Christian: The "Alexandrian" Manuscripts (testimony, gospel, tradition, contradiction)

[No*s]

In another thread Limbo wrote:

Originally Posted by Limbo

Some people want us to believe that all 5,306 manuscripts that disagree with the "minority text" are corrupt and that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are as pure as the wind driven snow.

There is a problem with that however. These two Alexandrian manuscripts disagree with each other over 3000 times in the gospels alone. Anytime you are dealing with the Alexandrian texts, you are dealing with corrupted texts. They are the Gnostic gospels, which the Bible warns against the Gnostic teachings. These were corrupted to support the Arian dogma. These texts are not valid to begin with. It is the "Majority Text" that makes up our Bible, and this includes the King James Version and the New King James Version. Most other versions are from the Alexandrian texts and so, therefore, not even reliable. There is evidence of at least three copyists tampering with the text.

I would be off-topic to respond to him there, but I'm not here. *laughs maniacly*

Limbo, as a caveat (and any other Christian that wants to get in this), you are surrendering the inspiration of Scripture with the above. I say this, and I'm not a Textus-receptus guy, nor am I all that fond of Alexandrian supremacy; I support a reading found in the majority of families generally which comes much closer to a Byzantine reading but still isn't the Byzantine text. I say that in spite of those views. The differences between the Alexandrian text family and the "Byzantine" text family (I don't like that word) aren't as substantial as you make it sound. If the differences are that important and change the text's meaning, then a very similar problem will persist in the majority: there are variants, and they number in the thousands. Most of the variants are simply spelling, and as such, don't count. This accounts for the majority of the Alexandrian variations.

With that in mind, I would like you to prove:

1). That the Alexandrian texts are Gnostic or Arian. They cannot simultaneously be both. In other words, list the changes and demonstrate the theology.
2). Demonstrate the over 3000 contradictions between א, A, B, C, D, etc. and if you wish the papyri like P66 and P75. I have access to a textual apparatus that can give me these readings, and I can read the original language if you wish use it. I am quite likely to.

3). I would like your sources. I will pull most of my variants from the apparatus in the NA27, which even though you won't accept the text form, does give the alternative readings.

ἀληθώς γε λέγωμεν κατὰ ταῦτα.

[No*s]

I propose the following model:

The Alexandrian text represents our oldest biblical manuscript line. It is the roughtest, and thus least smoothed over, and no doctrine has been eliminated (Arians would eliminate the Trinity, but that is still present in the texts). The reading in it is actually more doctrinally sound than some of the Textus Receptus models in the KJV (II Peter 1.3-4 is clearly better in the Alexandrian).

The chronology is important, because there would be less time for copying errors. Of course, there still isn't that much difference, but it is important in garnering the strongest biblical text possible.

In determining the correct reading, counting manuscripts is not a wise choice. Your advocating a strict majority text approach requries just that reading. To demonstrate the flaw, say I decided to send a manuscript to a friend. He decided to copy it and distribute it to five friends. Four of whom copied it once, each with various typos, and one copied it twelve times with more typos than the others. Say this twelve became popular and most of them were copied a dozen times. How many witnesses do we have? Just five if we don't have the original. The reading that is widest is widest because it was copied most. That is no gaurantee of being right. If we classified the witnesses across five families and still maintained the same reading, that garners a lot of weight. In some cases a family may have multiple readings.

This is true of the biblical text. Biblical manuscripts are classified into Byzantine (the majority fit this family), Western, and Alexandrian. There is another subset some scholars see, the Caesarean, which is usually subsumed in the Alexandrian and Western text families. The majority of manuscripts fit into one textual family and find their textual "father" in a single group of manuscripts. These others represent different traditions.

The result is that a unity of testimony between text classes is weighty, but not a 95% say such and such. That carries little weight, and nobody has ever been able to collate all the manuscripts (it's pretty presumptuous to make the statement in light of that). The choices, then, are to be decided on in light of their quality in the science of textual criticism.

Until I see evidence to the contrary, I will maintain that the Alexandrian text is neither Gnostic nor Arian. Some of the readings in the Alexandrisn textline are clearly anti-Gnostic and anti-Arian. The example I gave above of I Peter 1.3-4 is a prime example.

[No*s]

Originally Posted by Limbo

I'm more than willing to yield to your judgement on the matter. Your knowledge is appreciated...in fact if you would like to help correct anything other claims I made on the IPU thread I would more than appreciate it...

OK . And here I was hoping for a debate. I'm willing to bet that you got a good bit of information from a KJV-Onyist site or an author like Riplinger or Ruckman. My advice is to stay away from them. I'll go over the IPU thread and see what I can see

[No*s]

Originally Posted by Limbo

Much appreciated. As a relatively new convert to Christianity, my knowledege isn't as extensive as some. I do what I can...but if given a choice I prefer to argue about the flaws I see in other peoples arguements. I try to destroy misconceptions. I try to demonstrate a foundation of logic as well as faith.

If I am forced to do research to do that, I rely on the internet...sometimes its hit and miss. Thats why I'm so grateful to have someone like you here who can help me with that by providing feedback like this.

Lol, until I saw that IPU thread I had never even heard of the IPU satire.

I understand entirely .

I'll try and get a few good websites together for you to read on this subject. Now, of course, if I may ask, what group in Christianity did you convert to? Even the non-denoms are a group of their own

[No*s]

All right, I found a couple of sites you can educate yourself with. There's a lot of articles about the text of the Bible at TC: A Journal for Textual Criticism.

A good introduction to the cricital text and the issues in textual criticism can be found at this page. I don't agree with everything on it by a long-shot, but it's mostly fair. I have a few Byzantine sympathies, so that was my principle gripe .

This page is an argument for Byzantine priority. It suffers from some flaws, but it's still a valuable resource.

Now I've said Byzantine too many times. I've come to dislike that word a lot, and you have some resources. After reading them, you'll have a better idea of when someone is feeding you bull. However, it still requires study, and frankly, only books of the dead trees variety mixed with journals of the same variety will really get well-informed.

Enjoy