Reverse realm and contradictions of bible translation

We have no original manuscript (MSS}copies. We only have 24,000 extant copies. (The next highest number is the iliad with about 650) The accuracy of the copies compared to each other gives us a measure of how close the copies are likely to be to the missing original. A comparison of all the Extant MSS has turned up only an occasional letter being miss-copied or transposed.

I tried to find out more about this with a very quick, very general google search, but I was very unsuccessful. I tried lots of variations on keywords like "original" and "manuscripts" and "quantities" but all of them for many, many pages were all entries which were almost entirely identical to each other saying essentially the same thing (paraphrased):

quote:

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Julius Caeser has only 10 copies of his "Gallic Wars" manuscript which is 900 years later than the original, the new testament has 24000 copies with the earliest being about 150AD

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The veracity of this I have been entirely unable to verify because it is patently obvious that all the religious sites have poisoned the well and real information is the proverbial needle in a haystack made of needles.

But, it occurs to me that this is a blind alley - Julius Caeser has many other pieces of information about him than one manuscript which was, after all, a dry text meant for scholars, not laymen. There's coins, busts, journals and more from third party and wildly remote sources all from the same time which add up together in perfect harmony.

the bible, on the other hand, whilst having 24000 extant copies or what-have-you has only the bible to confirm itself. Big difference.

and come on, in two thousand years, I'm pretty sure there will be more than 24000 copies of starwars - but does that mean that greedo existed? or (heaven forbid) jarjar?

there's even the jedi's own gnostic heresy - the holiday special.

So your research skills are poor and all the information you could find is in agreement with me, yet my conclusions are wrong? Uncle. I Give.

That's not what I meant, forgive me for missing out certain details - whilst you missed the obvious stress I was putting on "very very brief" (meaning that it was far from a dedicated search through a mountain of archives supported by conversations with specialists) I didn't make it clear enough that the pages all agreeing with each other were entirely, without fail, all religious and all parroting a single source - as in not only were they undeniably biased to start with but they offered no independant proof and contained no original work save reading the same single book they were all paraphrasing from.

You also offered no thoughts on the rest of the message - as in the fact that the many extant copies are copies of the same source and offer no proof outside of themselves in gauging the accuracy of their account - whilst Caeser's existence is backed up by many related AND unrelated sources of information, and whilst there may only be 10 copies of that one work of his, that is far from the only source of information on the man himself.

So, now I've pointed out what you misunderstood, any new thoughts?

In order to verify what the original Scripture is, there is a measurement verification for one to see first which copies of scripture are false, and it is very easy to prove if one first verifies the evidences that the corrupted ones came from the same source

It is? great, let's hear it!

There is much evidence that the Protestant bible translation is a sophisticated copy of the Catholic Bible since all the books of the new testament that are in the versions of the Protestant bible carry precisely the same mistranslations and contradictions that came from the one mastercopy belonging to the spiritual ordinances once left to the doctrine of the Catholicism and the [holy] Mother city--congregation, (i.e. Rome and the State of Vatican).

Oh brother.

firstly, the protestant bible was a new retranslation of earlier greek texts, not a retranslation of either the catholic version nor the vulgate latin that bore it.

Secondly, how do you know there are "mistranslations and contradictions that came from the one mastercopy"? If all you have is the "mastercopy", you can never know that the "mastercopy" holds "mistranslations"!

Contradictions, perhaps, but is that the fault of the "mastercopy" or the fault of the text itself?

So, you can tell if the copies are "in agreement" with other copies - sure - but that doesn't mean much now, does it?

I get it. You have to learn to walk in the other guys shoes. You would need to find me conflicting information from a source I trust in order to make a valid point. Just as if I was trying to discredit your "age for the earth", I would have to use a "Scientific" source to discredit you. I can't call all scientific literature POISONED.

My original message was about two things

1) the amount of literary heavy-lifting done by most believers seems to be minimal, and infact all the websites I found did zero checking on their own and instead parroted one person's book. Whilst the book may be correct about the numbers of manuscript copies, whilst I haven't read it, it still doesn't tell me anything about the veracity or accuracy of the manuscripts

It does tell me there are a lot of copies, but it shows no proof about accuracy when compared to these older copies, nor about changes between earlier and later in terms of language, syntax, context or otherwise.

Maybe the actual book has better proof?

I think to pretend that translations change nothing than the language is a big mistake, and I think to pretend that whilst scribes are really, really good at what they do, to pretend that they can't make mistakes or would not make changes for any reason is foolish.

2) You still cannot use the bible to prove the bible - I think that is, essentially, goedels incompleteness theorem (yes, I'm horribly ignorant so if I've got the name wrong, please correct). As I stated, there are probably more than 24,000 copies of starwars and they date right back to year 0 of the mythos. In 2000 years, should archaeologists find the original trilogy, should they automatically assume it to be true?

Edited by greyseal, : No reason given.

I...have no idea what you're talking about. Can you tone down the crazy and explain that in plain English?

Even assuming some all-pervading quasi-mathematical code that can survive translation between myriad languages and several thousand years, how can you use the bible to prove the bible?

I'm also not sure how what you're talking about negates contradictions of bible translations, except by attempting to assert that there's some sort of inbuilt meta-CRC to fix all these errors?

2015 & Reality in the same breath. All-Righty-Then.

?

it's now 2010. back in '78 the JW's thought the world was going to end. Again. Back in 2000 I think there were several doomsday cults that drank the coolaid.

What's wrong with talking about 2015?

how can you use the bible to prove the bible? ------- Revert the keys Sir, Every Scripture has been reversed, example: a camel's name: the generic term, god and elohim (gods) instead of a SEPARATE NAME: ELYON.... faith instead of Fidelity.... In order to see the Scriptures as originally written you have the option of doing this: use the synchronized keys to revert the changes made by the Scribes.

(synchronized reversed noodle blumpf redacted)

no, please, really - start at the beginning. I don't know what a synchronized key is, I have no idea what a camel has to do with elohim and if I try to read scripture backwards it makes even less sense than it does forwards. Especially if I try to read it in Jewish.

2012.. dun dun dun...

oh don't remind me! that movie was awful! It was worse than The Day After Tomorrow!

..oh, wait, yes, the whole world-really-is-going-to-end-this-time-we-mean-it

Just...nod, and walk away, slowly. Don't make eye contact...

Dear Greyseal, It is great to hear from you again.

Hi JRTjr - haven't really had time to look at your email, yet, they're normally quite detailed, but I will get to it!

I have to agree with you on your points in this posting. Greyseal writes: the amount of literary heavy-lifting done by most believers seems to be minimal Unfortunately I have found this to be true about people across the board, not just the “believers”

I actually don't recall all I was saying here, but you're probably right. There's quite a lot of people on both sides of the debate that haven't and won't read the bible even the criticise it, but iirc in this particular case, every single webpage for a hundred or so seemed to share not only religiosity, but also vocabulary, style, facts and source (singular) and appeared to be a carbon copy in all but name.

Greyseal writes: to pretend that translations change nothing than the language is a big mistake, and I think to pretend that whilst scribes are really, really good at what they do, to pretend that they can't make mistakes or would not make changes for any reason is foolish. This is also so true. A direct translation ‘word for word’ (per say) would not make much sense especially with two completely unique languages. However, I believe there may be a variable you may be overlooking. If God is the author of the Bible (as the Bible claims), then would you not have to take into account God’s ability to keep the errors and tendencies of scribes to ‘add’ or ‘change things’ to a minimum?

Well that's the question! Is it fair to ask how powerful god is by bringing up the fact that even amongst believers there is vehement disagreement over such a simple word as "yom"? Can we be sure that sects and splintered offshoots won't appear (such as JW's and LDS's already have) which won't rewrite the bible (and/or recanonize such as already happened in ~3rd century CE) - there's been disagreements aplenty amongst and between samaritans, jews, christians, muslims, catholics, protestants, "NT-only" xians and more already about which books do and do not belong, what the translations mean, what the context is, how important various verses are when stacked up against each other, which version of the ten commandments are followed and so on.

The bible in it's many forms is undoubtedly old, but the originals ARE lost, and older versions (dead sea scrolls for example) are different to the newer ones...I think that's why there was (and is) a movement towards trying to pull out the "lessons" (which definitely shapes the lessons themselves!) from the "historical" text, and treating the text itself as a parable more than a history lesson, which probably fed into the backlash that we see today in the 6-24hour-long-it-all-really-happened viewpoints held hard and fast by certain denominations.

You may hope this won't influence the bible, but history appears to tell us it already has and certainly will.

I think it's easier for a non-believer to study such a phenomenon, since they have no preconceived notions that such a change can't happen...

Hi JTRjr,

Are you complaining that “every single webpage for a hundred or so seemed to share not only religiosity, but also vocabulary, style, facts and source (singular) and appeared to be a carbon copy in all but name. ” or that “…amongst believers there is vehement disagreement over such a simple word as "yom"?”

Both.

One from experience on the intertubes, the other from this website. They are not exclusive.

Greyseal writes: The bible in it's many forms is undoubtedly old, but the originals ARE lost, and older versions (dead sea scrolls for example) are different to the newer ones... … You may hope this won't influence the bible, but history appears to tell us it already has and certainly will. The variations between the different versions and between the ‘Dead See Scrolls’ and the modern ‘Canonized Bible’ are, surprisingly, small.

From Wikipedia (yes, I'm lazy), quoting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_scrolls

quote:

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The biblical manuscripts from Qumran, which include at least fragments from every book of the Old Testament, except perhaps for the Book of Esther, provide a far older cross section of scriptural tradition than that available to scholars before. While some of the Qumran biblical manuscripts are nearly identical to the Masoretic, or traditional, Hebrew text of the Old Testament, some manuscripts of the books of Exodus and Samuel found in Cave Four exhibit dramatic differences in both language and content. In their astonishing range of textual variants, the Qumran biblical discoveries have prompted scholars to reconsider the once-accepted theories of the development of the modern biblical text from only three manuscript families: of the Masoretic text, of the Hebrew original of the Septuagint, and of the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Old Testament scripture was extremely fluid until its canonization around A.D. 100.

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(emphasis mine)

Now I'm no scholar, but these are words of people who are.

Greyseal writes: I think that's why there was (and is) a movement towards trying to pull out the "lessons" (which definitely shapes the lessons themselves!) from the "historical" text, and treating the text itself as a parable more than a history lesson, which probably fed into the backlash that we see today in the 6-24hour-long-it-all-really-happened viewpoints held hard and fast by certain denominations. I have found that, generally speaking, the reason people want to treat the Bible: “as a parable more than a history lesson” is that if they accept it as ‘the Word of God’ then they have to accept the authority of God over their lives. They use all kinds of excuses for not accepting the Bible as literal but once you boil it down it usually has more to do with their stubborn pride /I want to do things my way/ then any facts.

I don't agree with you there in all cases. I know that people can still believe that God has authority over their lives just as much without believing in the literal truth of all the bible, and it makes the differences easier to swallow (if it's just a story, within which is god's wisdom, then it matters far less that there are four differing accounts of the resurrection, it just matters that there WAS a ressurection, and so on). It allows them to say that god was better than the people who wrote about him - they can say that the wisdom of god was such that murder was always wrong, and that the stories about genocide and ethnic cleansing are actions of a barbaric people from a barbaric time that would not be justified now, and need not be. the story of Noah changes from mass extinction to parable of being faithful to the lord will see you through even impossible odds.

The fire-and-brimstone evangelicals call this watering down the message, but the "rational believers" see it as their way to reconcile obvious discrepencies (age and shape of earth, the reality of helio-centrism, evolution, and so on).

I became a ‘believer’ at fourteen, although I had gone to church with my family since before I was born. As a teenager (and into my early adulthood) I was plagued by the question: Is there evidence {scientific evidence} that refutes the Biblical claims?; and if so what should I do about that?

The only way you can deal with new facts is to incorporate or to ignore - or suppress.

I am now in my early forties and I have not come across a single piece of ‘scientific evidence’ that refutes what the Bible says. However, I have found evidences that caused me to adjust my interpretation of what the Bible says. {I try to be careful to look at what the ‘evidence’ says; and not the conjecture of Scientists and Theologians or my own prejudices}

I would submit that you incorporate and ignore as irrelevant where necessary (and I mean no offence when saying that). for example, we share a lot of common DNA with monkeys and apes, common descent and evolution is a fact; the believer can say many things to negate the naturalists' premise of natural abiogenesis, such as "god did it that way", or "god used evolution", otherwise the fact of evolution and shared DNA must be ignored or labelled as irrelevant. All it will require is a slight modification, an adjustment of the interpretation, or simply a statement that god is smarter than the writers of the bible.

I'm in my early thirties, and I would say almost the exact opposite as you; I have found many things that tell me the bible is not a history book, that many if not all of the accounts of the magical and non-magical occurences within are myth and legend and possibly not even based on real occurences, and that far from not having any scientific proof to deter faith, I have seen no scientific proof to reinforce it.

I remain agnostic, but on Dawkin's (I think it was) scale of 1 - 7 I rate myself a 5 or 6 because I see nothing that requires a god and nothing that proves there is a god.

In my email to you I asked about the issue with when Jesus was born - according to one entry, he was born 1 CE. According to another it was at the latest 4 BCE (and still another says that Jesus must have been 1-2 years old when the male babies were killed, so that makes it 6 BCE). The general view is that the former is wrong, but some refuse to acknowledge there IS a discrepancy, others provide an explanation why this interpretation is wrong, and still others say it was written by man, and when Jesus was born isn't important as much as that he was.

Still others see the bible as a story and nothing more, so the veracity of the accounts are of little matter, so exist or not, the accounts can differ as they are stories from two different authors supposedly about the same guy, and errors will occur.

Edited by greyseal, : I'm going to make sure I don't sound overly harsh in this rambling message i wrote last night in an attempt not to offend.