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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Catholicism versus Protestantism down the centuries | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Who gave those instructions? What were they? How were they violated? Well, this goes to the history of the R.V. You will have heard of Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce, the chap who debated with Huxley. He is also the author of the enduring comic poem "If I Were A Cassowary". Not many people know this. Anyway, on back in 1870 dear old Soapy Sam proposed to the Convocation of Canterbury:
[A] joint committee of both Houses, with power to confer with any committee that might be appointed by the Convocation of the Northern Province, to report upon the desirableness of a revision of the Authorized Version of the New Testament, whether by marginal note or otherwise, in all those passages where plain and clear errors, whether in the Greek text originally adopted by the translators, or in the translation made from the same, shall, on due investigation, be found to exist. This motion was extended to include the Old Testament, and passed by Convocation. The proposed committee was formed, met, and resolved the following:
That it is desirable that a revision of the Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures be undertaken. [...] That in the above resolutions we do not contemplate any new translation of the Bible, or any alteration of the language, except where, in the judgment of the most competent scholars, such change is necessary. This report was accepted by the Convocation of Canterbury, by an overwhelming vote. Convocation then appointed a committee to make rules for the revision. This committee resolved:
VIII. That the general principles to be followed by both companies [i.e. the two groups for the revision of the two Testaments] be as follows: '1. To introduce as few alterations as possible in the text of the Authorized Version consistently with faithfulness. Now Faith's point is that there is absolutely nothing in all this suggesting that the revising committees should have behaved like so many bulls in so many china shops.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
It makes unison reading in a church almost impossible when everybody has a different translation. It makes memorization of passages within a church context almost impossible for the same reason. And since most people try out various translations over time it interferes with our individual ability to memorize verses too. And it makes it very difficult to look up verses in online Bibles or in the concordance when you have a mixture of half a dozen different versions of the verse in your head. I personally find it very jarring when I hear a sermon on the radio based on some translation I'm not familiar with when I would like to be able to read along. OK.
But I'm not the only one saying so ... OK, let me restate my position: scholarship involves weighing all the evidence rather than ignoring some of it because Faith and her pals say so. --- Look, textual criticism is difficult. You and Westcott and Hort have a common method for making it easy: elevate some MSS, cast all other MSS down before them, and make your recension on that basis. Hoorah! The problem is that this doesn't actually make textual criticism easy --- it makes it seem easy, but what it actually achieves is to make it impossible. For on what basis are you to elevate some MSS and deprecate others? Well, the good MSS are the ones with more good readings in, the bad MSS are the ones with more bad readings in. So to compare our MSS, we need to establish which of the various readings are better in each particular case. For this, we need scholarship, and lots of it. If, instead, we declare that the good readings are the ones to be found in the good MSS, and the bad readings are those that occur the bad MSS, then we have certainly found a way to make our lives easier. But you will observe that we have also committed ourselves to a chain of reasoning so perfectly circular that at some point we are going to have to toss a coin to discover which MSS we are going to call good. This is idiotic. So, scholarship it is, then. But this means beginning with all the MSS on the table and taking the job reading by reading. Now, after you've got as far as you can with this, you can use your decisions to form an estimate of the merits and defects of the MSS, and you can then use this information as a tie-breaker when faced with readings of otherwise equal merit. But to start by deciding the worth of the MSS, whether by saying "The Alexandrians are better because older" or "The Byzantines are better because more numerous" is not textual criticism at all; the particular points of merit and demerit in the MSS is what textual criticism is meant to discover. --- Imagine a company which sells various wines at various prices according to how they are rated by their expert wine taster. One day the owner of the company visits the wine taster in his office. To his surprise, he sees no corks, bottles, corkscrews, glasses, etc. "Aren't you busy?" he asks the taster. "Oh, very busy", says the wine taster, glancing up from the large catalog he's perusing. "But you aren't tasting any wine?" "No," he says, "the fact is that I don't like any wine and have no interest in drinking it. Possibly this stems from the fact that I have no sense of smell." "Then how," asks the owner "do you establish the merits of the wine?" The taster replies "That's easy, I look up the prices of the wines in our company catalog; naturally the most expensive ones must be the best." At this point, the manager should sack his employee and appoint in his place someone with a good palate and the intention of actually doing the job.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
There's the Burgon camp and there's the W&H camp. Not so much.
Burgon wrote that it was already known to the Church that Sinaiticus was corrupt. All MSS are corrupt to some extent. If this leads us to pretend that they don't exist, the Bible will disappear in a poof of orthographical indignation.
We don't need more scholarship, we need more intelligent judgment of the results we already have. Scholarship includes judgement. That is, in fact, the difficult part.
(And the other groups, "Western" and "Caesarian" or whatever, are really just made-up accommodations to W&H's lousy work ... Then whatever one thinks of them as textual critics, one has to admire them for inventing the time machine, going back fifty years before they were born, and telling Semmler to identify the Western text-type because they'd need it to "accommodate" them in 1881. I really don't think you should discuss what constitutes scholarship while you are capable of writing stuff like that. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Nobody has said these corrupted manuscripts don't exist, only that they are so corrupted they don't belong among valid Bible manuscripts. I know I'm overstating the case by scholarly lights but this is the conclusion I've come to from what I've seen of the arguments on both sides. The Alexandrians basically overthrew the legitimate text of the Bible. They have no right to be included in any Bible text. But on what basis are we to say that they're corrupt? If you say "Because they're different from the Byzantines" then you are indulging in viciously circular reasoning. A good reason would be if you could say: "We looked at all the variant readings in all the MSS, and preponderantly the good readings are in the Byzantines and the bad ones are in the Alexandrians". Besides the whole not-being-completely-stupid thing, this has the additional merit that in those instances where the Alexandrians are correct and the Byzantines are wrong, you'd find out about it.
That's my judgment based on what I've read about them. The text types are "hypothetical" for starters, and the Western according to Wikipedia is represented by very few mss, and the Caesarian is not regarded as a legitimate text type by many writers according to the Wikipedia article on that one. And both tend to paraphrase, which ought to demote any claim to validity right there. But while I don't hesitate to come to such bald conclusions myself, there are the cautious types who may say something different, such as this web page has to offer: And his reasoning, in full, is this:
quote: You remember I mentioned scholarship? One important aspect of it is not believing the unsupported assertions of religious fundamentalists.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Burgon did this ... Where do you suppose that Burgon did that?
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
It's implicit in his work. I asked where he did it. If the answer is "In the privacy of his own study", that's not much use to us, is it?
The Traditional Text has been departed from by them nearly 6000 times, -- almost invariably for the worse. And yet even this does not dispute that the Alexandrians are sometimes superior (which they are) in which case we should not rule them out a priori. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Who cares where he did it, the evidence is that he did do it. And yet if we don't have the fruits of his labors, it's all gone for nothing.
And sure, take the half dozen places where the Alexandrians may be superior and throw out the rest. Clearly I wasn't arguing for using the Alexandrians where they are worse than the alternatives.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
The different texts have been thoroughly studied and compared by generations of scholars. Yeah, sure. But you seemed to be suggesting that we should follow Burgon. Most of those generations of scholars, after all, have come to a conclusion inimical to you. Well, we can't follow Burgon, he didn't do a recension.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Oh we should definitely follow Burgon, he's the only one who understands. And yet he didn't use this vast understanding to do what needed to be done. There is no Burgon edition of the New Testament.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Why should there be for pete's sake? He was a supporter of the Textus Receptus except for believing it needed some corrections. Which he didn't make. This is not intended as a criticism of the man. But it does mean that we can't just say that Burgon's done whatever needed doing, that "Burgon did this [looked at all the variant readings in all the MSS] [...] I don't need any further scholarship". Further scholarship would in fact be required, especially if you are not satisfied with the current crop of critical texts.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
You aren't distinguishing between the Greek text and the English translation. If the KJV were to be updated now as I keep suggesting the idea would be to find the clearest way to render it in English without destroying its universally acknowledged superiority of phrasing that has had enormous impact on the English language, literature and culture. This has nothing to do with the Greek texts and I don't see that you said anything about that anyway. If you meant readings in the Greek text, how about Matthew 16:20? The Textus Receptus, following the Byzantine texts, turns this into nonsense; in the Alexandrians, it makes sense.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
It isn't hard to know the Mind of God, just believe the Bible. "How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways." --- the Bible.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 315 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
People can of course twist the Bible but it's not really all that hard to understand most of it if you approach it honestly. Remind me, how many Protestant sects are there?
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