Jesus: The Missing Years in the East

[angellous_evangellous]

Because actual textual critics aren't morons who get impressed typing practically random and absolutely meaningless numbers into a calculator like your source.

Yeah, that's about it. How do you disprove something absurd?

 

[angellous_evangellous]

The following is just a load of crap pulled from thin air. It's not 99.999% accuracy, but 99.98% accuracy, BTW.

I will post this just once. If you want to disprove it, be my guest, but I have no reason to believe it is a fabrication, nor will I attempt to prove it if requested:


Would the caretakers of The Divine words be as careless as the Greek scribes obviously were, while The Aramaean scribes, transcribing a mere human translation of the NT , counted words and letters, burying old mss.and maintaining such accuracy, that two Pe****ta mss. – Eastern or Western, maintained by The Church of The East and The Orthodox Syrian Church, respectively, differ , on the average, only once every 3.3 pages , or 101 times in the entire New Testament ?(This is ignoring the pericope de adultera). That is based on a comparison of ten Pe****ta mss. in
Pusey and Gwilliams’ critical apparatus of Matthew, five Eastern and five Western. Some Eastern mss. vary from each other as little as once in 43 pages! A comparison of three of them in Matthew reveals an average of one variant per seven and two thirds pages!

These are almost always insignificant variations in spelling or even splitting of compound words into two single words and vice versa.

The agreement between two avg. Pe****ta mss. amounts to 99.98% !
A pair of average Eastern Pe****ta mss. agree 99.99%.
A pair of average Western mss. agree 99.97%.
The best we can expect from two Greek mss. (Textus Receptus) is 99.80% .
The letter # differences are 10 times greater between Elzevir's 1633 TR edition and Stephens 1550 TR edition.
The Greek NT Textus Receptus exists in various editions, whose mss. are the most consistent and carefully copied of all Greek mss. Elzevir's 1633 edition differs from Robert Stephens 1550 edition by about 87 letters in 1 Corinthians!
That , while only 2 thousandths of the book's 33,260 letters, (0.2%) is still ten times the variation found in the Pe****ta mss. (compare 2 ten thousandths for Pe****ta-Pe****to)-Lukes highest variation of 0.09%)

The Byzantine NT (1991 edition -Pierpoint) has 691,023 letters. Stephens 1550 has 693,395 letters. This is pretty good for Greek texts overall- 99.66 % agreement.This is 0.33 % variation ; Pe****ta-Pe****to Lukes vary by 0.09%, 56 letters (the highest variation of Pe****ta books) , just 1/3rd of Greek variation.
Overall Pe****ta-Pe****to variation, comparing only 22 common books and disregarding John 7:53-8:11 which is found only in Western Pe****to, is 0.023%.
That is an overall variation in The Greek 10 to 14 times as great as The Pe****ta(o) versions. (1 Cor. is 10 times as great.)
The modern Critical Editions of The Greek NT have much wider divergences.
Westcott & Hort's Greek NT has 679,885 letters. That differs from Byzantine by 11,038 letters, or 1.60%. 98.40% agreement is still not bad at all, but relative to the Byzantine-Textus Receptus comparison, about five times as great.
This is 70 times the Pe****ta variation. 1 Cor - W&H 32717; Byzantine 33182; 1550 TR 33256. WH 98.60% of Byz. ; TR 100.22% of Byz.
WH varies 1.40% from Byzantine - Majority text in 1 Cor.
TR varies 0.22% from Byzantine - Majority text in 1 Cor.

WH variation is 6.36 times as great as TR from Majority text.
I don't have USB NT or Nestles' 26th Edition stats yet. They will be better than W&H comparison numbers, however.
The Eastern Pe****ta text mss. have even less variation among some mss. than some of the variation we see in Western editions.Consider 8 variants in one ms. in all of Paul's epistles- (one for every ten pages), in an 8th century manuscript from a 2000 year old version.
The average for two Eastern mss. at 0.01% variation , or 0.0001 , is one twentieth the variation found between two editions of the Textus Receptus -(1633 Elzevir and 1550 Stephens).
Two Greek mss. will vary more than this.
P32 and P33 , , two Eastern Pe****ta mss. in Pusey and Gwilliams’ critical apparatus of Matthew, differ only once in the whole of Matthew’s Gospel! That is 0.000017 variation , or 99.9983% agreement!
That is less than one thousandth the variation between the two closest Greek editions.

We have had the picture reversed for time immemorial. It is obvious that this
phenomenon of accuracy of copying and preservation of mss. strongly supports Pe****ta primacy and a secondary Greek NT.
Facts are such pesty things sometimes, especially for those who have an interest in promoting an agenda rather than discovering the truth. Why are these facts not even known in seminaries and Bible colleges, much less discussed and written in textbooks on Textual Criticism?


http://aramaicnt.com/Research/Proofs of Pe****ta Primacy.pdf

Ancient manuscripts aren't even compared this way, especially when we're talking about a major project like the New Testament that has thousands of fragments scattered over a wide geographical area and over hundreds of years.

I'm perfectly happy with you pretending there's "accuracy" when it's impossible, but I'm a little frustrated that someone can lie to you so effortlessly about something so basic. I don't like seeing people being deceived.

I admit I am entertained by the delicious silliness of it.

 

[godnotgod]

Ancient manuscripts aren't even compared this way, especially when we're talking about a major project like the New Testament that has thousands of fragments scattered over a wide geographical area and over hundreds of years.

I'm perfectly happy with you pretending there's "accuracy" when it's impossible, but I'm a little frustrated that someone can lie to you so effortlessly about something so basic. I don't like seeing people being deceived.

I admit I am entertained by the delicious silliness of it.

Sometimes people are so hypnotized by their own beliefs that anything (everything) else appears silly or ridiculous, even evil, as dictated by their belief system.

Currently, the Church is on a paranoid campaign to talk down as evil all other views, such as Wicca, Zen, Yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age, etc, etc, as it is so threatened by these other views.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Sometimes people are so hypnotized by their own beliefs that anything (everything) else appears silly or ridiculous, even evil, as dictated by their belief system.

Currently, the Church is on a paranoid campaign to talk down as evil all other views, such as Wicca, Zen, Yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age, etc, etc, as it is so threatened by these other views.

The difference is that we aren't talking about something fabricated by the church. All of this stuff is a part of an established history that is completely exclusive of your arguments. Not just a little exclusive - what you're saying about the Essenes and the "Aramaic NT" would never be entertained as a possibility because it has no relationship at all to reality, except that the words are real words. No skeptical historian [something you might pretend to value on a good day] would treat this topic with the contempt that it deserves.

That is to say, the words "Aramaic," "Nazarene" (and similar), Jesus, Mt. Carmel all exist. That's it. That's the only thing that your source has going for it. They aren't making up those words. They are making up 99.9% of everything else, and if they happen to be right on some peripheral detail, it's because they got lucky.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Sometimes people are so hypnotized by their own beliefs that anything (everything) else appears silly or ridiculous, even evil, as dictated by their belief system.

Currently, the Church is on a paranoid campaign to talk down as evil all other views, such as Wicca, Zen, Yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age, etc, etc, as it is so threatened by these other views.

This is just prejudiced dribble. The Church isn't threatened by anything but itself, and for the last 50 years, the Church has been more open and tolerant of other religions than at any point in history.

 

[godnotgod]

This is just prejudiced dribble. The Church isn't threatened by anything but itself, and for the last 50 years, the Church has been more open and tolerant of other religions than at any point in history.

Is that why Christian missionaries in India target Hindu cremation ceremonies, shouting obscenities in the faces of the grieving families as they are leaving their services?

Is that why one priest openly denounces evolution from the pulpit on Sunday TV?

 

[godnotgod]

The difference is that we aren't talking about something fabricated by the church. All of this stuff is a part of an established history that is completely exclusive of your arguments. Not just a little exclusive - what you're saying about the Essenes and the "Aramaic NT" would never be entertained as a possibility because it has no relationship at all to reality, except that the words are real words. No skeptical historian [something you might pretend to value on a good day] would treat this topic with the contempt that it deserves.

That is to say, the words "Aramaic," "Nazarene" (and similar), Jesus, Mt. Carmel all exist. That's it. That's the only thing that your source has going for it. They aren't making up those words. They are making up 99.9% of everything else, and if they happen to be right on some peripheral detail, it's because they got lucky.

Is that the same contempt the Church had for Gnostic teachings, which it just about destroyed? Or for the Apocrypha, which it banned from its council? Further back, it was Rome and Paul that targeted the Nazarenes, and what it did to them I've already gone over.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Is that the same contempt the Church had for Gnostic teachings

You know who had contempt for gnostic teachings? Gnostics. That category is a modern invention includes a wide range of different and even conflicting beliefs (and, actually, there isn't complete agreement on whether certain teachings should be considered gnostic, as there is no real criteria that can reliably identify gnostics).

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Is that the same contempt the Church had for Gnostic teachings, which it just about destroyed? Or for the Apocrypha, which it banned from its council? Further back, it was Rome and Paul that targeted the Nazarenes, and what it did to them I've already gone over.

That's what I had in mind - sort of. The Apocrypha was never banned. It's actually in Catholic Bibles.

Further back, there is no evidence that Paul targeted Nazarenes / Essenes or mini freezer pies.

 

[godnotgod]

That's what I had in mind - sort of. The Apocrypha was never banned. It's actually in Catholic Bibles.

Further back, there is no evidence that Paul targeted Nazarenes / Essenes or mini freezer pies.

Right. And there was no such thing as the Inquisition or the Holocaust, nor were the Dead Sea Scrolls hidden from Roman destruction.
"....unlike the Inquisition or the Holocaust, there is no historical blah blah blah....."

re: Apocrypha: http://bannedfromthebible.org/

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Right. And there was no such thing as the Inquisition or the Holocaust, nor were the Dead Sea Scrolls hidden from Roman destruction.
"....unlike the Inquisition or the Holocaust, there is no historical blah blah blah....."

re: Apocrypha: Banned from the Bible-Banned books of the Bible and banned Gospels

Your inability to choose a reliable source is impressive. I don't think that I've ever seen you choose a good source by accident.

 

[outhouse]

That's what I had in mind - sort of. The Apocrypha was never banned. It's actually in Catholic Bibles.

Further back, there is no evidence that Paul targeted Nazarenes / Essenes or mini freezer pies.

Look at the books in some African catholic communities, there up over what 60 something books included?


They love that Apocrypha

 

[tomasz.t]

I think it is nonsense. Christ rejected reincarnation

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Look at the books in some African catholic communities, there up over what 60 something books included?


They love that Apocrypha

Not sure about that. But the Apocrypha was never banned in the West or the East for that matter. In fact, when Luther and the Reformers did not print the Apocrypha in their Bibles, it became a mark of pride for the Catholics.

How I wish gullibility worked both ways.