An Agnostic is an Atheist Without Balls
from the who-mocks-the-mockers
dept.
There's a great interview of Bart Ehrman, the
author of Misquoting
Jesus (here is a good review of the
book). The interviewer (Colbert) is not a believer from what I can tell, but he
takes on the stance that he is for humor's sake to interview Ehrman who wrote
the book that attacks the accuracy of scripture. Then a little more serious
interview follows (Stewart).
Here's the interview. It's funny, laugh.
Ok, the bottom line is this. We have sacred scripture, and we have no original "autographs." That bugs some people, but not me. All joking aside, it's better that we don't have the autographs by Paul, for instance. If we did, people would worship them, or devote more time to them because of what they are rather than focus on what was said.
The fact that we have so many manuscripts that agree as much as they do is amazing in and of itself. When Ehrman said that there are hundreds of thousands of differences, it's partially a function of the difference *and* the number of copies there are. Let me give one example of this. If we have ten copies, nine of which are exactly the same, one of which has a single word missing, how many differences do we have? For the purposes of study, we have ten differences. That's just how it's counted. The existence of one change in one manuscript causes the entire corpus of manuscripts to have a difference. So having hundreds of thousands of differences seems huge until you take into account how these differences are counted. It's clear that Ehrman plays on the ignorance of his readers.
For more information on this topic, I suggest looking at Stand to Reason's resources on the subject of "Misquoting Jesus." Greg Koukl has talked about it on his radio show, and a lot of what he has said is also covered on their blog. Great stuff.
[Update 1/19/2007 5:58 AM]: I was informed that Colbert is in fact a believer; a devote Catholic. Ok, I stand corrected. Apparently the video has been removed due to terms of use violation.
Here's the interview. It's funny, laugh.
Ok, the bottom line is this. We have sacred scripture, and we have no original "autographs." That bugs some people, but not me. All joking aside, it's better that we don't have the autographs by Paul, for instance. If we did, people would worship them, or devote more time to them because of what they are rather than focus on what was said.
The fact that we have so many manuscripts that agree as much as they do is amazing in and of itself. When Ehrman said that there are hundreds of thousands of differences, it's partially a function of the difference *and* the number of copies there are. Let me give one example of this. If we have ten copies, nine of which are exactly the same, one of which has a single word missing, how many differences do we have? For the purposes of study, we have ten differences. That's just how it's counted. The existence of one change in one manuscript causes the entire corpus of manuscripts to have a difference. So having hundreds of thousands of differences seems huge until you take into account how these differences are counted. It's clear that Ehrman plays on the ignorance of his readers.
For more information on this topic, I suggest looking at Stand to Reason's resources on the subject of "Misquoting Jesus." Greg Koukl has talked about it on his radio show, and a lot of what he has said is also covered on their blog. Great stuff.
[Update 1/19/2007 5:58 AM]: I was informed that Colbert is in fact a believer; a devote Catholic. Ok, I stand corrected. Apparently the video has been removed due to terms of use violation.
Posted: Tuesday - October 17, 2006 at 09:17 AM |
Distractions