God Interferes

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JoeyKnothead
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God Interferes

Post #1

Post by JoeyKnothead »

From Post 1319 here...
Sherlock Holmes wrote: Furthermore, God has intervened in the status quo numerous times so clearly can and will take actions that would not occur unless he took said action.
For debate:

Please offer some means to confirm the claim is true and factual.
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Sherlock Holmes

Re: God Interferes

Post #21

Post by Sherlock Holmes »

benchwarmer wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 8:53 pm
Sherlock Holmes wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 1:10 pm The NT is quite exceptional when it comes to documents from antiquity:

Image

It all therefore comes down to how one interprets all this, different people will and do interpret this in different ways.
Harry Potter is also quite exceptional (bolding mine):

http://mediaroom.scholastic.com/files/2 ... PT2018.pdf
1. Scholastic published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the U.S. in September 1998. The
book by then debut author J.K. Rowling had an initial first printing of 50,000 copies
...
7. More than 500 million copies of the Harry Potter books have sold worldwide; more than 180
million copies have sold in the U.S. alone.
...
20. If all the Harry Potter books ever sold were placed end to end, they would go around the
equator over 16 times.
The above was from 2018, so we have a span of 20 years and > 500 million copies. What does this tell us? It tells me this book is popular. It certainly doesn't tell us that Hogwarts is a real school for magicians.

I always laugh when someone brings up the number of Bibles printed. As if that is some measure of it's truth or validity. In the age of the internet, we can ALL access any published (to the internet) material. Does this mean it's all true because we can all read it? Clearly not.

I suggest another avenue for validating the truth of any claims from the Bible. Like verifiable (by the person you are trying to convince) evidence.
Well I certainly did not refer to the number of Bibles printed (in fact I did not refer to Bibles at all). All of the ancient documents listed in the chart predate printing and come from a time when hand copying was the only means available for replicating documents.

Look at the chart, the NT is exceptional as you can see.

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Re: God Interferes

Post #22

Post by Miles »

Sherlock Holmes wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 1:10 pm

The NT is quite exceptional when it comes to documents from antiquity:

Image

It all therefore comes down to how one interprets all this, different people will and do interpret this in different ways.
What is the source of your chart? A link would be great.

Thanks


.

Sherlock Holmes

Re: God Interferes

Post #23

Post by Sherlock Holmes »

[Replying to Miles in post #22]

https://www.biblicaltheology.com/Resear ... ezR02.html

the table though is very well established, many sites have similar tables.

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Re: God Interferes

Post #24

Post by Difflugia »

Sherlock Holmes wrote: Fri May 27, 2022 4:01 pm
benchwarmer wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 8:53 pmThe above was from 2018, so we have a span of 20 years and > 500 million copies. What does this tell us? It tells me this book is popular. It certainly doesn't tell us that Hogwarts is a real school for magicians.

I always laugh when someone brings up the number of Bibles printed. As if that is some measure of it's truth or validity. In the age of the internet, we can ALL access any published (to the internet) material. Does this mean it's all true because we can all read it? Clearly not.
Well I certainly did not refer to the number of Bibles printed (in fact I did not refer to Bibles at all). All of the ancient documents listed in the chart predate printing and come from a time when hand copying was the only means available for replicating documents.

Look at the chart, the NT is exceptional as you can see.
It's exceptional, but benchwarmer's response shows why your argument based on that specific criterion is flawed. The "number of copies" argument is support for a different claim, namely that the manuscripts we have are reasonably close to autographs, or at least an earlier form. It's often mistakenly cited, as you have done, as evidence that its content is historically trustworthy. Likewise, even if the original manuscript of Harry Potter were lost, we could be reasonably certain that we could reconstruct a text very similar to the original. Also likewise, the number of copies preserved doesn't offer any assurance that Hogwarts is real.

To extend the analogy a bit further, there are actually two main variants of the first Harry Potter book in English: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone with a number of textual differences. We could perform literary and textual criticism across those variants and attempt to reconstruct an original and find likely patterns for those differences. To extend it even further (and because I'm nothing if not a nerd), I own copies of the first Harry Potter book translated into both German and Homeric Greek. We could examine those translations along with the English variants and determine, for example, whether the translators were likely working from an English variant and whether it was one of the two that we have, a combination of the two, or an unknown variant. The more manuscripts we have, the more we could learn about its literary history, but that still wouldn't do much to inform us about the main character's status as an actual historical wizard.
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Re: God Interferes

Post #25

Post by benchwarmer »

Sherlock Holmes wrote: Fri May 27, 2022 4:01 pm Well I certainly did not refer to the number of Bibles printed (in fact I did not refer to Bibles at all). All of the ancient documents listed in the chart predate printing and come from a time when hand copying was the only means available for replicating documents.

Look at the chart, the NT is exceptional as you can see.
Apologies, you are correct. You referred to the number of NT documents copied. Ok, so? How is this any different?

It just means it was a popular document. How does that help determine anything beyond that? Are you saying people won't spend time reproducing documents of false tales?

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Re: God Interferes

Post #26

Post by Eloi »

Sherlock Holmes wrote: Sun May 29, 2022 9:24 am [Replying to Miles in post #22]

https://www.biblicaltheology.com/Resear ... ezR02.html

the table though is very well established, many sites have similar tables.
That is a very interesting table.

In a forum in Spanish in which I sometimes participate, there is a forumer who invents all kinds of nonsense with the idea of destroying the truth of the Bible. One of his topics is entitled "The Bible Does Not Exist", and it is based on the fact that since there are no original manuscripts or hagiographers of the NT, no one can say that the Bible really exists. It's a pretty stupid reasoning, even more so when in another topic of his he writes posts where he makes references to the content of the NT and the OT, but ... you know.

Imagine if that same criterion were used with all this classical literature... The chairs of literature and philosophy would have no content to speak of. :shock:

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Re: God Interferes

Post #27

Post by Tcg »

Sherlock Holmes wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 1:10 pm
The NT is quite exceptional when it comes to documents from antiquity:
Image

It all therefore comes down to how one interprets all this, different people will and do interpret this in different ways.
Exceptional is one word for it. Here is what I assume this chart refers to as the "Earliest Copy":

Image

It's the Ryland Papyrus P52. Not much of a storyline.


Tcg
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