Has anyone published the Nitpickers Guide to the Bible? Oh, wait - nearly every theology book ever published. 
note that was a joke. You do not need to post a list of theology books which ae not Nitpickers’ Guides to the Bible.
Imagine living in a modern society dominated by people prone to justifying cruel or contemptuous behavior based solely on arbitrary interpretations of far-fetched literature of a bronze-age nomadic desert culture.
Such a bizarre predicament has a way of preoccupying one’s life, especially when one is unable to escape it.
I know Cross was joking, and that 'splaining kills the funny, but he wasn’t as far off the mark as you might think. At least according to New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, who points out that in all the ancient manuscripts we have, there are more variations than there are words in the whole New Testament. (Although the majority of them are simply what we now call typos.)
But there are several variant readings that affect the meaning of the verse, and point to very different theological interpretations. The Johannine Comma, for example, which is an extra line or two added to 1 John 5:7-8, that are the only scriptural support for the Trinity. The implication is that they were added for that purpose.
Given the fact that the earliest Christian writings that became the NT were copied by amateur rather than professional scribes, and that the earliest actual documents that we possess are copies of copies of copies of copies, with all the opportunity for errors and revisions that that affords, Cross’s joke is not as exaggerated as it seems. (And I’ve just slain about every bit of humor it held.)
Women and their bodies are right here to speak for themselves. Not the same thing as interpreting millennia of writings and their journeys to modern language and editions.
Or… “We’ll shut up when you do.”
When you quote it out of context, to someone who probably has no idea who David Cross is, they’re going to take you literally. And what he said is factually wrong. The books that became the Bible may have been edited as they were passed down. But all translations try to go back to the original source as best they can. They do not edit the translation and then translate the translation. The Bible we have today is as close as we can get to the original given the data we have. That’s not at all like the game of Telephone.
As for what she said, I think you guys are ignoring the context. She’s responding to a post that appears to be about mocking the religion of others. On Facebook, where you’re ostensibly talking to your friends. And apparently, not only to friends who aren’t literalist Christians.
Of course atheists can be fascinated by religion. Of course they can learn about it to understand the religious people around them. But it is indeed strange that many atheists spend more time mocking religion that most religious people spend actually talking about their religion.
Essentially, she’s mocking you (via proxy of “atheists”) because she perceives your post as mocking her via proxy of “Christians.”)
So my response would be something along the lines of “Oh, that’s a joke I find funny. I’m not saying anything bad about Christians. I don’t like it when Christians mock atheists, so I’d be a hypocrite to mock Christians.”
But that’s the serious point behind the joke - we don’t have the originals. Nor the copies of the originals, nor the copies of copies. Yeah, modern translations - some modern translations - try to get back to the earliest sources we have. But we really don’t know what those originals were.
And it’s unquestionable that later translators and copiers of the Bible added and subtracted from the text; see my comment about the Johannine Comma in post #43. Or the different ways that (some) Protestants and Catholics number the Ten Commandments. Or even exclude whole books from the canon.
The Bible is a human document that has been copied and recopied, printed and reprinted, translated and retranslated into hundreds of languages, for three thousand years. Of course it’s been altered; it’s almost impossible for it not to have been. So yeah, it’s fair to compare it to a game of telephone.
That’s what you got from her friend’s comment? That she was playfully teasing back?
You are totally right about how tiresome it is the hear atheist constantly badger you for money on the radio but calling new episodes of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” heaven is a little much. I mean it’s good, but without Paula Poundstone…
Well, put it this way, I may not spend a whole lot of time thinking about feminism but I think I know a little bit more about it then people that devote their lives to it, sweetie.
“given to kings for them to take their favorite parts out”
I presume that refers to James I of England and Ireland and VI of Scotland? Why would the Pope work on the famously Protestant KJV?
Otherwise, a subset of religion believes that it is the True Work of God™, but many treat it as a good moral guide but not 100% true.
Your mistake (you and your friend) is to make discussion on Facebook. Or politics. Or conspiracy theories. Or cat pictures.
I never heard of Cross before, still thought it was funny and there being some truth to it, but assumed it may have come from a comedian, which turned out to be the case. Who’s next for their criticism of the bible and/or of Christians, George Carlin? Think he needs a fact check too?
May? The bible is probably the most edited book in history. There are thousands of interpolations that scholars have identified through additions, deletions, some by honest mistake, but many deliberately. And there is no such thing as an original bible. Even the Jews borrowed heavily, with many credible scholars subscribing to the JEPD documentary hypothesis for the Pentateuch and this spanned centuries in time to say nothing for the rest of it.
I realize judging from how many false belief systems there are, most people prefer to be deceived. Don’t bother them too much, but there is certainly nothing wrong if someone enjoys talking and making arguments for one side or the other either especially on this board and other outlets. Perhaps why atheist don’t have any problem talking about it, is because they find their arguments and reasoning the most sound, while religious folks, not so much, and prefer to be surrounded only by like-minded individuals. The internet has let many a cat out of the bag, and I don’t think some religious folk are quite ready to accept anything but the traditional way the bible has always been passed down to them. Maybe the internet isn’t for them, but should reconsider staying at home and going to the church that still gives them that old-time religion.
Shall we all hold our tongue for fear of offending some superstitious soul? I’ll tell the person to please point out where I have erred, I can assure I’m not offended by a good argument, quite the contrary, I’d very much appreciate it, and if I really flubbed up and wouldn’t listen to logic no matter how much the facts were stacked against my argument, I could probably use a certain amount of ridicule too since nothing else was getting through.
He’s dead, Jim. And that’s a fact, Jack.
It’s my impression - correct me if I’m wrong - that all books of the Bible are currently extant in their probable original composed language - Hebrew and Aramaic for the OT, Greek for the NT. So while I understand where he got all those “retranslates” and “re-retranslates” from (KJV, presumably), at this point it’s pretty much for humour value only.
The “documentary hypothesis,” which has much support, suggests that the Pentateuch, plus Judges, Kings, Chronicles, and a few others, are, in fact, very heavily edited, an assembly of four or more original documents. This is pretty much the prevailing view, nowadays (although, of course, heavily resisted by certain varieties of literalists.)
The Gospels and epistles, not so much. They don’t seem to be the result of overt tinkering. Slow Moving Vehicle pointed to one or two suspicious bits that might have been revised.
Originally composed language, yes - originally composed texts, not so much.
But I assumed Cross was talking about the Bible in English, which has been translated from Hebrew and Greek to Greek, then from Greek to Latin, then from Latin to English, then retranslated directly from Greek, then retranslated from Greek but with bits from the Latin version and also considering other English translations, then retranslated directly from Hebrew…
Huh? I thought that was exactly how the game of Telephone is played? Each person passes on the message as best they can but the errors nonetheless accumulate till the message is barely recognisable. Do you play it some other way?
Yeah, and all the cross-checking that this implies is the exact opposite of Telephone, where the whole point is that Person 5 never gets a chance to ask Person 1 what their message was.
If every Telephone player heard from all the previous players one after the other before passing on the message, it’d be a pretty easy game.
Um, no. Because by the time the message the message gets to Person 5, Person 1 has buggered off to go play Grand Theft Auto.
Your metaphor assumes we can go back to the original texts and check our modern translations against them. And indeed we can. But our “original” texts themselves are five or six iterations removed from the very first versions of the writings. (I’m talking New Testament, here.) And when we go back to those versions, we find many many variants.
To put it in terms of a game of Telephone, it’s as if Person 1 told four people, and they each told seven, and those seven each told three, and the three each told eight, and so on. The closets we can get is to ask each of the eight what the message was. And they each report it a little differently.
Dan Brown says the Emperor Constantine completely re-wrote the Bible, and that’s good enough for David Cross.