Dumb question time: What original bible texts do we really have?

[OriginalGeek]

My little brother is trying to tell me he is studying original texts with direct translations from Hebrew and greek...I don't think he CAN be for the new testament as I thought the closest thing we had was at least a hundred years after the alleged crucifixion. But what about the old testament?

Incidentally, his studies have led him to believe that fundamentalists are full of shit but he still believes there is a god and jesus died for us so I don't know what practical good that does anyone.

He also claims (and I think I have heard this often from RW bible thumpers) that there is more contemporary non-biblical documentation about Jesus than there is for about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great.

So that is my question: What actual texts do we really have that isn't a translation of a translation of a translation at best?

[cleanhippie]

1. Ask him to support his claims with the evidence.

If he claims there is more (or any) extra-biblical contemporary evidence to support that claim, get him to show it. I think it will be like most others who make that claim; links to others who make that claim with all of them lacking any actual evidence. It will all be conjecture. But maybe he has something. Who knows? Ask to see it.


To answer your question: None. Zip. Nada. But I'm open to reviewing anything new.

[arcane1]

2. Indeed, they always use Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great in that claim

I suspect it's just re-parroted nonsense that nobody has ever tried to verify.

[OriginalGeek]

3. I asked him to show me the money.

lol, his first link was an on-line hebrew to english translation site. I guess if you put a hebrew word in you get an english word back and he figures that is studying the ancient texts.

[Warpy]

4. We do have a few of the Sumerian texts

parts of the early books of the bible were cribbed from. That's about as early as it goes.

Other than that, it's a compilation of all the myths from around the Mediterranean cobbled together into a self contradictory whole, mis translated, re-mis translated, and eventually we got it. Now it's used as a talisman instead of literature to be read.

The Torah, the first 5 books, has been laboriously copied and recopied but left in the original Hebrew, probably the most intact of the modern texts.

The jury is still out on the Dead Sea scrolls, very few scholars have had access to any parts of them.

[Bolo Boffin]

5. We don't have Paul's original copy of any letter he wrote, for example.

We have no document like that.

What we have is lots of different manuscripts, some old but most much later, with various disagreements among them. Modern scholars have painstakingly put together critical texts of each book, listing out the major variants and the texual support with each. That's what you look at when you read a Nestle-Aland Greek text of the New Testament. These critical texts also take into account the various languages the books have been translated to when that language demonstrates another variant in the original language.

The Hebrew scriptures are the same, but with manuscripts much further removed from the original composition date. There was a major translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek called the Septuagint, and it's also reconstructed because of its importance. In fact, the New Testament authors appear to have relied on it more than the actual Hebrew scriptures.

We can be reasonably sure we have the original content of most of the New Testament books, with the trouble points clearly laid out (the last few verses of Mark, for example, or the story of the woman caught in adultery that bounces around the gospels until it settles in John where it is today). Less so the Hebrew scriptures.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

6. simple answer? None.

More detailed answer?
There are no original texts, in fact, given the Councils of Trent and Nicea (and the radical surgery they performed on texts) it is impossible to have One Original Text.

Most of the stories in Ye Olde Testament were repeats of even older societies and tribes. They were eventually translated in a written form, often, several competing forms, and took on their own lives.

The first problem the honest translator faced was that ancient alphabets contained letters that were written, or graphed, in similar ways, especially when dealing with paleo-Hebrew or Aramaic characters. Unfortunately, they can have very different meanings. For example, the prepositions kaf (“like”) and bet (“in”) are interchanged in the Masoretic and Dead Sea Scroll versions of Isaiah.

Another serious problem was the lack of punctuation in Aramaic. Take the words, “I copulate with women hating cats at night.” Simply placing periods or commas in different places radically changes the meaning. Did I mean to write that I am screwing cats, women, or that I dislike excess felines after the sun sets? Or worse, is this group of words supposed to go with other words in front and behind this grouping and not with each other? Did they alternate right to left and left to right, as the Egyptian hieroglyphs sometimes do?

Translation between any languages is no easy business, especially a dead or dying language. Personal bias and misunderstanding play a huge role in the final product. To make matters worse, there were no copy machines, typewriters, or computers in these early days. Dictionaries were unheard of and dialects varied almost as much as languages themselves. Everything had to be hand copied, causing even greater errors. We won’t even get into the different rules of grammar that existed in different languages.

A more serious problem is that not all languages contain identical words. Some words simply do not exist in other languages. This was particularly true when moving from Hebrew to Aramaic, and then to Attic Greek and Latin.

Aramaic’s own rudimentary beginnings created other problems. It consisted of 22 consonants, and contained no vowels. In Aramaic, Dick Cheney’s famous suggestion that an opposing Senator beget himself, would read “gfkrslf.” It is easy to see how differences and errors arose when translating anything from Aramaic to more modern languages.

The Aramaic Targums were pieced together, revised and edited from around 900 BCE.
Scholars today admit that these contained major errors.

The Septuagint consists of several efforts to translate the Aramaic text into old Greek, dating back to about 300 BCE. In 130 BCE, the Aquila version was an effort to translate the Jewish Torah, what we know as the Old Testament, from Hebrew into Greek. Theodotion’s Greek version came some 300 years later. Although much effort was made to be more accurate than the prior translations, problems cropped up and transliteration was required because of so many missing or nonexistent words.

Still another Greek translation by Symmachus relied on various older works. Although not many Greeks seem to have read his version, Saint Jerome later relied on it for his famous Vulgate bible. (The Vulgate, with all its widely divergent versions and serious flaws, would later become the gold standard of bible translations until the 1500s.)

Because the many different versions were sowing confusion and causing serious dispute among members and leaders of the christian cult, Origen of Alexandria tried to fix the problem with his Hexapla. He created a novel approach by placing the Hebrew and Greek texts, and the Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion versions in parallel columns. Missing texts, interpretation issues and changed meanings became obvious. Origen also created marks to highlight words that existed in the Greek but not in the Hebrew and vice versa. With the help of this Religious Rosetta stone, translations improved somewhat.

The Coptic version of the bible was translated from both Old Latin and Old Greek into the Coptic language. By this time, many parts of their bible were at least 3 languages away from the original Aramaic text.

The Armenian version (400 CE) was translated only partly from Syriac, (a counterpart in time to Aramaic). It also required the invention of a whole new alphabet. Missing words were still a problem. Some decades later, the Georgians came out with their version, based partly on the Armenian and even older Greek versions.

In the early and mid 400s, the Gothic and Old Latin versions came to be before we finally get to the famous Vulgate text created by Saint Jerome. Despite his hard labors, his work solved nothing. Old Latin and Vulgate texts were soon mixed, matched and often contradicted one another. Because more than 8,000 versions of the Vulgate and Old Latin eventually came into existence and have lasted through the ages, their differences, writing and translation errors are easy to spot. Still, because of his faith, reputation, and probably more than just a bit of successful self-promotion, various parts of Jerome’s Vulgate had an impact for over a thousand years. Unfortunately, its existing errors were compounded over time with even more changes as many unnamed scholars did their own revising. Some of these changes were based on scholarship; many others were based on politics. Think back to Greed and Fear.

So, you see, there is no easy answer, except, perhaps, the original None.

[OriginalGeek]

7. Seriously fascinating

thank you for that!

I should tell you now that I will borrow very liberally from that as I have ongoing discussions with my brother. (I mean, I won't take credit for the arguments - but I will use them) At least this brother will let me talk. My other brother is fundie fundie that mostly listens to some youtube preacher. I think he's a lost cause. I know why my less insensible brother clings so tightly to the possibility of god - he knows he screwed up royally in his youth and he's both trying to make up for that and also thinks that his interpretation (with help of some un-named teacher I just learned about) of religion (less hate-filled than fundamentalist but still pretty woo-wooey) is what is keeping him from relapsing. He needs to think something is there in the afterlife to reward him for his piety now and forgive him for the sins of his youth.

Also thanks you guys, CH, Bolo, Warpy and arcane1! I really do appreciate you all taking time to answer.

[Ron Obvious]

8. How could there possibly more documentation for Jesus than Caesar?

Caesar wrote about his own campaign in Gaul, in what I understand to be highly-praised Latin.

[OriginalGeek]

9. this is what I got in reply:

I had been taught that 5000 or so historical references to Christ exist but i didnt read the list. caesar had 1400 and a. the graet had 600. i dont have proof

no proof but that's what he wants to believe so that was good enough for him. Not sure I'm getting through to him at all...

[Ron Obvious]

10. Josephus

I always understood that there were zero contemporary references to Jesus outside the Bible. The only one, in Josephus, is no longer claimed by most theologians because it's widely believed to be inserted by a Christian copier in the Middle Ages.

I personally find theology about as fascinating as astrology, so that's all I know about it.

[defacto7]

25. Time to pull up some quotes....

"What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them."

----Martin Luther


The words of Eusebius Pamphili, a Roman historian (c. AD 263–339) states in his Book Evangelical Preparation:

"It may be lawful and fitting to use fictions [falsehood] as a medicine, and for the benefit of those
(Christians) who want to be deceived."

He was the first to "notice" the infamous Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus the historian whose account apologetics claim "proves" the existence of Jesus Christ 300 years earlier... and, of course, was probably treated with Eusebius's "medicinal fictions". It is pretty well tested that the words in Josephus where Christ was mentioned were fudged as they do not follow the same textual meter and character as the rest of Josephus' works.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

30. one ancient scholar and biblical expert was famous for dissing

Eusebius as "mostly wrong." Talk about damning with faint praise.

[cleanhippie]

13. Yep. He is parroting apologists nonsense that he has been fed.

[OriginalGeek]

14. ANd he thinks he's thought of something new

but he is my brother. I'll keep trying. the other one will take a lot more work but I'll keep trying with him too.

[cleanhippie]

15. Good luck. I had a close friend that went full-on fundie...

Smart cat, too. He threw every apologists play he could at me. Nothing I did or said made even a dent. Got to be so bad that I asked if we could just stop talking about his beliefs altogether and he was unable to speak a sentence, send an email, or even a text without adding a bible verse or some god-botherer bullshit. He also became a homophobe and equal-marriage opponent. I told him to fuck-off and after two years of no contact, he sent me an email last xmas that contained a two-page prayer and bible verses. I asked that he not contact me again. I got one response back that simply said "I'll pray for your soul."

I just don't get it with these folks and their need to not only believe, but to try and get others to do so as well.

[FiveGoodMen]

17. "not only believe, but to try and get others to do so as well"

Their god ordered them to convert everyone.

They don't really have a choice.

The whole thing is frustrating as hell.

[onager]

29. LOL! Pulled that one out of their (Balaam's) asses...

I had been taught that 5000 or so historical references to Christ exist but i didnt read the list. caesar had 1400 and a. the graet had 600. i dont have proof...

That's straight out of the Josh McDowell School of Apologetics Debate - throw out an impressive "academic" stat that sounds authoritative. Then hope nobody checks.

I mean, who's going to go and actually count the damn references? But we do know this...

(pedant mode)

Julius Caesar - Oh, even an amateur dumbass like me could probably find a LOT more than 1400 historical references to Caesar. A master of P.R. and spin, Caesar kept 2 secretaries with him at all times to take down his thoughts, brag about his victories, and re-write his defeats.

He probably started the world's first daily newspaper, the Acta Diurna, and had it delivered to the Roman provinces. Again, full of his sayings and doings.

If you want to really confuse a believer, bring up Caesar's book The Alexandrian War. Which was most likely written by one of his staff officers, Hirtius. You'll find that when Caesar was in Egypt, his biggest supporters were the Jewish communities along the Palestinian coast. They raised money for him and even sent a cohort of 3000 Jewish soldiers - who Caesar thanked profusely in the book.

Watching all that was a kid whose father spearheaded the efforts to help Caesar. That kid grew up to be Herod The Great, famous Rug-Rat-Killer of the New Testament. And try finding a historical reference to THAT! Flavius Josephus hated Herod and practically recorded his every stray belch and fart. But not even he mentions the Massacre Of The Nazarene Brats.

(Double pedant note - Xians, always trying to pull a fast one to support their fairy tales, often refer to Josephus as a "contemporary" of Jesus. But Josephus wasn't born until circa 37 CE.)

Alexander The Great - now what was the name of that city where I lived for 4 years again? Kind Davidia? Jesusia? Why no, it was Alexandria. Where I often amused myself by strolling down Iskander al-Akbar Street. Which is apparently Arabic for "Loser Who Only Rated A Few Contemporary Historical References."

And one of at least 10 cities Alexander The Great named after himself, in a geographical spread ranging from Egypt to Persia to Afghanistan to India. e.g., Alexandria Eschate ("The Furthest&quot was located in modern Tajikistan.

Yes, it's true that no written contemporary accounts of Alexander's life have survived, apart from a few fragments. (For that we can partly thank those wonderful folks who liked to burn "pagan" libraries.) But some of the ancient writers, like Arrian, named their sources. So we can be pretty sure they existed.

And like Caesar, Alexander invaded/pillaged a lot of places. Maybe "history is written by the victors," but the sore losers often have long memories about that sort of thing. (Ask a native of Atlanta, GA...) And they leave behind their own kind of evidence.

Speaking of evidence...what's this? A news story from January 2013...

Alexander the Great presence still felt in modern Afghanistan

http://www.isaf.nato.int/article/news/alexander-the-great-presence-still-felt-in-modern-afghanistan.html

(/pedant mode)

[ZombieHorde]

26. Your DU avatar is my youtube avatar.

[Ron Obvious]

27. Optical illusions...

I think all sceptics love optical illusions since they are a constant reminder not to trust our senses.



Even knowing that A and B are the same colour doesn't make me see it.

[ZombieHorde]

28. When I first saw that illusion, I printed out several copies and cut out the labeled squares.

I was surprised, and impressed.

[Curmudgeoness]

11. If your brother is into reading,

I would suggest the book "Misquoting Jesus" by Bart Ehrman. And if he would prefer to listen to a lecture, there is a 10 part lecture on YouTube by Ehrman. This is the first part (Ehrman doesn't show up until about minute 4).

[OriginalGeek]

12. I'll give it a try

thanks!

[Stuckinthebush]

33. The fundies have gone full-bore blasphemer on Ehrman

His stuff is great. Because he is so good, so convincing, and so ex-fundie the fundies have made a business out of attacking him. You can buy a load of books that try to discredit Ehrman.

[Curmudgeoness]

34. Of course they would attack him.

They have no other option. I have learned a lot from reading Misquoting Jesus. I suspected much of it, but reading a book that was well researched and easy to read just reinforced what I already knew.

We have no idea what Jesus said and did. All we know is the mythology that has been passed word of mouth for centuries before being recorded, and then "translated" several times with "interpretations" meant to support the PTB of the time. Amazing.

[yellerpup]

16. I've seen fragments of the Old Testament

in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are on exhibit just before you get to the Egyptian rooms. They are papyrus scraps.

[dimbear]

18. The translation problem isn't really so serious. The NT was mainly written in Greek, and we

can read that readily. The problem is the chain of custody. Since the early church kept all the copies it wanted and burned the rest, they could and did make whatever changes pleased them. Scholars think, for instance, that the NT was selected from about a hundred competing books. Even after that much freedom, clearly a good bit of what was selected was edited and cleaned up to make it more useful to the Roman empire.

To see that what I'm saying is so, just ask whether a book full of Jew hating slurs would be likely to be popular with first century Jews. That doesn't compute, but it might go down fine with Rome.

[skepticscott]

19. Translators and scribes

Could also make whatever changes pleased them, and when things are so far removed from the originals, parsing out what is "real" (and no one even knows what THAT means) and what was added later becomes essentially impossible.

[dimbear]

20. A curious Christian should certainly have a hard look at the Gnostic gospels, which weren't in the

tender care of the Church at Rome, rather resting undisturbed in the sand in Egypt. The figure of Christ is essentially unrecognizable. By this I don't mean the Gospel of Thomas, which is intermediate between Gnostic and 'canonical.' Things like the Gospel of Phillip.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

21. gnostics were too cooperative, too communal,

no power structure, no way to graft riches and power from the masses, no opportunity to control the sheeple. Gnostics were the first to be attacked and effectively erased by folks who understood what a great idea a centralized, led from the top, mysterious church could be . . . for their pocketbooks and power over the people.

[OriginalGeek]

23. On a completely unrelated side note

and not to derail my own thread, I always thought it was funny that Steve Flynn, drummer for the band Atheist, has a side project band named Gnostic.

Both great bands.

[sakabatou]

22. There are no contemporary sources for the Jesus of the Bible.

Sure, there may be someone who Jesus was based on, but the Biblical Jesus didn't exist. People say that there's a writing of Josephus, but that's been debunked.

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-josephus-so-called-testimonium.html

[amuse bouche]

24. As far as I know

there is no mention of Jesus in history, only in the bible. Isn't that strange for Religies?

Also would the name 'Jesus' ever be from the part of the world he supposedly appeared? I think not

[Act_of_Reparation]

31. The notion that we have "original texts" is laughable

There were no publishing houses in the ancient Near East. There's no way to tell whether a document is an original or a copy. All we can do is date what manuscripts we find to determine which of them is the oldest.

Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive list of estimated authorship dates, and a list of our oldest surviving fragments of New Testament texts.

Essentially, the answer is no. Complete ancient texts are practically nonexistent. Those fragments that we have found have been dated far later than their estimated original authorship dates.

Your brother needs to bone up on his history.

[dimbear]

32. Note that Julius Caesar thought his ideas were worth the trouble of being written down.

Many others have had the same concept of their self importance, including many folks about to be hanged. On the eve of their going to dance on air, they made public recorded statements, wanting their own actual views to be known.

Making the choice of being reported by your enemies, like Saul of Tarsus, or folks who never met you, like Mark and Luke, seems a bit aloof.