“How do you know that God was not working through the Greek rulers? There is a reason that tne NT was written in Greek, and the authors of the NT often used quotations from the LXX.”
We certainly think so...and for very good reasons. We Greeks are God’s other favorite kids and like those other favorite kids, we are very, very bad people with big mouths. He wanted us to have every advantage and use those big mouths to spread the word! :)
BTW, if you want scriptures likely nearest to the “originals”, the Byzantine Text of Orthodoxy is what you should look for.
When the Scriptures are read every day in the Greek Orthodox Church, they are read *in the original Greek* are they not?
I want people to consider the implications of that fact...that the same culture that wrote the Septuagint and the New Testament has maintained an continuous unbroken existence since that time.
>We certainly think so...and for very good reasons. We Greeks are God’s other favorite kids and like those other favorite kids, we are very, very bad people with big mouths. He wanted us to have every advantage and use those big mouths to spread the word! :)
God uses all things for the workings of His will. He definitely used the Greeks extensively. From Alexandrian prophesy in Daniel, to the Septuagint and the use of the term Parthenos to further underline the virgin birth of the Messiah, to the use of the Greek NT letters and books to spread the word throughout the Eastern Med, God surely had His hand on them poor loudmouthed Greeks.
>BTW, if you want scriptures likely nearest to the “originals”, the Byzantine Text of Orthodoxy is what you should look for.
Which one? The Byzantine text family is pretty diverse itself. Since the Ninth Century it was the only Greek text being copied due to the encroaching Muslim hordes, (the Latin, of course being found in the West) but this does not say the OTHER Greek non-Byzantine texts are inferior just because they were not being published.
The use of differing manuscripts is not a weakness but a strength. It shows that the Dan Brown “Constantine had all the other versions of the bible destroyed” myth is just that. As well as the fact that even with all the thousands of manuscripts most of the differences are scribal errors and there are NO doctrinal differences between them. No, we don’t need the bible to have differences in churches, we just need to ignore it.
I personally LOVE textual criticism and would push all those interested in the field to read read read good Christian scholars.
But NOT Bart Ehrman, as he is an apostate with an agenda. Dr. James White really highlighted that in his debate with Dr. Ehrman. (I know, I know, Dr. White is an evil protty CALVINIST, but the debate is quite interesting. Funny that, lots of Catholics love when White debates Christian cultists, apostates and others that they do not agree with...)
I suggest anyone interested to take a gander at this for some good crunchy textual criticism goodness —> ( http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php?amount=0&blogid=1&query=An+Introduction+to+Textual+Criticism )