Dead Sea Scrolls and the inerrant word of God

by dgp 10 Replies latest jw friends

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  dgp

  Some days ago I read this article:

  http://www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15543906

  It essentially says that, more or less when Christ is deemed to have been alive as a person, there was more than one version of the Scriptures out there. Which is a hell of a problem for a believer. People of faith hold it that God transmitted his word inerrantly. But it so happens that God didn't seem to be speaking with one voice, as there was more than one version of the Scriptures. The least you can say is that someone tampered with one version and not with the others. But then, who is to know who did what?

  I would appreciate any comments.
• 

  JWoods

  One problem with the notion that God himself somehow preserved the bible down through the centuries is the total lack of original documents - only much later fragments here and there. Looks like if God had wanted them preserved, he could have done a little better job of it.

  What we actually have is not unlike a jig-saw puzzle with about 1/10th of the pieces.

  The dead sea scrolls themselves are just fragments - historically useful, but not proof of divine intervention IMHO.
• 

  dgp

  But this finding is different. It is about how the scrolls were preserved and they do contain a version of the Scriptures that is different from the Masoretic text. That is to say, now we don't have just discussions, but a strong suggestion that there was never one single scripture to start with.
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  JWoods

  When Bishop James Usher decided that Adam's creation was pinned down to evening of Oct. 23, 4004 he had to decide upon three "oldest" texts of the OT to add up the ages of the ancient patriarchs.

  They had respectively: The Samaritan - 1307 years, The Hebrew - 1656 years, The Greek - 2242 years. He picked the Hebrew because it roughly agreed with a recently discovered Chaldean version.

  I agree that all this archeology really shows is that there is a wide array of ancient discordant writings from which to pick and choose.
• 

  Terry

  One of the most important things I had to unlearn about Christianity is that it is/was ONE thing historically.

  Even Judaism was all sorts of variations with one unifying element: the temple sacrifices.

  Neither Christianity nor Judaism was a unified polarity. It was a buffet of ideas. It was a Wikipedia. Each group formed around proprietary beliefs.

  The "other" guys were wrong and "our" group was right. In Jesus' time the main groups were at odds: Sicarii, Saducees, Pharisees, fringe groups such as the hermetic Dead Sea purists, etc. Christianity spun off those factions and fractioned itself. Within a few hundred years of the time of Jesus you had Christians not only disagreeing about the nature of Jesus himself--but, killing each other over their arguments of orthodoxy!

  The myth of early christian "purity" is ludicrous fiction. Alexandria vs Constantinople vs Antioch vs Rome.
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  Leolaia

  The Society likes to say that the Dead Sea Scrolls copies of Isaiah show that the text hardly changed from the first century BC to the tenth century AD (when the Masoretic Text was finalized). Not quite true because there are lots and lots of scribal errors and things like that, but by and large, the differences are relatively minimal. What the Society doesn't mention is that the contents of other books, like Psalms, Jeremiah, and 1-2 Samuel are very much different in the Dead Sea Scrolls. There is it obvious that different editions of the same books circulated in antiquity. It is much the same with Esther or Daniel or 1 Esdras in the Septuagint; there too we can see that different versions of the books circulated.
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  JWoods

  And according to Purplesofa's snake worship thread, they themselves may be rethinking the veracity of that snake-handling verse they put into the NWT.
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  Terry

  ......and it is pretty obvious that the book of ESTHER is nothing more than a romance novel Isreal-style rather than a "holy" book worthy of canon!

  Yet, so many Type and Anti-type articles over the years were written by the Society.....
• 

  Leolaia

  Actually, yes, Esther is a good exemplar of a Hellenistic novella, comparable to Judith, and pagan works like Chaereas and Challirhoe.
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  JWoods

  Yet, so many Type and Anti-type articles over the years were written by the Society.....

  And, so much fodder to cook up great Assembly dramas...

  This might be a good thread to again mention that the WTS is speechless when trying to defend their choice of the bible canon (copied the old Constantine council even though they think those guys were apostate trinitarians).