A complete Bible is NOT necessary to trust God, nor for preservation!

I'm glad you liked my point. Now the next point. In view of the fact that nobody alive today has ever seen an original copy of scripture and has no idea what exactly was contained therein, the argument for "better and more accurate" manuscripts should be obviously viewed as a complete farce. How does one know they are better or more accurate? The answer is, noone can.

 

Right. So we pray, study, research, and trust God to allow us to give us His word.

 

It is by faith, not by scientific process, that we trust in God's word. This, in my view, is where many have erred.

 

Okay - faith in what?

I have faith that God can and does preserve His word for me. I don't don't limit Him to one translation because there is no Bible basis for doing that.

Call it what you will - choosing one particular translation is a result of a thought process, scientific reasoning, if you will.

It does not help to use 'scientific process' in a pejorative sense. We have all come to our conclusions by thinking through the issue and coming to a decision as to how e exercise our faith.

 

By scientific process I mean the process of pouring over manucript after manuscript and saying "this one is closer to the originals..."

By the way, I'm not arguing for a specific translation. I'm arguing against the process that holds sway over many today. You can use whatever translation you want. My point is you should trust it because you believe it is God's word not because of someone telling you that it is closer to the originals.

 

Our desire should always be to acquire a translation as close to what God gave as possible. The King James translators knew that - they told us to use a variety of translations and to study the marginal notes in order to get a great sense of God's word.

On what basis, other than that, does one choose a translation?

 

How do you know what God gave us?

It always comes back to the same problem. People keep talking about the originals as if we can "come close to what God gave us." The problem is we have never seen the originals. Study as many translations as you want, they cannot satisfy the hard issues. One either has to trust by faith that what he is reading is the truth of scripture, or one tries in vain to get close to what God gave us using various methods.

 

You offer the twin fallacies of error of fact and of bifurcation (all or nothing). We know a great deal about the original autographs (original writings) from the manuscript (hand-written copies) evidence left that attest to them. In fact, we know a great deal more today about the original texts than did the scholars who assembled the RT, as we now have a lot more textual evidence to use in a comparative fashion. The current state of affairs in textual criticism (science for identifying the original text) indicates that we know within about 99+ percent the exact wording of the original texts. It is that surety that is driving modern textual translation efforts -- and being resisted by those who prefer the efforts of scholars who were highly motivated by theological issues from a bygone era.

In order to hold your point that "no one knows if our current texts are better or more accurate because no one knows the originals," you would simply have to walk away from the Bible as an authoritarian piece of literature, otherwise known by faith and experience as The Word of God. I doubt that you are willing to carry your point that far... Or if so, then you are no longer arguing as a Christian.

For curiosity sake, are you capable of working in the original languages?

 

This wasn't aimed at me D), but I will field it anyway.

Having a Bible itself is not even necessary for faith. People come to Christ through personal testimonies and invitations all the time; no one cracked open a bible for them. many of these same people (I am talking third world and Christian-oppressed countries) will NEVER have or read a bible of any sort, much less a whole one. that does not diminish their faith OR their salvation one whit.

Trying to pin someone's salvation on ANY bible is ludicrous at best, not to mention it is elevating a creation of man to the place of God... idolatry in the worse fashion.

 

99%? How do you know this? Oh, the manuscript we have, blah blah blah. The manuscripts we have are copies of the original, not the originals themselves. Many of them differ one from another. Which one has what the originals had? Nobody knows. People guess, they theorize, they work off of assumptions and man-made principles, but nobody knows for sure what the originals said. That 99% you gave is a bunch of bologna. You have no way of testing that and proving it true.

How can I take the scriptures as authoritative? By faith. That's the only way. The manuscript route using textual criticism fails every time. It's failure is in the fact that no original copy exists and we have no eyewitness of those copies. It is trying to bring the bible as close to something that the practitioners of this process have never seen. How can you know whether 1 John 5:7 is original or not? What about the disputed portions of John 8 and Mark 16? Textual criticism hasn't answered these questions.

 

By the way, are you arguing that modern scholars are not motivated by theological issues of the modern era? Those old translators like the KJ, the Geneva, and Tyndale had such corrupted motivations while the modern translators have pure motivations. Is that your argument?

 

The story of the Ethopian would be one particular Scriptural anecdote demonstrating that the answer is "No!". Or Abraham. Or David. Or any person who trusted God before the canon was completed. Claiming that a perfect Bible, much less a complete Bible, is necessary for faith or trusting God is negated by all the counter-examples throughout history, not to mention within Scripture itself.

 

I don't agree. If this were true, then no translation could be considered to contain everything that was important and vital. What is important and vital are not the particular words but the concepts the words contain.

 

It takes words to create a concept. If words are deleted, the concept will change.

 

What did you delete? You only translated into another language.

That is not the same thing as removing large blocks of words.

 

Not necessarily. One can convey equivalent concepts using various different combinations of words. If this were not true, then meaningful translation wouldn't be possible at all for any substantial work like the Bible.

Furthermore, if one takes doctrine from the whole of Scripture (good practice) and never from one particular reading of one particular verse (bad practice - very common to cults). Then the fact that a particular concept is maybe missing or truncated in one passage doesn't affect the doctrine itself. So, even if a particular verse does not contain a particular concept important to doctrine, when taken as a whole, the concept remains in Scripture.

 

So can we at least agree that the changing or maybe deletion/addition of single words is not necessarily a problem?


If so, then lets consider whole sections deleted...
Would you agree with me that the accounts of Jesus' ministry differs between the 4 gospels? And would you agree that the various writers both left out and added different sayings and actions of Jesus?

 

No. They gave their own personal testimonies. Each gospel was written for a particular audience.


Would you apply this same logic to other written works? Would it be ok with you if college textbooks were all different and some left out important information? How well might you do on an exam?