I said I would not reply, but I have to reply to this one part to make things historically accurate. During the early part of Judaism and Christianity (and every other culture/religion for that mattter), scribes would painstakingly copy the Bible (holy books, scrolls, etc.) by hand because they did not have a printing press. Every word, every number, every piece of punctuation.
Your desire to be historical;ly accurate is good. What you are stating in the above sentences in not according to history, nor is it accurate.
You mention punctuation. there was no punctuation in either the Hebrew or Greek manuscripts. In the Greek manuscripts the Bible was written as unicals. These are capital letters only run next to each other, and without any punctuation. Punction is a relatively later invention, as is uniformity of spelling. As a result, a simple sentence would look like this: JESUISCHRISTISMYSAVIORSANCTIFIERANDCOMINGKING.
At Colgate Rochester Divinity School, encased in acrylic is a replica of the real Chester Beatty Payparus. I had it in my hands, and I can assure you that it was written in Unicals. BTW, that papyrus is a portion of John, and it id dated c. 96
Like modern Hebrew, there are only consonants in earlier Hebrew. The vowel pointing is an invention to help non Jews pronounce the words properly, among other things.
If they were translating from their source document into a different language, they would often write notes along the margins (many of us do that today) in an attempt to cross reference verses, phrases and words, because they wanted to be as accurate as possible (but they were not always 100% successful). Their documents would then be stored away. Some time later, another scribe/scholar would come along and do the same thing, although now they have not only their source documents, but also the notes that their predecessors left behind. Those notes intermittently wound up being included in the next rendition/revision. History (not the Bible) has told us this.
The issue of translation is a discrete issue than the autographs, the topic of the thread. But missing from your critique is the comparison of the early texts in Hebrew and the LXX, or Septuagint.
Since you seem to not want to accept my say-so, here is a brief paragraph:
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Septuagint (sometimes abbreviated LXX) is the name given to the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures. The Septuagint has its origin in Alexandria, Egypt and was translated between 300-200 BC. Widely used among Hellenistic Jews, this Greek translation was produced because many Jews spread throughout the empire were beginning to lose their Hebrew language. The process of translating the Hebrew to Greek also gave many non-Jews a glimpse into Judaism. According to an ancient document called the Letter of Aristeas, it is believed that 70 to 72 Jewish scholars were commissioned during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus to carry out the task of translation. The term “Septuagint” means seventy in Latin, and the text is so named to the credit of these 70 scholars. [/FONT]
from
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.http://septuagint.net/
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The date of the LXX is fix, and agreed to be in the decline of the Greek Empire (Alexander the Great died 330 BC) and before the ascendancy of the Roman Empire.
The date of the DSS is fixed at 125 BC or less
The date of the Masoretic texts are fixed at c.600.
EACH of these correspond almost exactly, with only minor variations such as spelling and numbers due to the way numbers are written in Hebrew. therefore for anyone to assert that the doctrine of inerrancy is false MUST use these texts to establish their premise, and that is an impossible task. Even the most liberal scholars agree to the reliability of the texts, meaning what we have now is exactly what they had back then.
The original documents (the ones written by Moses for example) are long gone, having been destroyed ages ago.
All scholars stipulate that. However, your conclusions do not follow
All that we have are copies of copies that were hand written by a scribe way back when, and include those "notes" from previous scribes.
When the Hebrew scribes copied from the texts, doing as you suggest would break the rules because it would be a sacrilege to write anything else by the proper text on a scroll. That scroll would have been destroyed.
It is important to understand that you will not find this information in the Bible, but rather history textbooks.
Of course! But the issue is not the facts you present, but the conclusions that you draw from them.
The Bible is not a textbook. It does not claim to be a timeline of history.
Actually, it is history of the redemptive acts of God. Therefore the purpose of the Bible is not the same purpose you will find in a college text.
Since we can't compare any source text to the originals (the autographa) then it becomes a non-issue.
That my friend is a non sequitur, meaning that the conclusion does not follow. I demonstrated above how we can use a "triangulation" of three different, but remarkably alike texts all copied by hand, and all within 900 years of each other
The Bible has oversights and contradictions (you can read them for yourself) not because of God, but because of human error.
You have yet to prove that there errors of fact in the autographs. Certainly there are variations that are easily explained, and they are all recognized, and categorized, but they have no bearing on the accuracy of the texts.
Naturally, you have a right to your opinion, but no one has the right to their own set of facts. I believe that I gave you many different facts from different sources. Please consider them. Thank you.
