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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chris land who wrote (30872)	7/9/2000 7:58:39 PM
From: Thomas C. White	Respond to of 39621

If it was not your purpose of undermining the credibility of the virgin birth then I apologize for my misunderstanding. It is not my business to attempt to undermine anything in scriptures. I actually take a very conservative view in terms of how one treats the scriptures, and I think some of the things that many liberal theologians come up with are kind of loony (like the idea that Christ was the product of a fling between Mary and a German soldier, which was simply a nasty rumor that Roman anti-Christian writers started to ridicule Christians). Within the Baylor religion department at the time, it was generally accepted that the sections on the virgin birth began to show up in later versions of Matthew and Luke. Those who did not believe in the virgin birth, didn't believe it. Those who did simply believed that it was a divine revelation from God to later scribes of Matthew and Luke. It is a matter of faith as to whether or not you accept it. And I certainly cannot question that. Actually I feel a bit confident in seeing some of the surficial textual inconsistencies of the scriptures (such as the variances in each of the Gospels as to the visiting of Christ's tomb), because what it means is that the Catholic Church did not take it upon itself to start trying to rewrite the Bible to "homogenize" things too much, that is, to avoid any controversy about the interpretations of this or that verse. Unfortunately, that has actually happened in particular instances, where the texts have been changed centuries back in order to support one or another positions during the various Church controversies. This is the purpose of painstaking textual Biblical criticism, to make sure we are reading what we are supposed to be reading. Perhaps the most famous instance is 1 John 5:7-8. "For there are three that bear record IN HEAVEN THE FATHER, THE WORD, AND THE HOLY GHOST: AND THESE THREE ARE ONE. AND THERE ARE THREE THAT BEAR WITNESS ON EARTH, the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one." (1 John 5:7-8 KJV). The portion in capital letters above was inserted in Latin manuscripts during the controversy over the stature of Christ relative to God in the fifth century. Its purpose was to silence the Arians, who believed that Christ, although divine, was lesser than God within the Trinity (a commonly held doctrine of the early church prior to the writing of the Nicene Creed). This insertion is commonly known as the "Johannine Comma." It appears in the KJV and the Amplified Bible. The KJV translators picked it up from the earlier Latin Vulgate manuscripts. Many years later more reliable manuscripts were discovered (such as the codex Sinaiticus), which clearly exposed the manipulation of the Vulgate scribes, who made an addition to the verse to support the Trinity. Many modern translators have omitted this capitalized portion of the verse from their Bibles. For example, the NIV, the RSV, the NRSV, and the NASB omitted it.