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To: mountainlion
I read that linked article, and thanks for sending it, it's a very good one. It does not refute my earlier comments, though.

There are reportedly 3,536,489 letters in the Bible. (I didn't count them, I looked it up!) If the text is 99.5% error free, that makes 17,687 errors. And there are indeed thousands of scribal errors in the various mss of scripture.

However, I do not derive a skeptical attitude about the Bible from those calculations. The truth is that the Bible is rather astoundingly error-free, compared to any other ancient text. Even more important, most of these scribal errors make no difference whatsoever. For instance, one text says "he had sheep and goats," another says "he had goats and sheep", and the Aramaic is over there saying "he had herds and flocks."

Lots of variants, makes no difference at all.

People who play up scribal errors to encourage agnosticism (like Bart Ehrman) are, in my view, pedantic fools. They turn "perfect text" into a kind of an idol, and then when they find a half-penny variant, they say "There is no god!"

98 posted on 07/23/2014 8:34:07 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (To err is human, but to really screw up requires digital technology.)
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To: Mrs. Don-o

I think the greatest errors in the Bible come form translators. The King James Bible was translated by the best at the time but thy had little knowledge of ancient Hebrew customs and such and could not fully understand the Hebrew text. They did their best. Lots of our Founding Fathers could read Hebrew, Greek, Latin and other ancient texts which gave them a greater understanding. We can find much information on ancient texts but we can find more garbage than any other generation also.


100 posted on 07/23/2014 8:51:17 AM PDT by mountainlion (Live well for those that did not make it back.)
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