Made up Bible

[Cybrweez]

Well, I could say I wrote TCOTC, and prove I didn't (a negative), I suspect you'd have some ways to do so. I'm not asking to prove something doesn't exist, I'm asking for evidence for certain claims. Claims like it's obvious there were edits (one even said purposeful edits) over the years. Ok, who made the edits, and what was the original? In order to know it was edited, we would have to know the original? Otherwise, we're guessing. And, to be clear, I don't mean to talk about misspellings, or changes that have no effect on the meaning, as there is such an abundance of manuscripts, you can cancel small issues like that by comparing amongst them all. (But even those, we know they are misspellings or errors b/c we have a weight of evidence for the correct word/phrase, whatever.)

[High Lord Tolkien]

Well, I could say I wrote TCOTC, and prove I didn't (a negative), I suspect you'd have some ways to do so. I'm not asking to prove something doesn't exist, I'm asking for evidence for certain claims. Claims like it's obvious there were edits (one even said purposeful edits) over the years. Ok, who made the edits, and what was the original? In order to know it was edited, we would have to know the original? Otherwise, we're guessing. And, to be clear, I don't mean to talk about misspellings, or changes that have no effect on the meaning, as there is such an abundance of manuscripts, you can cancel small issues like that by comparing amongst them all. (But even those, we know they are misspellings or errors b/c we have a weight of evidence for the correct word/phrase, whatever.)

Ah...I finally get what you're asking.
To be honest I wasn't sure up until this point.
You're saying that the only proof of edits would be by comparing it to older texts.
Makes sense.
I mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls before.
It's like a time capsule copy of the Old Testament.
Once it's translated, if ever, it will reveal any changes made over the centuries.
Good luck on any consensus or agreement on that though.

[I'm Murrin]

Well, I could say I wrote TCOTC, and prove I didn't (a negative), I suspect you'd have some ways to do so.

You would not be proving a negative. You would prove you did not write it only by proving someone else did.

[Fist and Faith]

Well, I could say I wrote TCOTC, and prove I didn't (a negative), I suspect you'd have some ways to do so. I'm not asking to prove something doesn't exist, I'm asking for evidence for certain claims. Claims like it's obvious there were edits (one even said purposeful edits) over the years. Ok, who made the edits, and what was the original? In order to know it was edited, we would have to know the original? Otherwise, we're guessing. And, to be clear, I don't mean to talk about misspellings, or changes that have no effect on the meaning, as there is such an abundance of manuscripts, you can cancel small issues like that by comparing amongst them all. (But even those, we know they are misspellings or errors b/c we have a weight of evidence for the correct word/phrase, whatever.)

Ah...I finally get what you're asking.
To be honest I wasn't sure up until this point.
You're saying that the only proof of edits would be by comparing it to older texts.
Makes sense.

I wasn't sure, either. The thing is, any translation is a change. It can't be otherwise. So all the parts that weren't originally in English are changes from the originals. And I'm not just being a smartass. A teacher was once reading a story. In one part, the little boy was running home, happily anticipating the candy bar he knew was there waiting for him. The teacher said that, in the original language, the little boy was running home for his porridge. But American readers wouldn't understand the feeling the boy had if we thought he was going to get porridge, so the translator changed it to candy. Just a simple thing. But language and cultural differences are real, and they have to be taken into account when translating.

[SerScot]

F&F, Avatar,

Isn't another example of translation shift when Christ says, "It is finished." As he dies on the Cross. According to my priest, in the original Greek a better translation may be "It is complete." It has a very different connotation from the modern idea of "it is finished."

[Orlion]

F&F, Avatar,

Isn't another example of translation shift when Christ says, "It is finished." As he dies on the Cross. According to my priest, in the original Greek a better translation may be "It is complete." It has a very different connotation from the modern idea of "it is finished."

That seems to have more to do with the evolution of language then it does translation issues...

[Avatar]

According to my priest, in the original Greek a better translation may be "It is complete." It has a very different connotation from the modern idea of "it is finished."

It does have a very different implication, definitely. Of course, the fact that the original is in Greek might suggest a remove from the actual events as well.

--A

[Cybrweez]

Yea, I don't know who would think translation b/w languages is an easy thing. But there's no need to focus on english version, it comes from a source. Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew (which is why I think Jewish people get a richer understanding of the Bible, Old or New testaments).

But, we can focus on the original languages for this exercise. How do we know Matthew wasn't written by a disciple of Jesus before 70AD? For instance, the Q document that gets mentioned quite a bit, I'm confused b/c this document has never been found, it's hypothetical, yet spoken of as near fact.

[Avatar]

Scholarship believes Matthew was composed between the years c 60 and 85, but a small minority claim that there is absolutely no way that it could have been written in this time given the average lifespan of most people at that time. Ignatius seemed to have knowledge of four Pauline epistles and the Gospel of Matthew", which gives a terminus ad quem of c. 110. The author of the Didache (c 100) probably knew it as well. Many scholars see the prophecy of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem as suggesting a date of composition after the year 70. However, John A. T. Robinson argues that the lack of a passage indicating the fulfillment of the prophecy suggests an earlier date. Furthermore the Gospel of Matthew does not mention the death of James in 62 nor the persecutions of the early Christians by Nero.

This view has been challenged by two scholars almost a century apart, The Reverend C. B. Huleatt and Carsten Peter Thiede. In December 1994, Carsten Peter Thiede redated the Magdalen papyrus, which bears a fragment from the Gospel of Matthew, to roughly the year 60 on palaeographical grounds.

So it's based at least partly on external (non-biblical) references to the relevant book, and apparently partly on the dating of the earliest discovered fragment thereof.

--A

[Cybrweez]

Many scholars see the prophecy of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem as suggesting a date of composition after the year 70.

--A

Ok, I think this is what it comes down to, for most types of evidence, even in OT. B/c of the prophetic bits, it must've been written after those events came to pass. Flimsy.

[Avatar]

In that specific instance, they're saying that it must have been written earlier, because there is no indication that the prophecy had come to pass was included.

--A

[Cybrweez]

No, it says many scholars believe it was after, b/c of the prophecy, but some other guy doesn't think so. The 'many' is what I was referring too.

[Fist and Faith]

Many scholars see the prophecy of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem as suggesting a date of composition after the year 70.

Ok, I think this is what it comes down to, for most types of evidence, even in OT. B/c of the prophetic bits, it must've been written after those events came to pass. Flimsy.

What evidence suggests it was an actual prophecy, written before the event? If I'm told that a particular bit of writing was found that says, "Such-and-such an event will take place", and that event is known to have taken place, and I can't do tests on the original material that the writing is on, which explanation should I believe? It was either written after the event, and worded as though it was written before; or it was actually written before the event, and the writer could see the future. The first option is a piece of cake. It can be done rather easily, by any of us, about a million different events from the past. And I'm sure you would think exactly that about a so-called prophecy outside of the Bible. If I'm expected to believe the second option, there's gonna have to be some evidence for it.

[Damelon]

There's a fascinating article in the New Yorker about searching for Jesus in the Gospels. If you have a few minutes, read it. I don't normally read articles on Biblical matters, but it is interesting.

When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? This curious criterion governs historical criticism of Gospel texts: the more improbable or “difficult” an episode or remark is, the likelier it is to be a true record, on the assumption that you would edit out all the weird stuff if you could, and keep it in only because the tradition is so strong that it can’t plausibly be excluded. If Jesus says something nice, then someone is probably saying it for him; if he says something nasty, then probably he really did.

And a bit about when the Gospels were written, from the same article.

What seems a simple historical truth is that all the Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the First Jewish-Roman War, in 70 C.E.—a catastrophe so large that it left the entire Jesus movement in a crisis that we can dimly imagine if we think of Jewish attitudes before and after the Holocaust: the scale of the tragedy leads us to see catastrophe as having been built into the circumstance. As L. Michael White’s “Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite” (HarperOne; $28.99) explains in daunting scholarly detail, even Mark—which, coming first, might seem to be closest to the truth—was probably written in the ruins of the Temple and spiritually shaped to its desolate moment. Mark’s essential point, he explains, is about secrecy: Jesus keeps telling people to be quiet about his miracles, and confides only to an inner circle of disciples. With the Temple gone, White says, it was necessary to persuade people that the grotesque political failure of Jesus’ messianism wasn’t a real failure. Mark invents the idea that Jesus’ secret was not that he was the “Davidic” messiah, the Arthur-like returning king, but that he was someone even bigger: the Son of God, whose return would signify the end of time and the birth of the Kingdom of God.

[aliantha]

Good article, Damelon.

[Avatar]

Very interesting.

--A

[Cybrweez]

was probably written in the ruins of the Temple and spiritually shaped to its desolate moment.

Yea, that's what I said. The fact that a hint of the temple's actual destruction is missing is ignored. And the contradictory writings, you know, people saying, wait a minute, that was never said, or that never happened, don't exist. Does it say when Mark was written?

[Avatar]

Found in a quick look about Mark...

...However, most contemporary scholars now regard [Mark] as the earliest of the canonical gospels (c 70), while other scholars now argue that the Gospel of the Hebrews actually was composed first and the basis for future gospels...

The Gospel of Mark was composed by an anonymous author, traditionally believed to be Mark the Evangelist (also known as John Mark), a cousin of Barnabas. There is external evidence that the Gospel of Mark may have been based on the preaching of disciple of Peter. However, this is an area of ongoing debate. (See also the Augustinian hypothesis and Augustine of Hippo)

As early as Papias in the early 2nd century, this gospel was attributed to Mark, who is said to have recorded the Apostle Peter's discourses. Papias cites his authority as being John the Presbyter. While the text of Papias is no longer extant, it was quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea:

This, too, the presbyter used to say. ‘Mark, who had been Peter's interpreter, wrote down carefully, but not in order, all that he remembered of the Lord’s sayings and doings. For he had not heard the Lord or been one of his followers, but later, as I said, one of Peter’s. Peter used to adapt his teachings to the occasion, without making a systematic arrangement of the Lord’s sayings, so that Mark was quite justified in writing down some of the things as he remembered them. For he had one purpose only – to leave out nothing that he had heard, and to make no misstatement about it.

Irenaeus concurred, as did Origen of Alexandria, Tertullian, and others. Clement of Alexandria, writing at the end of the 2nd century, reported that Mark was urged by those who had heard Peter's speeches in Rome to write what the apostle had said. Following this tradition, scholars have often speculated that this gospel was written in Rome. Among recent alternate suggestions are Syria, Alexandria, or more broadly any area within the Roman Empire. Other scholars argue that the Papias citation is unreliable, pointing out that there is no distinctive Petrine tradition in Mark.

Since the Gospel of Mark contains mistakes concerning Galilean geography and customs, the author was not native to the Holy Land, as was the historical Peter. It has been argued that there is an impending sense of persecution in the gospel, and that this could indicate it being written to sustain the faith of a community under such a threat. As the main Christian persecution at that time was in Rome under Nero, this has been used to place the writing of the Gospel in Rome. Furthermore, it has been argued that the Latinized vocabularyemployed in Mark (and in neither Matthew nor Luke) shows that the Gospel was written in Rome. Also cited in support is a passage in First Peter: "The chosen one at Babylon sends you greeting, as does Mark, my son."; Babylon being interpreted as a derogatory or code name for Rome, as the famous ancient city of Babylon ceased to exist in 275 BC. Jerome affirms that Mark the disciple and interpreter of Saint Peter, and the follower and Apostle of Jesus Christ. According to Eusebius, Mark composed a gospel embodying what he had heard Peter preach in Rome.

However, certain scholars dispute the connection of the gospel with persecution, identified with Nero's persecution in Rome, asserting that persecution was widespread, albeit sporadic beyond the borders of the city of Rome.

--A