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The Story of Jesus
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10-12-2018 3:37pm#1
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antiskeptic wrote: »That view (insofar as it applies to books-of-the-bible transmission) conflicts with this:
The Masoretes developed a system of checks to ensure that every copy was as nearly perfect as humanly possible. To make certain they had not added or left out even a single letter, they counted the number of times each letter of the alphabet occurred in each book. They noted and recorded the middle letter of the entire Old Testament. They recorded the middle letter on each page and the number of letters and words in each column. They examined every copy of the Old Testament and withdrew from circulation all copies in which any error was discovered. These carefully copied Hebrew texts have remained virtually unchanged since about 600 to 700 AD. In 1947 the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls yielded copies from all the major sections of the Old Testament, except Ruth, dating back more than a century before Christ. When compared to these ancient copies, the Masoretic texts were found to be virtually identical.
I do recall reading the above in times past but merely copied the above passage after a quick search. Is the above just some Christian apologetics propaganda or did the Masoretes indeed operate this way?
I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make here but it's a bad one. What do the Masoretes have to do with anything? The Masoretes were a group of Jewish scribe-scholars who came together in the 6th century CE to preserve the Hebrew bible. So, we're talking about a concerted effort by a coherent group of scribes to preserve the text of another religion in another language centuries after the time we're talking about. And this is relevant how exactly? You're making an awful lot of unsupportable assumptions here.antiskeptic wrote: »That would beg the question..
No, not really. Begging the question, in the logical fallacy sense, requires assuming your conclusion. But I haven't assumed that conclusion, I have demonstrated it with examples. Since we're here, how about another example. In Mark 6:14-29, Mark describes the death of John the Baptist at the hands of Herod Antipas. Mark refers to Herod four times (v. 22, 25, 26, 27). However, Herod Antipas wasn't a king, merely a tetrarch as Josephus Points out in Antiquities 17. When Matthew comes to write his gospel, he corrects Mark by replacing the word king with tetrarch. However, in the middle of the story, Matthew forgets to correct Mark and refers to Herod as king in 14:9 matching Mark 6:26. This is a clear example of parablepsis.antiskeptic wrote: »Apparently your average A4 page contains 500 words. So Mark is the equivalent of 22 A4 pages. The idea that someone (who doesn't even have to be operating close to the standard of our Masorete) couldn't proof-compare 22 pages A4 pages worth of text and not spot glaring mistakes is fairly implausible. For this idea to work, you've got to assign a care & attention level down at bottom drawer. You have to suppose that the writers didn't really give a fig about what they were copying.
Let me ask you a question. If you had the task of generating 22 pages of copy:
-consisting of significant copying from an existing text
-with important-to-you additions and subtractions
-to which you attached some kind of importance..
.. do you think you'd manage to avoid errors and omissions of a very glaring kind. I know I'd be capable of it. I'm wondering about this sense of "inevitability of error". Like, it's just proof reading - it's not complicated or reliant on modern technology.
Again, you're making an unsupportable assumption. You're assuming that proof-reading would have been a consideration for the evangelists or that factual accuracy was important to them. But given the evidence available this doesn't seem to have been the case. Take the exorcism story at the beginning of Mark chapter 5. Mark sets the story in the land of the Gerasenes. This creates a major problem since Gerasa was about 30km from the Sea of Galilee, rendering the story nonsensical. Matthew realises this and, in fairness, does his best to smooth over the crack in Mark's story by changing Gerasenes to Gadarenes and so reducing the error from 30km to about 5km. So, still nonsense but not quite as bad. However, at no point does Matthew attempt to discuss Mark's error. This stands in marked contrast to actual historical accounts of the time.
Take Suetonius' "Life of Caligula" as an example. In it, Suetonius acknowledges and discusses the uncertainty around Caligula's place of birth:
"Contradicting sources have made the place of his birth uncertain. Gnaeus Lentulus Gaetulicus writes that he was born at Tibur, whereas Pliny [the Elder] says that he was born among the Treveri, in a village named Ambitarvium, above the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle. Pliny further adds as evidence alters located there, bearing the inscription: ‘For the delivery of Agrippina.’ Verses that were in circulation shortly after he became emperor state that he was born in the winter-quarters of the legions: ‘Born in camp and weaned amidst the arms of his country, he was already a sign of future imperium.’ I myself have found it published in the acta diurna that he was born at Antium. Pliny has discredited Gaetulicus, on the grounds that he falsified his account through flattery, so that he could exalt the praises of a young and vainglorious prince who was even from a city sacred to Hercules; and that he made this lie with greater confidence, since there had actually been a son born to Germanicus at Tiber, nearly a year earlier, who was also named Gaius Caesar (concerning whose lovable innocence and premature death I have already spoken about above). Accurate chronology disproves Pliny."
Here we can see the differing sources mentioned as well as a discussion of what evidence supports each conflicting source. There's nothing like that in the gospels. This is because factual accuracy wasn't an important consideration for the evangelists, these are theological documents, not historical ones.antiskeptic wrote: »You seem to be saying that:
- Matthew approaches this sentence and adds "who hit you" in a deliberate and perfectly sensical attempt to strengthen the prophesy demand contained therein (which grants, for the sake of argument, your assessment of his motivations)
- He then carelessly makes a mistake in the mere copying of the sentence - a sentence which is the specific focus of his attention and concern - dropping "blindfold" and ruining his 'strengthening attempt' in the process.
Are you working from the supposition that the authors are blithering fools?
No, not blithering fools exactly. But as I've noted in a previous post, how the original gospel manuscripts looked is nothing like the text we're reading and writing right now. It was just a solid block of text, no punctuation, spacing, paragraphs, line breaks, verse numbers, chapter dividers, nothing.
Like this:
Now, we know Matthew copies almost all of Mark's gospel into his own to act as the backbone of his story. So, you can see from above that copying all of that text letter by letter while figuring out which bits needed changing isn't exactly an easy task. And it's made more complicated when Matthew's comprehension of his source material isn't exactly brilliant to begin with. He misinterprets Micah 5:2 changing Bethlehem from a tribe to a town, he misquotes Hosea 11:1 by truncating the passage and taking it out of context. He does the same a verse later with Jeremiah 31:15. He misreads Zechariah 9:9, misunderstanding a Hebrew parallelism so that Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and its colt. In 27:9, he inserts another messianic prophecy which he quotes from Jeremiah but actually comes from Zechariah 11:12-13.
And it's not even reading older texts where Matthew makes mistakes. In his genealogy Matthew states, that there were 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the Babylonian exile and 14 from the exile to Jesus or 42 generations total. But his genealogy only contains 41 names.
Again and again we see trivial mistakes from Matthew so he definitely has form in this area.
In fact, all of the evangelists do.
Mark contains a litany of errors about Palestinian geography, Jewish customs, Jewish legal procedures etc.
Luke describes Annas and Caiaphas as both being high priest, which was not true, Caiaphas alone was high priest. Luke's story opens with Joseph and Mary in Nazareth but then having to go to Bethlehem because of Quirinius' census, but Quirinius' census was of Judea so, being from Galilee, they would have been outside the scope of the census in the first place. Luke describes Lysanias of Abilene being a tetrarch in 29CE, despite the fact that he died in 33BCE.
Even John isn't immune to such basic errors. In 1:19, John opens his story in Jerusalem. But later in verse 28 he says that John the Baptist was baptising in Bethany "on the far side of the Jordan". But Bethany is on the western side of the Jordan, the same side as Jerusalem.
John, like Matthew also forgets what he's already written. In 2:11, John mentions that this was the first sign that Jesus performed. He then spends the next two and a half chapters documenting other feats of Jesus before declaring in 4:54 that this was the second sign Jesus performed.
Also, like Matthew, John suffers from a loss of historical perspective, failing to realise that the time he's writing about is different from the time he's living in. So just as in Matthew we get the unlikely "render unto Caesar" story" in John we get the expulsion of Christians from the synagogues, during the lifetime of Jesus, an anachronism that has been discussed by scholars for years with no insight forthcoming.0 -
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