Featured The objective truth of God's word.

However, excepting the Lord’s Supper, eating during prayer has never seemed quite orthodox to me.

 

Omitting the phrase "and fasting" seems of little significance, unless it leads to someone eating (or drinking).

Of course, smacking gum (or blowing/popping bubbles) during prayer seems a bit unorthodox as well.

 

Well, the closest I could come to bringing some clarity would be to ask what prayer and fasting might have to do with each other, why they would be in the same sentence connected by "and."

If there are no logical reasons, then that in itself would seem a problem, perhaps an insurmountable one.

 

The words no doubt were accidentaly deleted by an ancient ancestor of Codex's Vaticanus & Siniaticus. Perhaps in the 2nd century AD. Only one lone manuscript made the same mistake independently, a single Old Latin Manuscript.

Had the words not been there originally they would be missing by more Greek Manuscripts and other ancient translations.

 

{underlining mine}
I think you are coming at this from the wrong angle.

TRUTHS RELATING TO BIBLICAL TEXTUAL VARIANTS AND TRANSLATION

1. We do not have the original biblical texts; we have a multitude of similar (but subtly different) NT manuscripts written over about 1500 years.
2. Disagreements about NT textual variants occurred very early in the history of Christianity.
3. Biblical textual variants occur in Hebrew and Greek manuscripts [Scholars estimate the collective number of variants found in the New Testament manuscripts to be in the range of hundreds of thousands].
4. Textual variants differ in many ways, ranging from a few meaningful and viable variants, to numerous insignificant and infeasible ones.
5. An early phase in the process of translating from one language to another is identifying the variants deciding how to deal with them (in modern Bibles the Preface usually contains a translation's methodology).
6. In the process of biblical translation hundreds of textual decisions have to be made.

It has been estimated that 99+% of the biblical text is undisputed.
The choices made about the remaining disputed text are subjective and based upon a readers judgement, their personal opinion, and/or their point of view.

We can be persuaded in our own mind;
we can attempt to persuade others of our decisions,
but an aggressive attitude toward opposing opinions is unproductive and unworthy of the text we study.

OPINION: There are many more disagreements about how “God’s word” is interpreted despite the text being undisputed.

Rob

 

Just as an addition can be a doctrine of demons. That view cuts both ways.

On a simple reading of the text considering the situation of Christ raising the young man, the words "and fasting" does not seem to fit, it looks more like an addition by a scribe.

 

So you are persuaded by the accumulation of documents… sounds subjective to me.

Without access to the original documents we are dealing with statistical probabilities and possibilities rather than objective fact.

Being so sure of your position might I be so forward as to ask you,
when was the last time you fasted and prayed?

Rob

 

The question is what line of transmission are those manuscripts from. If I make a error in a text and then I copy it 100 times it is still only one error but just copied 100 times.
I found this on the net
https://reasonsforhopejesus.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Manuscript_Lines_Bible_reasonsforhopeJesus.pdf

History of the Transmission of the New Testament Text Bruce Manning Metzger
"Other divergencies in wording arose from deliberate attempts to smooth out grammatical or stylistic harshness, or to eliminate real or imagined obscurities of meaning in the text. Sometimes a copyist would substitute or would add what seemed to him to be a more appropriate word or form, perhaps derived from a parallel passage (called harmonization or assimilation). Thus, during the years immediately following the composition of the several documents that eventually were collected to form the New Testament, hundreds if not thousands of variant readings arose." History of the Transmission of the New Testament Text - Christian Publishing House Blog

The challenge before us is to attempt to see which words should be in a particular verse. The truth is we can not say for sure as we do not have access to the original texts. What we have are copies of copies. What we do know from bible scholars is that no doctrine of God is called into question. Can we say the bibles we hold in our hand are inerrant no but we can say that they are sufficient as God has preserved His word. He has promised to do so.
2Ti 3:16 All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;
2Ti 3:17 so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

 

OK so Dr. Pickering believes it does. And there in lays the problem. We do not have the original NT texts. So we have to rely on scholars to give us the best text they can based upon the manuscript evidence that they have.

God said He would preserve His word so that we could know Him and I trust that He has done so. I have a number of bibles on my computer and we see "and fasting " in some and not in others. Men that were much more qualified than I made decisions based upon the information available to them. That is why I have so many bibles, so that I can see how various scholars dealt with the text.

Whether "and fasting" is or is not in the text really does not matter. The critical part is reliance on God through prayer. That is how I see it anyway.

 

We do have the Original Text of the New Testament. It is in the Greek Manuscripts that exist today. We have thousands of them, from tiny fragments to complete New Testaments. We also have ancient Translations of the Original Greek in Latin, Syraic and Coptic, Gothic, Armenian, Ethiopian and other languages. We also have testimonies of ancient Church Fathers or leadership who quote the New Testament. The Original Text of the New Testament has been well preserved, even if a few places it is difficult to choose between Variants.