Thursday, October 25, 2012

Is the Bible Reliable?

I find Bart Ehrman to be a pretty compelling speaker when it comes to the accuracy of the Bible.

Textual criticism isn't a religious idea.  The study of many copies of a text to determine if it has changed over time has nothing to do with religion.  This is a purely analytic, academic subject.  It just so happens that we have lots of copies of the Bible, and lots of people looking at it.

Listen to the beginning of this video:  Question #6:  Have the gospels been accurate preserved down through the centuries?





In this video, the response from the debate opponent, Craig Evans, isn't shown.  In a separate video, we hear his response.  He generally agrees that the text certainly does contain changes, but they are mostly minor and typographical in nature, or slight embellishments.  The core message of the gospels remains clear, he says, and more or less hand-waves away these minor issues.

Then skip to the following question at 10:22:  Do scribal errors and textual variants significantly impact any teaching of Jesus or any important Christian teacher?



Dr. Ehrman quotes some very famous quotes from Jesus, and probably surprises many people by saying that those quotes only exist in textual variants.

He makes a very compelling argument, in my opinion, that we should at least cast some doubt as to whether the Bible is a trustworthy and reliable guide.



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