Featured The objective truth of God's word.

@37818 I have tried to answer your concerns as best I can by providing scholarly proof. But you seem to dismiss out of hand anything others say that you do not agree with.

We have an accurate bible because of the vast number of manuscripts that we have but we do not have an inerrant bible because we do not have the autographs.

In the late 1940s, a treasure trove of Old Testament manuscripts were discovered in caves near Qumran by the Dead Sea. These “Dead Sea scrolls” were copied by Jews in the first and second century BC, as much as 1,200 years earlier than the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible previously known. The surviving manuscripts include multiple fragments from every book of the Old Testament except one (Esther) and a complete copy of Isaiah. The differences in wording between these scrolls and the medieval manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament text are minute. For example, the “small” Isaiah scroll, containing most of the last third of the book of Isaiah, differs only in 22 (generally minor) words from the Leningrad Codex (dated AD 1008), one of the main Hebrew manuscripts on which modern editions of the Hebrew Old Testament had been based. Findings like these have demonstrated that our text of the Old Testament is at least 99 percent verbally identical to the Hebrew Bible of Jesus’ day.

The situation with the New Testament is in some ways even better. Archaeologists have found papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament dating from the second and third centuries, including a famous fragment of the Gospel of John copied very early in the second century, perhaps twenty to forty years after John was originally written. There are now about 5,800 existing manuscripts, each containing various parts or the whole of the New Testament in the original Greek. In all of these manuscripts, not one sentence has been found that is missing from the King James Version or other translations! In other words, no evidence whatsoever has been found of anything that was ever “lost” from the books of the New Testament. As for what was added, scholars identify some twenty or so verses that were probably added by scribes to the New Testament. Only two of the additions are longer than a sentence—the traditional ending of the Gospel of Mark (16:9-20) and the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). When we take into consideration the fact that there are 7,958 verses in the King James Version of the New Testament, twenty suspect verses is a very tiny amount—about one-quarter of one percent!

The bottom line is that the copying of the books of the Bible has not resulted in any serious loss of the message, content, or teaching of the original writings. There are debates among scholars over isolated words here and there, but nothing has been lost. As far as the text is concerned, there is no reason to mistrust the Bible or to worry that it is not reliable enough to be a sufficient authority for the doctrine and practice of the Christian faith. Has the Bible Been Copied Reliably?

 

Is the majority text method inerrant?

 

you must have a lot of time on your hands.

 

As soon as you have disputed passages you can not claim inerrant. I asked you if you could provide one bible that is inerrant. Have you, no. The bible that we have is accurate and there is not problem with 99% of it but we do not have the original autographs and we have disputes as to whether some text should be in the bible because of the differences in the manuscript evidence we have.

 

Those are strong words. It sounds like you are trying to provoke this brother.

 

I think I understand this comment.

I think I like it.
...
It is more, I believe, or maybe the same(?) as someone saying, for example;

"There are 100 people that viewed an accident,

and 95 of the people agree with everything they saw,

......(All texts identified as Scripture
have common texts which are 100%).....

and 5 people say they saw something different,

......(Where they differ).....

AND each of the 5 people
says they saw something different from the other 4."

.....(and since they really differ, where they differ
does not make the 100% text errant).....

(?)

 

This is a sampling and some excerpts from
“A Declaration of My Faith in the Inspiration
and Preservation of Holy Scripture,” by Thomas Ross,

in his "Syllabus for Bible Texts and Versions,
Manuscript Evidence, and God’s Promises of Preservation"

(complete original and numbered references at these links above)

and it goes as follows, below;

What does it have to do
with trying to arrive at an articulation of
The objective truth of God's word?

There has to be some bridge in stating what we believe, between all the Confessions of Faith, using the words 'inspired', 'inerrant', 'plenary', etc., and stupid things like KJVO diehards come off with that are indefensible (double inspiration, etc.).

Questions, comments, and concerns?

(the negative things he disagrees with
have been edited out, to start with/ will pick them up, later, all together

also, some of these guys go with the original language copies being 'perfect', which, I believe, means that between all of the original language copies, the whole canon is 'perfect' somewhere in there(?). Dunno.

“The just shall live by faith” (Romans 1:17; Habakkuk 2:4)
and “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

"Scripture, and faith in the promises of God,
must be the “glasses” through which we evaluate historical data
about the preservation of the Bible.

"Scripture teaches the verbal, plenary preservation
of the verbally, plenarily inspired autographa
(Psalm 12:6-7; Matthew 5:18; Matthew 24:35);

"that the preserved words
would be perpetually available to God’s people (Isaiah 59:21);

"and that Israel was the guardian of Scripture
in the Mosaic dispensation (Romans 3:1-2),

"and the church the guardian in the dispensation of grace
(1 Timothy 3:15).

"The Holy Spirit would lead the saints
to accept the words the Father gave to the Son
to give to His people (John 16:13; 17:8).

"Believers can know with certainty
where the canonical words of God are,
because they are to live by every one of them
(Matthew 4:4; Revelation 22:18-19)
and are going to be judged by them on the last day
(John 12:48).

"I further confess that, receiving with the faith of a little child
(Matthew 18:3; Luke 18:16-17)
God’s own testimony to His own perfectly inspired,
preserved, and self-authenticating Word,
only the Hebrew, Aramaic,
and Greek Received Texts of Scripture,
those original language texts
from which the Authorized Version of the Bible was translated,
fit the Biblical model of preservation."

"...the Textus Receptus that underlies the Authorized Version of the Bible, that holy Word that was in use by Baptist churches and believers in other denominations8 both in the time from the invention of the printing press until the present day, and also the type of text in use by the line of true churches and believers, who were first denominated Christians, and then Baptists or Anabaptists, in the ancient and medieval periods, is the true Majority Text, and the only text that the Spirit has led Bible-believing churches who accept the testimony of Scripture to its own preservation to receive as canonical and perfectly preserved.9

"I, therefore, confess with true churches, countless martyrs, and the humble and faithful people of God, that the Textus Receptus, loved, copied, printed, translated, read, memorized, meditated upon, and preached for century after century, is indeed God’s very living and holy Word, delivered miraculously from heaven, providentially10 and perfectly preserved, and with holy joy and wonder received by me in faith as His own living oracles in my hands.

"I likewise confess that I reject all textual criticism that denies or ignores God’s own promises about His providential work in preserving His Word, and that approaches the holy Scriptures in an atheistic and naturalistic way as if God’s Word were to be evaluated as if it were any common, uninspired and unpreserved book, instead joyfully receiving, with love, holy reverence, awe, and fear (Psalm 119:97; 119:120; Isaiah 66:2), that very Received Text that has been in use by true churches and the people of God from the time that God gave the autographs until this day.

"I confess with such true churches and saints that the Scriptures I can with reverent delight hold in my hands, “being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and Providence kept pure in all Ages, are therefore authentical,” and likewise join such churches to confess that, while there is plentiful external evidence for the inspiration and preservation of Scripture, nonetheless our “full persuasion, and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.”11

"In relation to the English translation of the Authorized Version, I confess that I receive it with veneration, believing that the God who providentially works in all of history would certainly providentially work in relation to the translation of His Word that would be in use by Baptist churches for over 400 years in the language that God ordained would become the first truly world-wide language since the tower of Babel.

"I also confess that the promises of preservation are specifically made for Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words, not English words (Matthew 5:18) and that there are no specific promises that state that Scripture would be translated without error.

"Since no verses of the Bible promise a perfect English translation, I respect the views of brethren who, while receiving the promises of God concerning the preservation of His perfect Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words, believe that there are places where the English of the King James Version would be better-rendered otherwise.13

"Furthermore, I recognize that there can be more than one accurate way to translate a verse from the original language into the vernacular.14

"Nevertheless, because the people of God who do not know the original languages should have (a justified) confidence that when they hold the King James Bible in their hands, they have God’s very Word in their own language, and because I respect the high confidence that the Head of the church has led His congregations to place in the English of the Authorized Version, and because I have found in my own language study that, time and again, there are excellent reasons for the translation choices in the Authorized Version, and because I am not aware of any single place where I can, with a certain confidence and definitiveness, affirm that the English of the King James Version cannot possibly be justified as a translation but is indubitably in error,15 I refrain from criticizing the English of the King James Bible, and when it is appropriate in preaching and teaching to mention a different way the text can be translated, I choose to say, “this word (or verse, etc.) could also be translated as” rather than “this word (or verse, etc.) would be better translated as.”

"This is the faith that I confess in relation to the translation of the Bible into my mother tongue. All of the above is the faith in the inspiration and preservation of Scripture I believe and confess with my whole mind and heart. Unless convinced otherwise by the Scriptures, I will continue to believe and confess this faith, by the enabling grace of God, until Christ’s return or my death."

 

God and His word are inerrant. The bible that we have in our hands is not inerrant. It is accurate to the best of our human ability based upon the manuscripts that we have. Have you provided the bible that is as you say inerrant, I asked you to do that. You are just playing games here 37. We do not have a bible that does not have textural variants in it do we. That is what started this thread "Disagreement over a textual variant between two Bible translation is a disagreement over the objective truth of God's word." I have provided information regarding the bible transmission and errors in the bible and what have you provided to support your view, Nothing.

37 provide just one bible that is inerrant and can be shown to be an exact copy of the original autographs. You cannot and you even admit this in your post "No translation of the whole Bible is inerrant." The original autographs were inerrant but we do not have them do we and the best we can do is reconstruct the bible from the manuscript copies that we have.

Answer these two questions: The Johannine Comma of 1 John 5:7-8. was it in the original text or not and what do you base your answer on. Whatever your answer is it will have to be a subjective one as you are going to trust one source while others will trust another and how can you know which is correct, which is the inerrant word of God.

 

So what your saying is that he cherry picked the mss that supported his bias and ignored the rest. Would it not be a better idea to use the best mss available?