is to the reliability of the Biblical scribes, and therefore to the reliability of the Christian Bible text from that time. One book's having been preserved so well through thousands of copyings and recopyings through the many distributions of the Christian Bible over the centuries, is an excellent indication that Biblical copying in general is quite reliable for that same span of time and can be inferred to be the case for the entire Bible. Hence complaints about supposed changes from that time are refuted.You claim all that is meaningless if there were changes made to Isaiah prior to the DSS, but that is another subject. I repeat, my topic was the RELIABILITY OF THE SCRIBES since the Isaiah scroll, period.This DOES have implications for the reliability of the scribes prior to that too, especially since the Jewish scribes were known for their obsessional-to-superstitious methods of accuracy.NOW, if you/PaulK want to discuss the integrity of the Old Testament books prior to the DSS, fine, bring up your objections and I'll try to answer them.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-15-2005 10:00 AM

Whatever. You win. Making sense you don't, but win, hey, whatever.

I didn't say you failed to support anything. You don't read very well. I said that *I* had failed to support *your* assertion, not my own as the whole thing was your assertion, not mine.

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And you have produced not one example of such "charges" - which in the case of the Isaiah scroll would be changes to Isaiah post dating the writing of the scroll (paleogrpahically dated to 150-122 BC).

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The Bible has been changed and translated so many times over the last 2000 years, it’s impossible to have any confidence in its accuracy. Everyone knows that.

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This invocation of common knowledge is enough to satisfy the ordinary, man-on-the-street critic of the New Testament, and the challenge has stopped countless Christians in their tracks. But it’s remarkably easy to answer if you know a few simple details.

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TheologyWeb Campus

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Google Answers: How do Christian fundamentalists reationalize their view of the Bible?

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A look at the history of the Bible shows that it is a compilation of
books that has been modified by human beings over the centuries. There
have been councils and church authorites that have made decisions
about what to include and what not to include. The collection of books
that we now call the Bible is not the same collection that other
people have called the Bible.

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Moreover the human hand has unquestionably been at work in copying the
text and in translating it from one language to another.

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With all this evidence of the error-prone human mind influencing the
document we now call the Bible, how do most of the people that hold
the Bible to be the unquestionable word of God rationalize their view?

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This message has been edited by Faith, 04-11-2005 07:25 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 04-11-2005 07:27 PM

The other books are not relevant, the Isaiah scroll is. The corruptions were not inherited by us for some reason. Even their being recognized as corruptions implies that we know the authentic from the corrupt in order to judge. They are interesting as the state of things at Qumran but not as pertaining to our texts. The Isaiah scroll just happened to be pertinent however. I didn't make any claims about anything, not about the Masoretic Text or anything BUT the Isaiah scroll. All the rest is simply not relevant to the point I was making.I posted this to somebody here. It answers lots of questions about the reliability of our current texts and about textual criticism: TheologyWeb Campus

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Sorry but even your sources support the contention that Mark was redacted and the verses were added in.
From your own sources:

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The witness in its favour is nearly as old as that opposed.

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Nearly as old. A clear admission that the older versions do not contain the additions.

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The two manuscripts which they are not found in are the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, which are the two primary underlying manuscripts used in every modern version.

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Once again, a clear admission that the verses do not exist in the oldest and most basic versions.

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Faith, even your very own sources admit the verses were added although they go on to try to deny the fact that they just admitted. This is a classic example of the Doublethink of the Fundamentalist. They simply ignore the evidence that doesn't fit THEIR particular idea of TRUTH.

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OK, this SHOULD clear this up. They can date Sinaiticus and Vaticanus to the fourth century and that is somewhat earlier than the other text sources. I didn't look up their dates but it shouldn't be hard to find.While it is true that the older the better, if the difference in time is not much it is much less important, THE REASON BEING that ALL Of these texts are COPIES, and there is NO way to tell which were copied from the originals.You are apparently assuming that the later copies we have must have been copied FROM Vaticanus and Sinaiticus and that is a big mistake. That WOULD imply a change between. But that is not how the copies were made. I don't know how much is known about the lineage of the extant manuscripts but I do know that there were many many lineages, meaning originating points that were not THE originals. This is because many copies of the autographs were made at one time and distributed to many different churches. Many different books. Apparently Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are compilations and include the Old Testament as well. The various books could have been gathered from many sources, copies of copies of copies over the three hundred previous years. Meanwhile in other parts of the Roman Empire whole other groups of manuscripts were being collected and copied and passed on in pieces and chunks and collections.There is no way to know which of all the extant texts is truest to the original autograph. The oldest is not necessarily the most authentic although in principle it SHOULD be better. But really it's only the oldest that happened to survive. And if others are just SLIGHTLY less old their claim to authenticity is just as significant. {EDIT: In other words, it could just as easily be Sinaiticus and Vaticanus that changed the original, deleted those verses of Mark, as the other way around, and considering the overwhelming testimony of the Church is in favor of the passage that adds to the likelihood that the change was on their side, not the majority text side}Then add to that the fact that over 5000 of the extant mss contain the disputed verses of Mark 9 and only 45 do not; and add again the fact that the authorities of the Church affirmed the Mark 9 verses as inspired. {MUCH LATER EDIT: Again, it's 600+ that contain it, to 2 that do not; and it's Mark 16:9-20, not Mark 9}.I hope I said this clearly.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-11-2005 09:22 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 04-15-2005 10:05 AM

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The clarity of what you say is not the issue.
The things you cite, such as the fact that the additions were included in later copies also carries no weight. All it shows is that the additions got copied.

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You seem to have missed the point. There is no proof there were any additions. If anything there may have been subtractions by the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus group. They were an island off by themselves not given any special weight by the mainstream until the unauthorized modern scholars decided to promote them. Then a compromised modern church accepted this revisionist corruption against the testimony of the true Church over the centuries.

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The fact that there is only a small difference in time only is true from OUR current perspective. If you had been living at the time, something from 100 years earlier would be a wide gulf.

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The point has to do with the authenticity of different groups of COPIES. They are ALL copies. The difference in age confers NO special authority on the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, and the weight of both the enormous preponderance of manuscripts and Church authority is against their claim.

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The point is everywhere we look in the Bible there are multiple, often totally contradictory versions of the story. There are two Mutually Exclusive creation myths. There are two Mutually Exclusive flood myths. There are two Mutually Exclusive Nativity Stories. There are four Mutually Exclusive accounts of the crucifixion. There are indications that Mark was redacted. Much of Isaiah was simply copied from other books.

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Now you are floundering around. I made my point and you want to obscure it by trotting out the usual collection of accusations against the Bible. There are answers to every single one of these accusations. I've encountered them many times. You even repeat the "indications that Mark was redacted" although I just answered that one. People have unrealistic expectations of the Biblical writers, as if they followed all the same rules we do. They were interested in the content, getting the gospel out, much more than in who wrote what. Various accounts do appear to have been combined here and there and built upon one another. Yet there is a tradition of authorship nevertheless.The creation stories are not mutually exclusive. One is chronological, the other is a focusing on particulars. The nativity stories complement each other. The crucifixion stories complement each other. You don't know if Isaiah was copied or the other books were copied from Isaiah and it doesn't matter as the material is the important thing. There are historical fragments in the prophets. Passages from the prophets are in the histories. Why not? It's all an interwoven history. There are some extremely minor apparent contradictions that are what one would expect from multiple writers. They amount to nothing, just an excuse for debunkers to make mountains out of molehills. All senseless caviling.

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The truths in the Bible are not the words. It is a very simple message.

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It's a sweeping history of unbelievable consistency and beauty from Genesis through Revelation that yields its meaning only to those who believe it, and never to those who pick it apart.

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By trying to force the Bible to be accurate when it comes to history, to science, to archeology or to geography is to miss the message entirely.

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The only people forcing anything are the critics such as yourself, who pick it to death. If you simply take it as written with the trust of a child it will reveal its message, but not otherwise.And before you succeed at obscuring the main topic of this debate, Mark 16:9-20 is legitimate.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-12-2005 05:42 AM

The point was only to give you the quotes you claim I left out. I showed that this complaint is a common complaint. That was the assignment. I met it.Since the OT was copied along with the NT over the last 2000 years, the Isaiah scroll's integrity IS relevant.

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I beg your pardon?
You claimed the similarity of the DSS Isaiah to the modern Isaiah shows the texts were copied accurately without changes.

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But the other DSS books prove just the opposite -
that the modern versions HAVE been corrupted.

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Nonsense. The corruptions are in the DSS, as you showed. They are discussed at length as I recall. Many of them were caught and corrected by the Qumran people themselves as corrections are shown on the parchments. In any case ours don't have those corruptions.And the Isaiah scroll's perfection still is evidence that the ensuing 2000 years of copying is very reliable.