Ping
Nothing new here. It’s called “scientific Bible criticism.”
I taught the Bible as literature for a while, and had to read a ton of that stuff, although I found little use in it.
Basically, it began in German Universities back around 1870, when Bismarck was attempting to exterminate Christianity (especially Catholicism) so he could modernize the State. But it permeates almost all academic Bible study today.
A questionable 5th AD quote would be some 800+ years older than any OT writing, so it's hardly reliable.
thanks for posting this. very cool!
i wish to understand the Bible the best i can.
and i much prefer to have the oldest possible copies,
and translations from them.
(i read that in one very ancient scroll, the “666” was actually “616”...)
” The Book of Jeremiah is now one-seventh longer than the one that appears in some of the 2,000-year-old manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. “
i don’t doubt, that some have tried to add or subtract from Scripture in the past 2,000 years.
The writer of this hit piece against the integrity of the biblical text is either ignorant about what orthodox Christians believe about the inspiration/authorship of the Bible, or has intentionally misrepresented both those beliefs and the Hebrew University research. Most of my Hebrew has long flown, but in another life I have a strong background in classical Hebrew (including study at Hebrew University).
The salient point is that, for orthodox (vs. "liberal") Christians, the inspiration of the biblical texts extends properly only to the biblical writers and the original manuscripts.
In other words, Christians do not claim that every copy of the text that was produced, in any language at any time, is equally "inspired." There are many copies of the biblical texts of varying accuracy (both the Hebrew and the New Testament), produced by those with different motivations and often limited skill. It would be ludicrous for Christians to claim that each and every one was "inspired."
It is the job of textual criticism ("lower" criticism rather than "higher," which is largely destructive) to ascertain to the highest degree possible what the original text said. This is accomplished by comparing the best of the "extant" manuscripts and applying interpretive rules. As a general rule, older is more accurate, but not necessarily so.
Textual scholars who hold a high view of Scripture believe that the translations that we have today reflect the inspired originals to a very high degree. Although there are many minor differences in wording, there are exceedingly few instances where any point of doctrine is affected. Thus, we can read our English Bible with a very high degree of confidence that it reflects the original inspired texts.
This has been going on since the 1920’s when the texts from Ugarit were discovered.
Ancient Hebrew is hard to translate anyway. With only 7800 words, each word has too many meanings.
Same old agenda - deny the prophecies of Daniel - they have been at this for decades
I don’t think anything negative here. All of you who a Protestants should not fret either. It was Erasmus of Rotterdam - a Catholic - the one who made the first critical Hebrew edition of the Old Testament.
The edition that Luther used to translate the Bible into German.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Scientific criticism of the Bible has been around a long time. It is useful, and has no bearing on inspiration.
So, rest easy y’all.
-Theo