Textual criticism

[pw201]

I mentioned Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus in my response to nlj21's complaint that Karen Armstrong does not provide a source for her claim that the Apostle Paul didn't write the Pastoral EpistlesI re-read the book while we were on holiday recently. I'd recommend it, despite the rather sensationalist cover advertising ("OMG the King James Version's text

Comments

[anonymous]

εις το ονομα = into the name (nomative? singular)
του πατρος = of the father (genetive singular)
και του υιου = and of the son (genetive singular)
και του αγιου πνευματος = and of the holy spirit (genetive singular)

I know nowhere near enough Greek to be able to start theologizing from it with any authority. But my guess would be his argument is based on "ονομα" being singular, not plural. So the father/son/spirit have a single name, rather them each having their own name.

nlj21

[pw201]

Yep, I was curious whether Greek has the same idiom as the English one that Steven Carr uses in the comments, which would mean that the singular name didn't mean everything which follows it was one thing ("the name of the poor, and the downtrodden, and the huddled masses" or whatever).

[anonymous]

I've also being investigating the arguments for pastoral epistles being non-Pauline. The argument seems to hinge on statistical analysis of the vocabulary and seeing that different words are used in them and other of Paul's letters. Therefore they can't be written by the same person.

But it would seem to me that there are other perfectly reasonable alternative explanations for a different vocabulary. e.g. Paul might just have a different style when writing to a city instead of an individual?

I bet if we did a statistical analysis of your LJ posts and compared it to your e-mail inbox we could conclude you were in fact two different people!

[ex_robhu]

namely that it's an extra-biblical tradition despite claiming not to be
I don't doubt that Evangelicals have traditions that are not clearly outlined in the text. You shouldn't be surprised by this as StAG would have said the same. Some things are inferred from what the text talks about, what it doesn't talk about, what the apostles seemed to believe, and so on.

The idea that the Bible is the word of God is something it claims for itself, and which Jesus also thought to be the case.

I have read the Ehrman links you referred to (I read the debate one before). In fact, it was because of reading some of his stuff and the debates online in the past that I found Ehrman's position to be weak, and that contributed to my decision that Christianity was probably true.

[pw201]

The foundational traditions of evangelicalism are not in the text, for example, which books constitute the canon, and how to interpret them (picking the evangelical interpretative method among the others the church has used through history when faced with the Bible

[ex_robhu]

The foundational traditions of evangelicalism are not in the text, for example, which books constitute the canonYeah, there are various foundational things that aren't in the 'Bible' before you have these foundational things because you need to determine them before you have 'the Bible'. You talk about Evangelicals having extra-biblical tradition as if this were big news when you ought to have known that when you were an Evangelical, and in fact it's obvious and necessary that it'd be the case

[pw201]

I did know (or should have known) that there was a bootstrapping problem when I was an evangelical, but I think I took the Bible as axiomatic because I felt that was the right thing to do. You might say that was God's inner witness. I might say that I was an enthusiastic participant in a group which had that attitude and didn't see any reason not to (which is the wrong way about, of course, but people get carried away sometimes). BTW: I hope I haven't said I never felt that God was there or the Bible was true (because I did), but I have said that I've never felt/seen anything I couldn't otherwise explain and that I never felt I got direct "words of knowledge", I think