Read the part about carbon dating. 1000 AD. The Khabouris is a copy of a document written in the 2nd century. The Khabouris itself was not. Carbon dating places it at 1000 AD, according to your source.
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Not reading the Bible in Greek- why?
- Thread starter TheSunscientist
- Start date
Read the part about carbon dating. 1000 AD. The Khabouris is a copy of a document written in the 2nd century. The Khabouris itself was not. Carbon dating places it at 1000 AD, according to your source.
godnotgod
Thou art That
re: Codex Sinaiticus:
"The Codex Sinaiticus has been corrected by so many hands that it affords a most interesting and intricate problem to the palaeographer who wishes to disentangle the various stages by which it has reached its present condition…."
(Codex Sinaiticus - New Testament volume; page xvii of the introduction).
What is the writer talking about? Did you note the phrase "to disentangle the various stages?" This indicates that there is a scribal problem with this codex and it is a BIG problem. Tischendorf identified four different scribes who were involved writing the original text. However, as many as ten scribes tampered with the codex throughout the centuries. Tischendorf said he "counted 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus." Alterations, more alterations, and more alterations were made, and in fact, most of them are believed to be made in the 6th and 7th centuries. "On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people." Tischendorf goes on to say,
"…the New Testament…is extremely unreliable…on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40, words are dropped…letters, words even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled. That gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same word as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament."....
....While Codex Sinaiticus may be old (or may not be since it was corrected into the twelfth century), it is obvious that it is corrupt. And yet, Sinaiticus is one of the two key manuscripts that form the basis of modern Bible versions.
Codex Sinaiticus: It Is Old But Is It The Best?
....and you are saying that the Pe****ta was translated from Bibles based upon corrupted manuscripts such as this?
The author goes on to state that the other treasured Greek manuscript, which you mentioned, the Codex Vaticanus, is in a state of mutilation.
"The Codex Sinaiticus has been corrected by so many hands that it affords a most interesting and intricate problem to the palaeographer who wishes to disentangle the various stages by which it has reached its present condition…."
(Codex Sinaiticus - New Testament volume; page xvii of the introduction).
What is the writer talking about? Did you note the phrase "to disentangle the various stages?" This indicates that there is a scribal problem with this codex and it is a BIG problem. Tischendorf identified four different scribes who were involved writing the original text. However, as many as ten scribes tampered with the codex throughout the centuries. Tischendorf said he "counted 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus." Alterations, more alterations, and more alterations were made, and in fact, most of them are believed to be made in the 6th and 7th centuries. "On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people." Tischendorf goes on to say,
"…the New Testament…is extremely unreliable…on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40, words are dropped…letters, words even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled. That gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same word as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament."....
....While Codex Sinaiticus may be old (or may not be since it was corrected into the twelfth century), it is obvious that it is corrupt. And yet, Sinaiticus is one of the two key manuscripts that form the basis of modern Bible versions.
Codex Sinaiticus: It Is Old But Is It The Best?
....and you are saying that the Pe****ta was translated from Bibles based upon corrupted manuscripts such as this?
The author goes on to state that the other treasured Greek manuscript, which you mentioned, the Codex Vaticanus, is in a state of mutilation.
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godnotgod
Thou art That
yes...a copy, in Aramaic, of a document originally written in Aramaic in 164 AD, this date being documented within the text of the colophon itself, and obviously not a translation from the Greek!
A copy is not a translation.
Like the Pe****ta, the sinaiticus is obviously copied from earlier documents.
First, Tischendorf is a 19th century scholar. A lot of better studies have been done since him. Second, the codex vaticanus is actually older. Third, ALL of our documents are copies of copies. We are lucky, however, that we have MANY texts of the NT, so textual criticism isn't a big problem.
Finally the Pe****ta has even more problems than sinaiticus, because it is not only a copy of a copy of a copy (going on who knows how long) but it is also a translation.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Ha! That is where the similarity ends! First of all, the Kharoubis Codex is complete and bound, though it is a copy. It is not composed of fragments. Here is a photo of the actual Khabouris Codex:
Beautiful!
Secondly, unlike the Sinaiticus and Valentinus codices, the Khabouris Codex is neither altered nor mutilated.
"..... the political and religious conditions.... isolated the Christians in the East from the rest of Christians in the Byzantine Empire and the rest of the Christian world. This isolation continued through Arab, Mongol and Turkish rule from the sixth to the thirteenth century. As the result of this continued isolation, the Biblical customs and manners and the Aramaic language remained unchanged and the Scriptures escaped additions and revisions.
Asahel Grant, M.D., the first American missionary to discover the Assyrians, writes in his book, The Nestorians, or the Lost Tribes:
`The Nestorians have preserved the Scriptures in manuscript with great care and purity.' He puts the date of Pe****ta New Testament in the early part of the 2nd century AD.'
One thing which has impressed the readers of these manuscripts is the care with which they were produced. There is hardly a word variance. Eastern scribes always copy Scriptures carefully. Time is immaterial to them when copying the Word of God. Sir Frederick Kenyon*, Curator at the British Museum, in his book Textual Criticism of the New Testament, speaks highly of the accuracy and antiquity of Pe****ta MSS. This translation is made from ancient MSS., facsimile pages which are reproduced in this volume.
This edition is not made as a revision. It is a translation from ancient Aramaic texts and from ancient manuscripts. We either have them or we have been granted to make photocopies from the ancient manuscripts by either their private owners or their public custodians."
http://www.specialtyinterests.net/comparing_the_kjv_and_niv.html
*****
"Better" in what sense? Do the later studies negate his findings?
You have not provided any proof of this. The Khabouris is carbon-dated at 1,000 AD, but the original it is copied from, as stated in the colophon of the copy, is dated at 165 AD. The Sinaticus and Valentinus documents are dated 4th century. You stated that the originals must be earlier. Maybe those originals were Aramaic texts, eh?
But they are a mess; full of corruptions, omissions, alterations, etc. while the Pe****ta documents are extremely clean and consistent from one document to the next. They agree with each other, except for the phony Old Syriac translation from the Greek.
Too bad they don't agree with each other as the Pe****ta docs do!
No, it is not a translation, unless, once again, you are referring to the rejected Old Syriac version. You don't translate Aramaic into Aramaic! Why would any self-respecting Aramaic speaking Christian translate the Pe****ta from the Greek back into his mother tongue?
If it is a translation from the Greek, why did the Aramaic speaking scribes find it unnecessary to make any alterations as the Greek scribes did, and profusely so?
*Frederic G. Kenyon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Codex Sinaiticus has the complete NT and is also bound. See here
But it is hundreds of years older. It dates from c. 1000 AD. We don't know how complete the text it was copied from was. We don't know if the author filled in places here or there. We don't know if s/he copied everything accurately. We don't have the copy..
Look at the dates: 6th to 13th century. But the text that the Khabouris was copied from was before that. We have no idea how accurately it was copied, because we don't have the original text.
Again, we don't have these texts. All we have are later copies. The Codex Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were also copied from texts dating far earlier than they. They oldest actual fragment of the NT we possess is p52, a greek fragment of John dating to about 20 years after John was written.
Yes, the codex sinaiticus is probably the best edition of the NT available. I would highly recommend reading The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration by Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, published by Oxford University Press, 2005.
Yes, but we can't compare it with the copy to see how accurate it was copied. And the original was probably in Syriac.
No. We can tell that they are not translations. As I said, this is fairly easy to do. Translations look like translations to people who read the language and are experts in it. Which is why not a single scholar that I am aware of has ever argued that the NT was originally written in Aramaic.
So is the Khabouris. It is being restored by going through and comparing it with the other syriac texts. Actually, it is the syriac documents that were copied very well in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Pe****ta texts are all in syriac. Including the Khabouris. Syriac IS aramaic.
Because the NT was originally written in Greek. In order to have it read by people speaking other languages, it was translated into Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Gothic, and so forth.
We don't know that they didn't. We know that the pe****ta texts were fairly well maintained in the 5th and 6th centuries. However, we don't know much about the copies they used prior to that.
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I think you aren't understanding something. Syriac IS aramaic. It is an later dialect of aramaic. The khabouris is a syriac-aramaic codex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaboris_Codex
If you look at the text of the codex, you can see it is not written in the Aramaic script of Jesus' day.
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godnotgod
Thou art That
re: Codex Vaticanus (B)
The second major manuscript of the Minority Text is known as Codex Vaticanus, often referred to as 'B'. This codex was also produced in the 4th century. It was found over a thousand years later in 1481 in the Vatican library in Rome, where it is currently held. It is written on expensive vellum, a fine parchment originally from the skin of calf or antelope. Some authorities claim that it was one of a batch of 50 Bibles ordered from Egypt by the Roman Emperor Constantine; hence its beautiful appearance and the expensive skins which were used for its pages. But alas! this manuscript, like its corrupt Egyptian partner Sinaiticus (Aleph) is also riddled with omissions, insertions and amendments.
Of Codex Vaticanus Samuel Gipp writes on page 72:
Quote: "This codex omits many portions of Scripture vital to Christian doctrine. Vaticanus omits Genesis 1.1 through Genesis 46:28; Psalms 106 through 138; Matthew 16:2,3; Romans 16:24; the Pauline Pastoral Epistles; Revelation; and everything in Hebrews after 9:14.
It seems suspicious indeed that a MS possessed by the Roman Catholic church omits the portion of the book of Hebrews which exposes the 'mass' as totally useless (Please read Hebrews 10:10-12). The 'mass' in conjunction with the false doctrine of purgatory go hand-in-hand to form a perpetual money making machine for Rome. Without one or the other, the Roman Catholic Church would go broke!
It also omits portions of the Scripture telling of the creation (Genesis), the prophetic details of the crucifixion (Psalm 22), and, of course, the portion which prophesies of the destruction of Babylon (Rome), the great whore of Revelation chapter 17.
Vaticanus , though intact physically, is found to be in poor literary quality. Dr Martin declares, 'B' exhibits numerous places where the scribe has written the same word or phrase twice in succession. Dr J Smythe states, 'From one end to the other, the whole manuscript has been travelled over by the pen of some… scribe of about the tenth century.' If Vaticanus was considered a trustworthy text originally, the mass of corrections and scribal changes obviously render its testimony highly suspicious and questionable."
Rev. Gipp continues on page 73:
Quote: "The corrupt and unreliable nature of these two MSS (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) is best summed up by one who has thoroughly examined them, John W Burgon: 'The impurity of the text exhibited by these codices is not a question of opinion but fact...In the Gospels alone, Codex B(Vatican) leaves out words or whole clauses no less than 1,491 times. It bears traces of careless transcriptions on every page…
If we are to be thorough and discriminatory in our evaluation of the true New Testament text, then we must not -- we cannot -- overlook these facts.' How did these MSS come into being? How did it happen that they should be beautiful to the eye, yet within contain such vile and devastating corruption? It seems that these uncial MSS along with the papyrus MSS included in this category all resulted from a revision of the true, or Universal Text. This revision was enacted in Egypt by Egyptian scribes! " (Ref:B6)
Rev. Gipp continues:
Quote: "So we see that once a pure copy of the Universal Text (Textus Receptus) had been carried down into Egypt, it was recopied. During the process of this recopying, it was revised by men who did not revere it as truly the Word of God. This text was examined by the critical eye of Greek philosophy and Egyptian morals. These men saw nothing wrong with putting the Book in subjection to their opinion instead of their opinion being in subjection to the book. This process produced a text which was local to the educational centre of Alexandria, Egypt. This text went no further than southern Italy where the Roman Catholic Church found its unstable character perfect for overthrowing the true Word of God which was being used universally by the true Christians." (Ref:B7)
The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible has this to say about Codex Vaticanus (B) on page 624 under the article Versions.
Quote: " It should be noted, however, that there is no prominent Biblical MS. in which there occur such gross cases of misspelling, faulty grammar, and omission, as in B." (Ref:H2)
Barry Burton comments further:
Quote: "For one thing…Vaticanus and Sinaiticus disagree with each other over 3000 times in the gospels alone…
Facts about the Vaticanus.
"It was written on fine vellum (tanned animal skins) and remains in excellent condition. It was found in the Vatican Library in 1481 AD. In spite of being in excellent condition, it omits Genesis 1:1-Gen.46:28, Psalm 106-138, Matt.16:2-3, the Pauline pastoral Epistles, Hebrews 9:14-13:25, and all of Revelation. These parts were probably left out on purpose."
"Besides all that - in the gospels alone it leaves out 237 words, 452 clauses and 748 whole sentences, which hundreds of later copies agree together as having the same words in the same places, the same clauses in the same places and the same sentences in the same places... The Vaticanus was available to the translators of the King James Bible, but they did not use it because they knew it is unreliable." (Ref:C2)
Dean Burgon comments on Codices Sinaiticus (Aleph)and Vaticanus.
Quote: "Compromise of any sort between the two conflicting parties, is impossible; for they simply contradict one another. Codd.B and Aleph are either amongst the purist of manuscripts,- or else they are among the very foulest. The Text of Drs.Westcott and Hort is either the very best which has ever appeared,- or else it is the very worst; the nearest to the sacred Autographs,- or furthest from them."… "There is no room for both opinions; and there cannot exist any middle view." (Ref: P3)
Oldest and Best
Bible students are often told that Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are older and better than other manuscripts: the implication being that they must, therefore, be more accurate. But this conclusion is wrong. We have already seen how Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are corrupt beyond measure. To be sure they are 'better' in appearance, but certainly not in their content. Remember they are written on expensive vellum; so they ought to be in good shape. They are older, but older than what? They are older than other Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. But they are not older than the earliest versions of the Bible: the Pe****ta, Italic, Waldensian and the Old Latin Vulgate: versions which agree with the Majority text. These ancient versions are some 200 years older than Aleph and B. Yes Aleph and B are older than other Greek mss, but for anyone to suggest that they are more accurate is absurd. It is like someone saying 'You will find the greatest TRUTH being preached in the oldest and most beautiful cathedrals of the world,' or, 'the most beautiful women have the best characters.'
http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/sbs777/vital/kjv/part1-4.html
The second major manuscript of the Minority Text is known as Codex Vaticanus, often referred to as 'B'. This codex was also produced in the 4th century. It was found over a thousand years later in 1481 in the Vatican library in Rome, where it is currently held. It is written on expensive vellum, a fine parchment originally from the skin of calf or antelope. Some authorities claim that it was one of a batch of 50 Bibles ordered from Egypt by the Roman Emperor Constantine; hence its beautiful appearance and the expensive skins which were used for its pages. But alas! this manuscript, like its corrupt Egyptian partner Sinaiticus (Aleph) is also riddled with omissions, insertions and amendments.
Of Codex Vaticanus Samuel Gipp writes on page 72:
Quote: "This codex omits many portions of Scripture vital to Christian doctrine. Vaticanus omits Genesis 1.1 through Genesis 46:28; Psalms 106 through 138; Matthew 16:2,3; Romans 16:24; the Pauline Pastoral Epistles; Revelation; and everything in Hebrews after 9:14.
It seems suspicious indeed that a MS possessed by the Roman Catholic church omits the portion of the book of Hebrews which exposes the 'mass' as totally useless (Please read Hebrews 10:10-12). The 'mass' in conjunction with the false doctrine of purgatory go hand-in-hand to form a perpetual money making machine for Rome. Without one or the other, the Roman Catholic Church would go broke!
It also omits portions of the Scripture telling of the creation (Genesis), the prophetic details of the crucifixion (Psalm 22), and, of course, the portion which prophesies of the destruction of Babylon (Rome), the great whore of Revelation chapter 17.
Vaticanus , though intact physically, is found to be in poor literary quality. Dr Martin declares, 'B' exhibits numerous places where the scribe has written the same word or phrase twice in succession. Dr J Smythe states, 'From one end to the other, the whole manuscript has been travelled over by the pen of some… scribe of about the tenth century.' If Vaticanus was considered a trustworthy text originally, the mass of corrections and scribal changes obviously render its testimony highly suspicious and questionable."
Rev. Gipp continues on page 73:
Quote: "The corrupt and unreliable nature of these two MSS (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) is best summed up by one who has thoroughly examined them, John W Burgon: 'The impurity of the text exhibited by these codices is not a question of opinion but fact...In the Gospels alone, Codex B(Vatican) leaves out words or whole clauses no less than 1,491 times. It bears traces of careless transcriptions on every page…
If we are to be thorough and discriminatory in our evaluation of the true New Testament text, then we must not -- we cannot -- overlook these facts.' How did these MSS come into being? How did it happen that they should be beautiful to the eye, yet within contain such vile and devastating corruption? It seems that these uncial MSS along with the papyrus MSS included in this category all resulted from a revision of the true, or Universal Text. This revision was enacted in Egypt by Egyptian scribes! " (Ref:B6)
Rev. Gipp continues:
Quote: "So we see that once a pure copy of the Universal Text (Textus Receptus) had been carried down into Egypt, it was recopied. During the process of this recopying, it was revised by men who did not revere it as truly the Word of God. This text was examined by the critical eye of Greek philosophy and Egyptian morals. These men saw nothing wrong with putting the Book in subjection to their opinion instead of their opinion being in subjection to the book. This process produced a text which was local to the educational centre of Alexandria, Egypt. This text went no further than southern Italy where the Roman Catholic Church found its unstable character perfect for overthrowing the true Word of God which was being used universally by the true Christians." (Ref:B7)
The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible has this to say about Codex Vaticanus (B) on page 624 under the article Versions.
Quote: " It should be noted, however, that there is no prominent Biblical MS. in which there occur such gross cases of misspelling, faulty grammar, and omission, as in B." (Ref:H2)
Barry Burton comments further:
Quote: "For one thing…Vaticanus and Sinaiticus disagree with each other over 3000 times in the gospels alone…
Facts about the Vaticanus.
"It was written on fine vellum (tanned animal skins) and remains in excellent condition. It was found in the Vatican Library in 1481 AD. In spite of being in excellent condition, it omits Genesis 1:1-Gen.46:28, Psalm 106-138, Matt.16:2-3, the Pauline pastoral Epistles, Hebrews 9:14-13:25, and all of Revelation. These parts were probably left out on purpose."
"Besides all that - in the gospels alone it leaves out 237 words, 452 clauses and 748 whole sentences, which hundreds of later copies agree together as having the same words in the same places, the same clauses in the same places and the same sentences in the same places... The Vaticanus was available to the translators of the King James Bible, but they did not use it because they knew it is unreliable." (Ref:C2)
Dean Burgon comments on Codices Sinaiticus (Aleph)and Vaticanus.
Quote: "Compromise of any sort between the two conflicting parties, is impossible; for they simply contradict one another. Codd.B and Aleph are either amongst the purist of manuscripts,- or else they are among the very foulest. The Text of Drs.Westcott and Hort is either the very best which has ever appeared,- or else it is the very worst; the nearest to the sacred Autographs,- or furthest from them."… "There is no room for both opinions; and there cannot exist any middle view." (Ref: P3)
Oldest and Best
Bible students are often told that Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are older and better than other manuscripts: the implication being that they must, therefore, be more accurate. But this conclusion is wrong. We have already seen how Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are corrupt beyond measure. To be sure they are 'better' in appearance, but certainly not in their content. Remember they are written on expensive vellum; so they ought to be in good shape. They are older, but older than what? They are older than other Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. But they are not older than the earliest versions of the Bible: the Pe****ta, Italic, Waldensian and the Old Latin Vulgate: versions which agree with the Majority text. These ancient versions are some 200 years older than Aleph and B. Yes Aleph and B are older than other Greek mss, but for anyone to suggest that they are more accurate is absurd. It is like someone saying 'You will find the greatest TRUTH being preached in the oldest and most beautiful cathedrals of the world,' or, 'the most beautiful women have the best characters.'
http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/sbs777/vital/kjv/part1-4.html
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This is an BIG overstatement.
This is patently false. We possess no copies of the Pe****ta or the Vulgate or any other complete text of the NT that predates the Vaticanus or Sinaiticus.
Again, I think your big problem here your misunderstanding of the way "aramaic" is used on the website you keep citing. It is a form of aramaic known as syriac. The Khabouris and all the other pe****ta texts were written in this form of aramaic. They were all translated from the greek.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Excuse me, sir, but the fact, based upon extensive verifiable evidence, is that both the Sinaiticus and Valentinux Codices are notoriously corrupt. Anyone who knows anything at all about this knows that they are, and profusely so. If we were just talking about a handful of protesters who were making a stink over insignificant minutiae, that would be one thing; but amongst those protesters is John Burgon, a masterful Greek and Biblical scholar, himself one of the greatest defenders of the Greek text of the New Testament who defended the "reliability" of Textus Receptus* till the day of his death.
"Burgon regarded the good state of preservation of B (Codex Vaticanus) and Aleph (Codex Sinaiticus) in spite of their exceptional age as proof not of their goodness but of their badness. If they had been good manuscripts, they would have been read to pieces long ago. One eventually found its way, four centuries ago, to a forgotten shelf in the Vatican Library; while the other, after exercising the ingenuity of several generations of critical Correctors, eventually (viz. in A.D.1844) got deposited in the wastepaper basket of the Convent at the foot of Mount Sinai.
Had B (Vaticanus) and Aleph (Sinaiticus) been copies of average purity, they must long since have shared the inevitable fate of books which are freely used and highly prized; namely, they would have fallen into decadence and disappeared from sight. Thus the fact that B and Aleph are so old is a point against them, not something in their favour.
It shows that the Church rejected them and did not read them. Otherwise they would have worn out and disappeared through much reading."
BIBLE VERSIONS ... Minority Texts
Whoever first tossed them into a trash bin apparently understood exactly how corrupted they actually were. Please remember that we are dealing here with the alleged transmission of the spiritual message from the world of the divine, which is Perfect, to man. The level of corruption in these two documents renders them unacceptable and unreliable beyond the pale. They are, in effect, unreliable in regards to accessing the purity of the divine message. Why you hold them up as shining examples of venerable Greek NT texts is beyond me.
"There are 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus." Alterations, more alterations, and more alterations were made, and in fact, most of them are believed to be made in the 6th and 7th centuries. On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people."
How can you claim that this represents a "BIG overstatement?"
Based upon the evidence, I cannot accept these two codices as bona fide source material for the New Testament. Got anything better?
*And yet, even the Textus Receptus has its many problems:
"The Greek text which stands behind the King James Bible is demonstrably inferior in certain places. The man who edited the text was a Roman Catholic priest and humanist named Erasmus.1 He was under pressure to get it to the press as soon as possible since (a) no edition of the Greek New Testament had yet been published, and (b) he had heard that Cardinal Ximenes and his associates were just about to publish an edition of the Greek New Testament and he was in a race to beat them. Consequently, his edition has been called the most poorly edited volume in all of literature! It is filled with hundreds of typographical errors which even Erasmus would acknowledge. Two places deserve special mention. In the last six verses of Revelation, Erasmus had no Greek manuscript (=MS) (he only used half a dozen, very late MSS for the whole New Testament any way). He was therefore forced to ‘back-translate’ the Latin into Greek and by so doing he created seventeen variants which have never been found in any other Greek MS of Revelation! He merely guessed at what the Greek might have been. Secondly, for 1 John 5:7-8, Erasmus followed the majority of MSS in reading “there are three witnesses in heaven, the Spirit and the water and the blood.” However, there was an uproar in some Roman Catholic circles because his text did not read “there are three witnesses in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit.” Erasmus said that he did not put that in the text because he found no Greek MSS which had that reading. This implicit challenge—viz., that if he found such a reading in any Greek MS, he would put it in his text—did not go unnoticed. In 1520, a scribe at Oxford named Roy made such a Greek MS (codex 61, now in Dublin). Erasmus’ third edition had the second reading because such a Greek MS was ‘made to order’ to fill the challenge! To date, only a handful of Greek MSS have been discovered which have the Trinitarian formula in 1 John 5:7-8, though none of them is demonstrably earlier than the sixteenth century."
http://bible.org/article/why-i-do-not-think-king-james-bible-best-translation-available-today
To be adressed at a later time.
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We are. The overwhelming majority of textual critics give pride of place to sinaiticus and vaticanus as being the best texts we have. See the reference to Metzger and Ehrman's book I gave earlier, Metzger being THE foremost textual critic of the 20th century.
Because what you fail to realize is that these "alterations" can be seen. Most are additions in margins. In other words, the original text is still there.
"Primacy of position in the list of New Testament manuscripts is customarily given to the fourth-century codex of the Greek Bible... known as "Codex Sinaiticus." p. 62
Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
All of the texts are copies of copies and all have minor alterations or changes. However, we are lucky in that most of the time we can see what has been altered, and even when we can't we have an enormous number of texts with which to reconstruct the Greek NT.
The Textus Receptus is pretty awful. But then, it isn't used by most translations today, and my edition of the Greek NT is based on all the manuscripts available, not the few used by the TR.
The fact remains, the pe****ta texts are syriac translations of the greek. None of them are as old as Vaticanus or Sinaiticus, and more importantly they are translations. I am still waiting for you to cite a single expert who believes the entire NT was written in aramaic.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Fact? As in "1+1=2? Then why is there disagreement amongst the Pe****ta scholars?
Proof?
Proof?
Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are not translations?
Even if there were originals of these, we don't know how reliable they are. Just the fact that the originals themselves are translations from Aramaic makes them subject to distortion.
David Bauscher, for one, who is proficient in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew.
Aramaic New Testament website
So far, it appears that neither the Greek NT nor the Pe****ta NT primacists can produce a smoking gun to put all debate to rest. So we have to rely on other evidence. That evidence can exhibit itself via computer mathematical analysis. David Bauscher has performed exhaustive computer analysis of the texts to make his determinations. The results consistently point to Pe****ta primacy. You can download those studies in .pdf form from the link given above.
Bauscher writes:
"The Interlinear and the Plain English translations each have hundreds of detailed examples showing how the author of the Greek NT texts mistranslated Aramaic words to produce certain questionable Greek readings. Many are illustrated in Dead Sea Scroll Aramaic script, Estrangela and Greek letters, showing beyond a reasonable doubt that the Pe****ta and Crawford texts (The Crawford manuscript includes the entire NT but is not Harklean, nor even like the Harklean) are the base text from which the Greek text types were all derived. The examples cover every book of the 27 book Western NT canon!
I also document in the book other analysis which compares The Pe****ta with the Greek NT, to determine which of the two is a translation of the other. There are accepted principles described in a German study, among others, showing that this can be reliably determined. I used the Greek LXX (Septuagint) and Hebrew OT as a model experiment by which to compare the NT results, since we know The LXX is a translation of The Hebrew Bible.
The NT results for twenty exhaustive cognate word pair searches in Aramaic & Greek unanimously and unequivocally coincide with the results of The LXX-Hebrew comparisons, showing the Greek texts to be translated from the Semitic original (Aramaic-Hebrew). The data is not a few examples here and there; it involves a total of at least 15,000 data points (total numbers of words occurring in all texts searched). For the word pairs meeting the criteria necessary to qualify as a significant cognate word pair to be analyzed, every one of those pairs supports the Pe****ta primacy model! The text analyzed in all the experiments is the critical 1905,1920,1979, etc. Syriac Pe****ta edition published by the British & Foreign and American Bible Societies.
These two analyses are just the beginning. I did many more tests, all of which are documented. Most of the computer analyses are non-code related, but determinations of primacy-translation relationship by examining the words of the respective texts and the various ratios that exist for each word pair. If the codes are too much to accept for some, the other data are much less esoteric and manageable, and yet they support the secondary conclusion of the codes experiment: The Pe****ta Aramaic NT is the original text from which the Greek NT books were each translated.
godnotgod
Thou art That
Fact? As in "1+1=2? Then why is there disagreement amongst the Pe****ta scholars?
Proof?
Proof?
Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are not translations?
Even if there were originals of these, we don't know how reliable they are. Just the fact that the originals themselves are translations from Aramaic makes them subject to distortion.
David Bauscher, for one, who is proficient in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew.
Aramaic New Testament website
So far, it appears that neither the Greek NT nor the Pe****ta NT primacists can produce a smoking gun to put all debate to rest. So we have to rely on other evidence. That evidence can exhibit itself via computer mathematical analysis. David Bauscher has performed exhaustive computer analysis of the texts to make his determinations. The results consistently point to Pe****ta primacy. You can download those studies in .pdf form from the link given above.
Bauscher writes:
"The Interlinear and the Plain English translations each have hundreds of detailed examples showing how the author of the Greek NT texts mistranslated Aramaic words to produce certain questionable Greek readings. Many are illustrated in Dead Sea Scroll Aramaic script, Estrangela and Greek letters, showing beyond a reasonable doubt that the Pe****ta and Crawford texts (The Crawford manuscript includes the entire NT but is not Harklean, nor even like the Harklean) are the base text from which the Greek text types were all derived. The examples cover every book of the 27 book Western NT canon!
I also document in the book other analysis which compares The Pe****ta with the Greek NT, to determine which of the two is a translation of the other. There are accepted principles described in a German study, among others, showing that this can be reliably determined. I used the Greek LXX (Septuagint) and Hebrew OT as a model experiment by which to compare the NT results, since we know The LXX is a translation of The Hebrew Bible.
The NT results for twenty exhaustive cognate word pair searches in Aramaic & Greek unanimously and unequivocally coincide with the results of The LXX-Hebrew comparisons, showing the Greek texts to be translated from the Semitic original (Aramaic-Hebrew). The data is not a few examples here and there; it involves a total of at least 15,000 data points (total numbers of words occurring in all texts searched). For the word pairs meeting the criteria necessary to qualify as a significant cognate word pair to be analyzed, every one of those pairs supports the Pe****ta primacy model! The text analyzed in all the experiments is the critical 1905,1920,1979, etc. Syriac Pe****ta edition published by the British & Foreign and American Bible Societies.
These two analyses are just the beginning. I did many more tests, all of which are documented. Most of the computer analyses are non-code related, but determinations of primacy-translation relationship by examining the words of the respective texts and the various ratios that exist for each word pair. If the codes are too much to accept for some, the other data are much less esoteric and manageable, and yet they support the secondary conclusion of the codes experiment: The Pe****ta Aramaic NT is the original text from which the Greek NT books were each translated."
There isn't. Not a single expert believes that the pe****ta texts are not translations from the greek. David Bauscher is not an expert. According to your website he is a former high school teacher "with a proficiency in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic." Profiency is not enough here. I am "proficient" in Anglo-saxon and Gothic. With a lexicon I can pretty much read any text in these languages. But I am not an expert, and I couldn't tell you if an Anglo-saxon text was a translation or not. I'm just not good enough. "Proficiency" doesn't cut it.
I gave you a reference to a publication by an academic press. There is nobody who argues that the Pe****ta texts we have predate either the Vaticanus or Sinaiticus. Moreover, we have several greek fragments which predate even these. The oldest NT fragment we have is p52, a fragment of the gospel of John copied shortly after the gospel of John was actually written.
No, they Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are not translations. There is not a single scholar of NT or biblical studies arguing that the NT was written in Aramiac. There are a select few who argue that Matthew, for example, was originally written in Hebrew. But nobody argues the NT was written in Aramiac. The text is clearly not a translation.
They aren't translations.
Again, profieciency doesn't cut it. The guy was a high school teacher.
Actually they can. The problem is that all the arguments involve an intimate knowledge of Greek at the leat. I have this. I can look at the NT and tell that these are clearly not translations. Have you ever read a translation of Homer or Virgil or Japanese Haiku? Ever notice that it sounds "off" somehow? Ancient translations, especially from a non-indo-european language like Aramiac into Greek leave plenty of marks. These aren't present in the NT.
I have looked at them. They are seriously a joke. Again, if you want to present a serious argument, at least present one actual scholar and expert in the field who has managed to publish a peer-reviewed article or a monograph or book or whatever from an academic press, rather than a high school teacher's website.
Bauscher writes:
"The Interlinear and the Plain English translations each have hundreds of detailed examples showing how the author of the Greek NT texts mistranslated Aramaic words to produce certain questionable Greek readings. Many are illustrated in Dead Sea Scroll Aramaic script, Estrangela and Greek letters, showing beyond a reasonable doubt that the Pe****ta and Crawford texts (The Crawford manuscript includes the entire NT but is not Harklean, nor even like the Harklean) are the base text from which the Greek text types were all derived. The examples cover every book of the 27 book Western NT canon!
I also document in the book other analysis which compares The Pe****ta with the Greek NT, to determine which of the two is a translation of the other. There are accepted principles described in a German study, among others, showing that this can be reliably determined. I used the Greek LXX (Septuagint) and Hebrew OT as a model experiment by which to compare the NT results, since we know The LXX is a translation of The Hebrew Bible.
The NT results for twenty exhaustive cognate word pair searches in Aramaic & Greek unanimously and unequivocally coincide with the results of The LXX-Hebrew comparisons, showing the Greek texts to be translated from the Semitic original (Aramaic-Hebrew). The data is not a few examples here and there; it involves a total of at least 15,000 data points (total numbers of words occurring in all texts searched). For the word pairs meeting the criteria necessary to qualify as a significant cognate word pair to be analyzed, every one of those pairs supports the Pe****ta primacy model! The text analyzed in all the experiments is the critical 1905,1920,1979, etc. Syriac Pe****ta edition published by the British & Foreign and American Bible Societies.
These two analyses are just the beginning. I did many more tests, all of which are documented. Most of the computer analyses are non-code related, but determinations of primacy-translation relationship by examining the words of the respective texts and the various ratios that exist for each word pair. If the codes are too much to accept for some, the other data are much less esoteric and manageable, and yet they support the secondary conclusion of the codes experiment: The Pe****ta Aramaic NT is the original text from which the Greek NT books were each translated."[/quote]
godnotgod
Thou art That
You stated earlier that the Greek NT was translated from the Aramaic oral tradition. Let's make one thing clear: Did Jesus preach in Aramaic to an Aramaic-speaking audience?
Merely dismissing them as a joke does not make them so, nor does your dismissal of Mr. Bauscher as not having sufficient credibility simply because he is a high school teacher mean much. Just because you stand behind the color of authority does not mean much either. Credentials do not make someone an "expert". Understanding does.
As far as I am concerned, a garbage collector can produce better evidence than so-called "experts". Again, I do not look at mere window dressing to determine whether something is authentic or not. I look at the evidence being presented.
Just because the scientific method exists does not mean that a non-scientist cannot employ its principles. The real question here is: is Bauscher's methodology and conclusion from the data valid; not whether he is an expert in Greek.
I point to the moon, but instead of the moon you look at my pointing finger.
You call Bauscher's work "a joke". On what basis do you expect anyone to believe that? You act as if no one has any right to say anything credible about this issue who is not an expert in Greek linguistics. Hogwash!
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Ok, I have to correct something here.
The Greek NT was NOT translated from an Aramaic oral tradition. There was an early aramaic oral tradition of sayings and teachings and so forth of Jesus in the early days of the church, but prior to any writings these were translated into greek.
Let me try to make this clearer with the example I used earlier. Say I went to germany and had several conversations with my friend over there. We spoke in german. Now, when I get home, I tell people about my time in germany. When it comes to our conversations, I translate them into english. Say someone writes down my experiences in english. Most of his writing will not be a translation. It will be a record of the account I gave in english. However, parts of it will record the english translations of the german conversations.
This is like the NT. It is NOT a translation of aramaic. The oral tradition was not the NT. The oral aramaic tradition had a variety of sayings and teachings and so forth, unconnected not in gospel form. Prior to any gospel, Jesus' teachings were translated for the benefit of the greek speaking jewish-christians. Then the gospel authors wrote whole narratives about the mission and life and death of Jesus in greek, and included the the translations of the aramiac sayings and teachings of Jesus. However, the gospels themselves, and the letters, are NOT translations from aramaic.
It is not simply the fact that he is a high school teacher. "Proficiency" in a language doesn't give you the ability to tell a translation from an original text.
Just because you stand behind the color of authority does not mean much either. Credentials do not make someone an "expert". Understanding does.
Then I have to ask, what experts have you read?
Have you looked at any evidence presented by experts?
Just because the scientific method exists does not mean that a non-scientist cannot employ its principles. You call Bauscher's work "a joke". On what basis do you expect anyone to believe that? You act as if no one has any right to say anything credible about this issue who is not an expert in Greek linguistics. Hogwash!
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Not really. If you are only "proficient" in a language, how can you tell whether or not it looks like a translation? Semitic languages belong to a totally different family. Greek is indo-european (like Latin, German, Persian, English, etc). Aramiac is VERY different, which makes translations even MORE obvious. Which is why there is not a single exper who argues that the NT was originally written in Aramaic.
godnotgod
Thou art That
I did not suggest that the Greek NT was translated from any Aramaic writings, though some of the Pe****ta primacists believe that they were, though the originals were either lost or destroyed.
You just stated that the "oral sayings and teachings" of Jesus were, in fact, translated into Greek. I assume you mean from Aramaic into Greek, for that is what a translation is, being from one language into another. And yet you state that the Greek NT was not translated from an Aramaic oral tradition. I don't see any difference between "oral tradition" and "sayings and teachings".
You did not answer the question as to whether Jesus preached in Aramaic to an Aramaic-speaking audience or not. If he did, then what that audience retained in memory is what would have become the oral tradition from which the Greek texts were translated from, unless you are instead saying that, as in your example below, Greek and Aramaic-speaking people co-mingled with Aramaic-speaking people who had retained the oral teachings of Jesus, spoke with them in Aramaic, and then translated those "conversations" into what is the Greek NT.
Do you honestly believe that, even had there been a first text rendered in Greek, that the Aramaic-speaking people never even thought of setting their own oral tradition into text; that what we have in our hands are translations from the Greek into Aramaic? Was there not a single word of the NT ever written in Aramaic, by an Aramaic-speaking writer, in spite of the fact that the OT was written originally in Aramaic?
"The Church of the East and some noted Western scholars dispute the belief of modern scholarship that the originals of the Four Gospels and other parts of the New Testament were written in Greek. In any case, Aramaic speech is an underlying factor and New Testament writers drew on documents written in Aramaic. Syriac is the literary dialect of Aramaic. From the Mediterranean east into India, the Pe****ta is still the Bible of preference among Christians."
http://aramaicbible.us/
godnotgod
Thou art That
The Evidence:
One of the points which Pe****ta primacists make in their criticism of a first Greek NT is that there are problems with the translations of original Aramaic meanings; meanings which the translators were unaware of, and which point to the primacy of the Aramaic text.
The following example is excerpted from "Pe****ta Matthew and the Gowra Scenario", a .pdf document written by Andrew Gabriel Roth, which can be downloaded in its entirety here:
Aramaic New Testament Truth Pe****ta English Translation
We now come to a passage whose meaning has been greatly debated from the Greek camp but which is crystal clear in the Aramaic text, as follows:
"But I say to you that anyone who provokes to anger his brother in vain is condemned to judgment, and anyone who would say "I spit on you" (raca) is condemned to the assembly, and anyone who would say "You are a coward" is condemned to the fires of hell."
Matthew 5:22 (Younan Pe****ta Interlinear Version)
What an inconvenient situation this is! An original Aramaic phrase is most impolitely transliterated into Greek without a word as to its true meaning. As a result, scholars like Charles Ryrie (Ryrie Study Bible, p. 14) guess that it means "empty-headed". James Trimm too renders it "you are nothing". In
both cases, these men are assuming the word is raka, which in Hebrew and Aramaic does mean "nothing".
However, what both of these men have forgotten is that Messiah came from Galilee, and there spoke a very particular dialect that has been handed down in pristine condition to the Pe****ta text. In that case, the same word pronounced with a slightly different inflection is the common invective "I spit on you"(raqa).
In Y'shua's culture, this was one of the worst acts that one Jewish man could do to another, especially if that person was a relative or close friend. The matter was in fact so serious that it ranked right up there with other Jewish defiant acts of separation, such as shaking off sandals and tearing clothing in
front of someone deemed "dead". Furthermore, people who were caught spitting were literally brought before the Sanhedrin, just as Y'shua says!
Therefore, the reason for the confusion clearly rests on the fact that more than a thousand years had again intervened between the Galilean Aramaic culture that the Pe****ta records and the Hebrew culture of the Middle Ages reflected in Munster, which would have forgotten the earlier Aramaic
reading in favor of the remaining concept in the Hebrew of their day.
(Also note that here we have at least one good example as to how the so-called "experts" may not always know what they are talking about. To place one's faith in what someone says merely because of their credentials can be fatal.)
One of the points which Pe****ta primacists make in their criticism of a first Greek NT is that there are problems with the translations of original Aramaic meanings; meanings which the translators were unaware of, and which point to the primacy of the Aramaic text.
The following example is excerpted from "Pe****ta Matthew and the Gowra Scenario", a .pdf document written by Andrew Gabriel Roth, which can be downloaded in its entirety here:
Aramaic New Testament Truth Pe****ta English Translation
We now come to a passage whose meaning has been greatly debated from the Greek camp but which is crystal clear in the Aramaic text, as follows:
"But I say to you that anyone who provokes to anger his brother in vain is condemned to judgment, and anyone who would say "I spit on you" (raca) is condemned to the assembly, and anyone who would say "You are a coward" is condemned to the fires of hell."
Matthew 5:22 (Younan Pe****ta Interlinear Version)
What an inconvenient situation this is! An original Aramaic phrase is most impolitely transliterated into Greek without a word as to its true meaning. As a result, scholars like Charles Ryrie (Ryrie Study Bible, p. 14) guess that it means "empty-headed". James Trimm too renders it "you are nothing". In
both cases, these men are assuming the word is raka, which in Hebrew and Aramaic does mean "nothing".
However, what both of these men have forgotten is that Messiah came from Galilee, and there spoke a very particular dialect that has been handed down in pristine condition to the Pe****ta text. In that case, the same word pronounced with a slightly different inflection is the common invective "I spit on you"(raqa).
In Y'shua's culture, this was one of the worst acts that one Jewish man could do to another, especially if that person was a relative or close friend. The matter was in fact so serious that it ranked right up there with other Jewish defiant acts of separation, such as shaking off sandals and tearing clothing in
front of someone deemed "dead". Furthermore, people who were caught spitting were literally brought before the Sanhedrin, just as Y'shua says!
Therefore, the reason for the confusion clearly rests on the fact that more than a thousand years had again intervened between the Galilean Aramaic culture that the Pe****ta records and the Hebrew culture of the Middle Ages reflected in Munster, which would have forgotten the earlier Aramaic
reading in favor of the remaining concept in the Hebrew of their day.
(Also note that here we have at least one good example as to how the so-called "experts" may not always know what they are talking about. To place one's faith in what someone says merely because of their credentials can be fatal.)
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The answer can be found at Matthew 24:14 - "This good news of the kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for a witness to all the nations". The reason the Greek Scriptures were written largely in Greek was that Greek was the common tongue of the first century, much as English is today. Acts 2:11 shows on Pentecost, visitors to Jerusalem heard Christ's disciples speaking intelligently in the native tongues of these visitors.
The Bible is a book for all people, not an elite learned clergy class. Hence it is available in more languages than any other book and it's circulation dwarfs any other publication. God wants people to read his Word, and He has made it available to all.
It is said that 98 percent of the people on earth have access to the Bible in their own language. Just think: If God intends to communicate with mankind by means of a book, is it not reasonable that this book should be well-known and easily available so that people of all nationalities and races could read and benefit from it? If it were just in Greek, that would not be the case.
There are many fine translations that accurately convey the flavor and sense of the original greek.