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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (152996)	1/24/2009 1:47:40 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 173976

This page explores some of the more debatable issues concerning the text and canon of the Bible. [edit] Old Testament * Canon of the Old Testament * Hebrew Canon * Masoretic Text * Masoretic Points * Ketiv and Qere * Apocrypha * Horns of Moses * Leviathan * Behemoth * Nephilim * Sons of God [edit] New Testament * Gnostic Scriptures * New Testament Apocrypha * Epistle to the Hebrews * First Council of Nicaea * Canon of the New Testament * Comma Johannorum * Camels and Needles * Number of the Beast * Antichrist * Life of St Issa [edit] Translations and editions * Septuagint * Vulgate * Textus Receptus * King James Version * Misprints in the Bible * Chapter and Verse wikipedia

To: Brumar89 who wrote (152996)	1/24/2009 1:48:25 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 173976

We should be careful when speaking of the Septuagint. According to Philo of Alexandria, writing in the 1st century AD, only translations of the first five books of the Bible (the Torah) were translated by the seventy-two scholars. The other books of Hebrew scripture --- the histories, the prophets, the wisdom literature --- were translated at a later date by unknown authors in an order that is still not clear. As soon as the Septuagint was copied, it was copied wrongly. By the third century AD, the problem was severe enough that the Christian scholar Origen edited an official recension of the Septuagint. The result of this is that most of the available manuscripts reflect what Origen thought the Septuagint said, and, of course, the manuscripts which followed Origen were also subject to copying errors. Only a small part of Origen's own manuscript remains. The upshot of all this is that despite the much earlier date of "the" Septuagint as compared to the Masoretic Text, we do not happen to have "the" Septuagint to hand, in the sense of the original (or even Origen-al) version; so it is not clear whether we should correct the Masoretic text by the light of the Septuagint, or vice versa. One famous difference between the two texts is two be found in Isaiah 7:14. In the Septuagint, this passage prophecies that a virgin ("parthenos") will give birth. In the Masoretic text, we have the much less startling prophecy that a woman will give birth. We might suppose that the translator was at fault with his Hebrew, or that his Hebrew manuscript was defective (this, remember, is the book of Isaiah, and not part of the original Septuagint), or that his Greek was at fault --- or we can suppose that he got it absolutely right, and that it is the Masoretic text which is faulty. This issue is vexed still further by the question of whether we should be reading the Greek word "parthenos" to mean virgin! The word had a certain ambiguity to it, rather like the ambiguity of the archaic English word "maiden". The Gospel of St Matthew, of course, relies on the notion that the word means "virgin", as shown in Matthew 1:18-23. It is hardly surprising that someone writing a gospel in Greek would refer to the Septuagint rather than going back to the original Hebrew. Despite the apparent reliance of the gospellers on the Septuagint, modern recensions and translations of the Old Testament are based on the Masoretic text. ----also from wikipedia

To: Brumar89 who wrote (152996)	1/24/2009 1:49:08 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 173976

Masoretic points are marks used to indicate the vowel sounds when the Bible is written in Hebrew. [edit] History Vowel sounds were not originally written in Hebrew, and the Hebrew Scriptures were written without them. This may have done well enough when Hebrew was still a living language, but was more problematic when its only use was religious and it had to be learnt as a "dead language". To remedy this deficiency, the Masoretic scholars, towards the end of the first millennium AD, established a system of indicating the vowel sounds in the Hebrew Bible to fix the oral tradition of pronunciation which had been handed down to them. [edit] Discussion To add the vowel points to the consonantal text required, of course, that someone had to decide what the vowel sounds in the Bible actually were. The answer is not always clear and unambiguous. For example, the Masoretes (in Genesis 47:31) have Jacob "bow upon the head of the bed": they suppose the Hebrew to be "mitta". However, the Septuagint has him "bow upon the head of the staff", which assumes the Hebrew word to be "matte'". Again, here is the book of Amos (9:11 - 12): "In that day I will raise up the booth of David which is fallen and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old, that they may possess the remnant of Edom." This follows the Masoretic text. But here is St James, in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 15:15-17), citing the same passage: "And with this the words of the prophets agree, as it is written: "After this I will return, and I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen; I will rebuild its ruins and I will set it up, that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord." There is a clear theological difference between the "remnant of Edom" and the "rest of mankind" --- and the difference is in the vowel sounds. It is not that St James is misquoting, but that he is dependent on a different tradition of inserting vowels. ----wikipedia

To: Brumar89 who wrote (152996)	1/24/2009 1:49:50 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

The compilation of the Textus Receptus was in its age a daring act, which brought Erasmus under criticism for undermining the authority of the Vulgate and for "correcting the Gospels". Erasmus' heated defence of scholarship bears repeating today: "You cry out that it is a crime to correct the gospels. This is a speech worthier of a coachman than of a theologian. You think it is all very well if a clumsy scribe makes a mistake in transcription and then you deem it a crime to put it right. The only way to determine the true text is to examine the early codices." [1] It would be nice to report that the good intentions of Erasmus paved the way to good results, but they did not. In the first place, as Erasmus himself acknowledged, his work on the Textus Receptus was much too hastily done: the host of typographic errors in the first edition bear witness to the fact that, brilliant though Erasmus was, he simply did not have the diligence which is the sine qua non of the textual critic. Then again, Erasmus did not have the wide range of manuscripts available to modern scholarship, nor the time or money to procure them. For most parts of the New Testament he had only a single manuscript to guide him --- plus the Vulgate, which, being an early translation, could be used to correct the Greek text. Moreover, the manuscripts which he had to work from were, with one exception, all of the Byzantine text-type. With nothing else to go on, he was reconstructing, not the ur-text of the New Testament, but at most the ur-text of the Byzantine recension of the text. To take an extreme example of the sort of difficulties Erasmus got into, he had no Greek manuscripts available containing the end of the Revelation of St John. Nothing daunted, Erasmus translated the Vulgate into Greek to supply the deficiency. Now the Greek manuscripts, in Revelation 22:18, speak of the "tree of life", and the Latin for tree is "ligno". However, between St Jerome's translation of the Vulgate and the 16th century, this word got itself miscopied as "libro" --- meaning "book". And it was this which Erasmus translated into Greek, thus introducing into the Textus Receptus a phrase about "the book of life" which does not, in fact, appear in any Greek manuscript. This error was copied by everyone else who produced a Textus Receptus: in particular, it appears in Bèza's edition, which formed the basis for the King James Version. It is because the Textus Receptus forms the basis for the King James Version that the errors of Erasmus are more than a footnote (or cautionary tale) in the history of textual criticism: for those who are committed to the notion that the King James Version is the perfect word of God find it necessary to claim that the Textus Receptus is the best possible edition of the Greek New Testament, and consequently they must also claim that the Byzantine text is the best text type. ----wikipedia