“The truth is, all doctrinal disagreements are based on the reading of disputed passages.”
You change the subject. The question was what doctrine rests on passages whose existence is disputed, rather than disputed interpretation of the agreed on text.
“for example, Mr. Rogers’ insistence that God really didn’t harden Pharaoh’s heart (even though the Bile says is clearly)”
Except you distort my position. I did NOT claim God didn’t harden Pharaoh’s heart, but said that in doing so, God was pushing him further in the direction he was already going. We may harden concrete, but we do so because it is the nature of concrete to be hard.
“The other one is Isaiah’s virgin. or John’s bread being Jesus’ flesh.”
Actually, I don’t know of any commentators who deny that the word used in Isaiah can refer to both a young woman and/or virgin. I suppose I shouldn’t say ANY...there are a few fringe groups that worship the KJV uber alles, but I don’t think of them as serious or honest commentators. John 6 is a passage I have discussed with y’all at length. I find it amazing that anyone claims it means the bread is literally the flesh of Jesus. Obviously, some disagree - but notice! NO one disputes the TEXTS! Neither Catholic nor Baptists claims that we don’t know what the text of John 6 was in 150AD, or 300 AD.
“Mr Rogers asks his question knowing that no particular variations in biblical text today.”
One of the great failures of the church in 500+ AD was to start ignoring scripture. If you read some of what passed for serious theological debate by 1400, it was appalling. And since scripture was in disrepute, it isn’t surprising that there were increasing variants. Thus the text Erasmus put together had flaws - flaws many men have laboured hard to remove. And we have largely been successful.
However:
“Clearly, someone was concerned with the passage being interpreted in a way that might put in question the dogma of Incarnation and Jesus’ eternal divinity, so they changed “who” to “God.”
No, someone so clearly assumed, at the core of their being, that Jesus is divine, made an error in copying and didn’t notice it because it didn’t register as a possible error. However, the divinity of Jesus doesn’t rest on that verse.
The divinity of Jesus is clearly taught throughout the NT. The exact wording used in councils hundreds of years later is NOT clearly and explicitly taught, which is why I don’t care if someone holds to them. Knowledge of the exact way that human and divine existed in Jesus is not required for salvation, nor for holy living - which is the purpose of God’s revelation. That is why God provided us with the scriptures and not a systematic theology text.
Jesus is God. He lived as a man. He is both Son of Man and Son of God. I believed in him and was saved long before I first read the church council decrees on how it worked - and I still find those decrees to be more concerned with human philosophy than divine revelation.
I accept those decrees as being accurate because, in my experience, those who start with denying them end up in la-la land, following internet prophets, believing in extraterrestrials and spaceships, denying Jesus was/is God at all, etc. I tend to view the Trinity as the easiest test of someone’s adherence to the revelation of scripture - not because the Trinity is clearly laid out in scripture, but because those who depart from it depart from the rest of scripture - sooner or later.
Joseph as the father of Jesus...what of it? Whatever else is true, medieval folks had no doubt about the divinity of Jesus. They didn’t add stuff in to prove what everyone accepted as true anyways!
“This is where the “spiritual flesh” comes in and why the Church insisted on the real Presence, real flesh and real blood...”
No, the discussion of spiritual bodies came about from the knowledge that the physical body of believers dies, so how will we be resurrected? Real presence came in because it has a significant amount of truth to it...as Baptists put it, “The outward elements in this ordinance, when correctly set apart for the use ordained by Christ, bear such a strong relation to the Lord crucified, that they are sometimes truly, but figuratively, called by the name of the things they represent, namely, the body and blood of Christ.”
The main marks of a Christian, what identified him as such, were baptism and Eucharist. Many church fathers who taught ‘real presence’ also discussed it as metaphor.
The Catholic Church went further and created transubstantiation, so their ‘priests’ could offer a sacrifice.
But again, these are not disputes based on the reliability of the texts, but about the meaning of what we find in the texts.
“So without making this any longer, most of the theologically dependent variants were made early in the Christian period....Sometimes it is forgotten that the etxt being read is actually a redacted text that was intentionally changed to make Christ divine, or one person, or things to that nature.”
Making an assertion does not prove the assertion.
As FF Bruce put it:
But how different is the situation of the New Testament in this respect! In addition to the two excellent MSS of the fourth century mentioned above, which are the earliest of some thousands known to us, considerable fragments remain of papyrus copies of books of the New Testament dated from 100 to 200 years earlier still. The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, the existence of which was made public in 1931, consist of portions of eleven papyrus codices, three of which contained most of the New Testament writings. One of these, containing the four Gospels with Acts, belongs to the first half of the third century; another, containing Paul’s letters to churches and the Epistle to the Hebrews, was copied at the beginning of the third century; the third, containing Revelation, belongs to the second half of the same century.
A more recent discovery consists of some papyrus fragments dated by papyrological experts not later than AD 150, published in Fragments of an Unknown Gospel and other Early Christian Papyri, by H. I. Bell and T. C. Skeat (1935). These fragments contain what has been thought by some to be portions of a fifth Gospel having strong affinities with the canonical four; but much more probable is the view expressed in The Times Literary Supplement for 25 April 1935, ‘that these fragments were written by someone who had the four Gospels before him and knew them well; that they did not profess to be an independent Gospel; but were paraphrases of the stories and other matter in the Gospels designed for explanation and instruction, a manual to teach people the Gospel stories’.
Earlier still is a fragment of a papyrus codex containing John xviii. 31-33, 37 f, now in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, dated on palaeographical grounds around AD 130, showing that the latest of the four Gospels, which was written, according to tradition, at Ephesus between AD 90 and 100, was circulating in Egypt within about forty years of its composition (if, as is most likely, this papyrus originated in Egypt, where it was acquired in 1917). It must be regarded as being, by half a century, the earliest extant fragment of the New Testament.
A more recently discovered papyrus manuscript of the same Gospel, while not so early as the Rylands papyrus, is incomparably better preserved; this is the Papyrus Bodmer II, whose discovery was announced by the Bodmer Library of Geneva in 1956; it was written about AD 200, and contains the first fourteen chapters of the Gospel of John with but one lacuna (of twenty two verses), and considerable portions of the last seven chapters.’...
The study of the kind of attestation found in MSS and quotations in later writer’ is connected with the approach known as Textual Criticism.’ This is a most important and fascinating branch of study, its object being to determine as exactly as possible from the available evidence the original words of the documents in question. It is easily proved by experiment that it is difficult to copy out a passage of any considerable length without making one or two dips at least. When we have documents like our New Testament writings copied and recopied thousands of times, the scope for copyists’ errors is so enormously increased that it is surprising there are no more than there actually are. Fortunately, if the great number of MSS increases the number of scribal errors, it increases proportionately the means of correcting such errors, so that the margin of doubt left in the process of recovering the exact original wording is not so large as might be feared; it is in truth remarkably small. The variant readings about which any doubt remain’ among textual critics of the New Testament affect no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice
To sum up, we may quote the verdict of the late Sir Frederic Kenyon, a scholar whose authority to make pronouncements on ancient MSS was second to none:
‘The interval then between the data of original. composition and the earliest extant evidence become so small to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scripture have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.’
Doctrine in the Catholic Church rests on the Magiosteirum's interpretation of existing official scirpture and historical teachings of the Church. Doctrine among Protestants is up to an individual based on extant copies of the Bible.
Be it as it may, doctrinal among all Christians at the present time is over the interpretation of extant verison of the scirptures.
This was not the case in the first 300 years of Christendom, when there were many variant verison floating around. There is biblical evidence that many passages were redacted to reflect doctrine or to bring it into ahmrony with the current doctrine. We know about some of these through references made by others repeatedly, or by actually having variant copies at hand.
All doctrinal differences result from either (1) variant biblical text or (2) variant interpretation of biblical text. Since all biblical text was aritifically made to agree with the earliest condices known, because they agree wiht the verison of the Bible accepted by the Church. Competing verison were either destroyed or buried.
So it is no wonder that all our copies of the Bible closely agree; it's artifical agreement! It does not prove that this is as close as it gets ot the original or that God preserved his scriptures from corruption.
From extant copies of variants we can see apt tern applied by Church scribes in trying to diminish or eliminate various divergent doctirnes based on variant copies of the Gospels and other NT books. Specifically, older versions of the NT were changed to reflect Church doctrine more closely. This was accomplished by chaing verses that sounded docetist, Gnostic, separationist, adoptionists, etc., and replacing them with vereses that sounded more "orthodox."
I seriously don't understand what you are disputing here except the banal position that changes in scriptures have no effect on doctrine.
No I am not. You said God made it only more obvious. Which is silly. God could have softened his heart and opened his eyes, but then the drama and theatrics would be lost. The God of the Bible could have fostered better, kinder humanity but he didn't. Because we need shock and awe, don't we?
Thus the text Erasmus put together had flaws - flaws many men have laboured hard to remove. And we have largely been successful
Yes, we have been successful in making sure our copies conform to the earliest church acceptable copies (those that were not chuch-acceptable miraculously disappeared!). It's an artificial concordance and it does not prove that this is the original or that the version we have is God-breathed.
The divinity of Jesus is clearly taught throughout the NT
No he is not. Only in John's Gospel written at the end of the century.
No, someone so clearly assumed, at the core of their being, that Jesus is divine, made an error in copying and didn’t notice it because it didn’t register as a possible error
Only in your make-believe world, it seems. I am reading Vulgate and it doesn;t have God (Deus) but who (quod) in 1 Tim 3:16
et manifeste magnum est pietatis sacramentum quod manifestatum est in carne iustificatum est in spiritu apparuit angelis praedicatum est gentibus creditum est in mundo adsumptum est in gloria
How come no one assumed it there? I will tell you why: because forging it in Latin was not a simple dash away, as it was in Greek! That's why.
So, we have older Greek manuscripts without it and we have Latin Vulgate without it. No one knew it was 'wrong' until some anonymous zealot took it upon himself to play God and 'correct' it.
However, the divinity of Jesus doesn’t rest on that verse.
The forger obviously believed it did, especially with Gnsotcis and Arians presenintg an alternative and a competitive threat.
Jesus is God. He lived as a man. He is both Son of Man and Son of God. I believed in him and was saved
I guess that makes it true, because Mr Rogers says it's twue, it's twue...Should I quote someone by the name of Mr Rogers who says "Making an assertion does not prove the assertion"?
The main marks of a Christian, what identified him as such, were baptism and Eucharist. Many church fathers who taught ‘real presence’ also discussed it as metaphor.
Which ones? And I hope you have many.