Steven Avery
Administrator
Error on DSS Great Isaiah Scroll word for word,
Wesley Huff on Joe Rogan
- Thread starter Steven Avery
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Steven Avery
Administrator
Part of the reason was that in the fourth century, very few people were reading Greek. They were reading Latin. And so they’re like, “Jerome, you need to produce a Bible in Latin because nobody can read the Bible anymore.” And so he produces the Latin Vulgate. And ironically, by the time you get to Luther, a thousand years later, no one can read Latin and they’re all using the Vulgate.
WESLEY HUFF: And even Erasmus was, so he dedicates his first few additions to the Pope because he knows that the Pope is going to get wind that he’s producing Greek New Testament, New Testaments, and the church is using the Latin and he, he’s risking, risking his life. So if he dedicates it to the Pope, maybe the Pope will take it easy on him.
WESLEY HUFF: And even Erasmus was, so he dedicates his first few additions to the Pope because he knows that the Pope is going to get wind that he’s producing Greek New Testament, New Testaments, and the church is using the Latin and he, he’s risking, risking his life. So if he dedicates it to the Pope, maybe the Pope will take it easy on him.
Steven Avery
Administrator
But ironically with the, the Christian manuscripts, because we have so many, it’s actually because of the mistakes that were able to trace the text back with a high degree of confidence. Because if you have copies that are floating around, you know, North Africa and places like Egypt, and then you have copies in Syria and you’ve copies out into Asia and into Europe and the British Isles, when mistakes pop up, they’re geographically located. And because you have so many, you can compare and contrast them and figure out, okay, well this obviously happens here at this time and you can pinpoint, point those things. So this is a field called textual criticism where you, and we do this with all ancient documents.
Steven Avery
Administrator
So one of the, the clearest examples of this is there’s a manuscript in the fourth century called Codex Vaticanus, because it happens to be in the Vatican right now. And there is a manuscript from the second century, which has the exact same scribal conventions that Codex Vaticanus does in particular readings. And so we know for a fact that the scribes who created Vaticanus did not have, I think it’s P75, which is a papyrus 75, but they had some sort of collection of manuscripts that were similar. And so we can have confidence that the readings, although they’re fourth century in particular areas of Codex Vaticanus are actually second century in their origination. And a large part of this is because of these like models that the computer has got involved in.
Steven Avery
Administrator
So actually, a guy I know, Elijah Hickson, he used that and he actually figured out that there was a prominent manuscript, P50, which is a forgery. And so he used that based on like looking at the digital. Yeah, he filled in the gaps within the rips and saw that the words didn’t match up when you fill in the gaps.
And so when he’s transcribing the text, he’s like, “Wait a minute, I don’t think that word fits in there.” And based on that, he’s like, “Yeah, that’s a that’s a forgery,” because someone has written the text in after that piece of papyri, which is these forgeries are almost always a genuine piece of ancient papyri. Someone gets it from like the black market antiquities.
WESLEY HUFF: Yeah, right there. So P50. So if you fill in these holes, they’re called lacunas. The words, a lot of the words don’t fit. So someone’s come along and they’ve like written up a really good job because it fooled scholars. And they’ve written in the text, but not quite good enough to figure out that not all of the words fit in the gaps that you presented.
And so when he’s transcribing the text, he’s like, “Wait a minute, I don’t think that word fits in there.” And based on that, he’s like, “Yeah, that’s a that’s a forgery,” because someone has written the text in after that piece of papyri, which is these forgeries are almost always a genuine piece of ancient papyri. Someone gets it from like the black market antiquities.
WESLEY HUFF: Yeah, right there. So P50. So if you fill in these holes, they’re called lacunas. The words, a lot of the words don’t fit. So someone’s come along and they’ve like written up a really good job because it fooled scholars. And they’ve written in the text, but not quite good enough to figure out that not all of the words fit in the gaps that you presented.
Steven Avery
Administrator
So the Gospel of Peter, which comes around in, you know, second, third, fourth centuries, is being written and it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross, because he’s not really physical, because he’s divine and physical entities don’t have physical bodies. So we don’t actually get like a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like the Gospel of Barnabas in the Middle Ages, which is a, it’s actually the document that Billy brought up to me in the conversation we had, is the evidence that Jesus was never crucified, the Gospel of Barnabas. Well, the Gospel of Barnabas is 15th century. It paraphrases Dante’s Inferno.
It’s not an ancient document. So, but in the ancient world, nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims. The more of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.
It’s not an ancient document. So, but in the ancient world, nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of supernatural claims. The more of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with.
Steven Avery
Administrator
So when I was talking with Billy Carson, he brought up the Sinai Bible, Codex Sinaiticus. Codex Sinaiticus is probably one of these documents that Constantine commissioned, because it’s one of our earliest examples of a cover to cover Genesis to Revelation copy of the Bible. And it comes from the fourth century. And based on both its dating, and based on the fact that this would have been incredibly expensive to make, like it took 360 sheep, just to put together, which would have been the equivalent of like, I don’t know, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars today.
So the reason why we’re pretty sure that documents like Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, potentially even Codex Alexandrinus, or Codex Washingtonianus are documents that could have been part of this commissioning is just because they’re such giant, giant projects in, you know, very few people would have had the ability to produce something like this, other than an emperor. And so we actually have some of these these documents that survived today.
So the reason why we’re pretty sure that documents like Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, potentially even Codex Alexandrinus, or Codex Washingtonianus are documents that could have been part of this commissioning is just because they’re such giant, giant projects in, you know, very few people would have had the ability to produce something like this, other than an emperor. And so we actually have some of these these documents that survived today.
Steven Avery
Administrator
So in the Gospel of James, Jesus is worshiping a goddess named Sophia. It’s like, okay, well, no first century Jews can do that. That’s obviously paganism. And so we have these early conversations.
Steven Avery
Administrator
And so sometimes documents out themselves as being unreliable and not true, because they inadvertently include these clues, like so the Gospel of Barnabas, which I mentioned before, which Billy Carson has brought up as evidence that he sees as denying the crucifixion. It talks about Jesus getting in a boat and traveling to Nazareth, but Nazareth is landlocked. So that person clearly did not know anything about the geography of like first century Israel, because you’re not getting in a boat to go to Nazareth, right? So, but if you’re writing, you know, I mean, in the case of the Gospel of Barnabas, you’re talking about like 1000 plus years later.