Very nice.
Manuscript varients betray deliberate altertion of NT
by peacefulpete 31 Replies latest watchtower bible
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hooberus
Was Mark derrived from "Secret Mark" - A Christian Response
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Narkissos
Leolaia: Thank you so much for this detailed, synthetic, and very impressive answer. It is by far the best concise apology of SMark I have ever read. And thanks Hooberus for providing the link to a fairly complete summary of the opposite viewpoint (contradictions included, such as "it doesn't agree with Clement" and "it shares Clement's gullibility at apocryphal material").
Until now, I had been much impressed by the "overmarkan" character of SMark. As a forgery it sounded quite naive to me. But the structural intricacy with GMark Leolaia pointed to has quite another ring. Can a forgery be that formally candid and structurally sophisticated? Maybe -- and the hypothesis of a very lucky candid 18th-century fake appearing as very consistent under later structural analysis cannot be ruled out. A forgery by Morton Smith himself isn't probable, since his interpretation of the text doesn't match this consistency. However, the weakness of external evidence remains.
Again, thanks very much for enlightening -- if not clearing altogether -- my perplexity...
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yxl1
Very interesting post, and comments.
21. None of the early pagan critics of Christianity was as thorough and penetrating as the late-second century Celsus, and none of its defenders was as brilliant as Celsus's posthumous opponent, Origen.
Does anyone have information on these guys?
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Navigator
Very interesting post! Surely the original accounts of the life of Jesus were in Aramaic. Have any of those accounts been recovered?
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Narkissos
yxl1:
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Narkissos
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/origen.html
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/celsus.html
As far as I know the oldest extant documents about Jesus are in Greek.
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badboy
Getting off the subject slightly,Y does the WT and others use 10th century manuscripts?
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peacefulpete
There are even a few proponents of the proposal that the Synopics and Acts were in some eary form written in Aramaic initially. They suggest that this best explains some odd wording, as the result of awkward translating to Greek. However this broad suggestion has little support. The idea tho that at least some stories incorporated into these works were in Aramaic is likely and may account for the examples cited by the above proponents.
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Narkissos
Badboy: there are, of course, a much greater number of 10th century copies of the NT than, say, 2nd to 5th century (in fact, if I'm not mistaken, we have no complete NT text before the 4th century: only fragments and portions before). They are generally less valuable (being copies of copies of copies..., on a longer period, of a more and more standardized text). However, some of them, coming from separate locations and/or textual traditions, may preserve very old variants, so everything has to be examined...
For the OT the situation is quite different, since the complete Hebrew Bible is only available in middle-age copies. Most modern translations are essentially based on the 1008 (11th century) Leningrad Codex. Of course older manuscripts have now been found (such as the Qumran Bible scrolls), and we also have the old translations like the Greek Septuagint which are witnesses to older states of the texts. The evidence shows that a number of editions of the same texts, with different characteristic, coexisted until the last quarter of the 1st century, where the pharisaic-rabbinical standardization of the text began, and most older copies were destroyed.