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World's Oldest Bible Going Online
99luftballon writes "The British Museum is putting online the remaining fragments of the world's oldest Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus dates to the fourth century BCE and was discovered in the 19th century. Very few people have seen it due to its fragile state — that and the fact that parts of it are in collections scattered across the globe. It'll give scholars and those interested their first chance to take a look. However, I've got a feeling that some people won't be happy to see it online, since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief."On Thursday the Book of Psalms and the Gospel According to Mark will go live at the Codex Sinaiticus site. The plan is to have all the material up, with translations and commentaries, a year from now.
but there were never any books I wasn't allowed to read while going to a Catholic school. The earth wasn't flat, gays weren't out to get me, and doing a book report on Darwin didn't get me excommunicated. If anything religion was the framework for how one behaved in school and did not control what I learned there.
If anything going to a public school was more of a shocker, stepping back the equivalent of two grades and being bombarded with more ignorance than one can shake a stick at.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
higher level than other infidels
Oh, so there's a caste system for infidels? Goody! Put me at the bottom, k?
I don't see the Muslims disparaging other religions
Really? I've heard Muslims call Jews rats, dogs, bastards, pigs....
As a side issue: wtf is up with Islam and dogs? Jesus friggin' Christ. Any religion that doesn't "allow" a boy to have a dog as a pet is... sick.
after the Mohammed cartoon controversity, I'd imagine they'd want more "protection"
You mean censorship?
"protected" against blasphemy
Fail.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Some of us cope by not believing in inerrancy in the first place.
And, for some of us, the idea that the copying and translation has introduced both unintentional errors and intentional variation is not particularly news.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Well,
1. It was perverted from the start.
E.g., right after Christ's death, we already know that there was a sect called the Ebionites, which actually contained relatives of Jesus and people who knew him personally. (They actually insisted that the leadership of the church should go to a relative of Jesus, not to Peter.) They also made no claim of resurrection, nor that Mary was a virgin (much less the later idiocy that she stayed a virgin even after giving birth), etc. Generally they thought of him as a _human_. Prophet and divinely inspired, yes, but not the divine incarnation that the later church turned him into.
What we inherited as Christianity is actually mostly due to Paul, who went fanboy and convinced the others that they must (A) proselitise at all cost, and (B) that it's ok to change stuff, e.g., about half the Old Testament, if it makes it easier to swallow by potential new followers. I wouldn't be too surprised if it involved some embellishing about Jesus too, especially given the following fact:
The Ebionites actually considered Paul an apostate. Not a misunderstanding, or mis-representation, or whatever, but outright apostate. That's how much it deviated.
2. That wouldn't even be the end of massaging it into a different shape.
The new religion wasn't even too clear about who Jesus was, or wth did it all mean. A lot of the early "heresies", like Arianism or Pellagianism are, strictly speaking, compatible with what was actually written. They just filled the blanks in differently.
It took several generations of Byzantine philosophers to define exactly wth _do_ they believe in, down to the smallest details. (The schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism came much later, so yes, you did inherit the byzantine construct even if you're Catholic or Protestant.) A lot of things that resulted don't even reflect the original context or meaning, but the effort of fitting Christianity into the Greek way of seeing the world, which at times was like fitting a square peg in a triangular hole. E.g., they had to make Mary and the birth even more perfect and wondrous, because they thought that something perfect (e.g., Jesus) can't possibly come out of something imperfect (e.g., a normal human mother.)
And even then it created even more schisms and heresies, because some things made no sense to cultures who thought differently. At least one schism was because stuff that made sense in Greek, made no sense when translated into Syriac, because the words didn't have the same nuances.
They also defined very strictly what is included in the Bible, what you can write or say about it, and in which terms.
3. Which brings me to the point, they had no problem dealing with the Ebionites or with the Syriac churches which were a lot closer to where it all happened. They just proclaimed them heretics.
I'm guessing it will be the same today. People will just proclaim this manuscript as some gnostic heresy, and continue as if nothing happened.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Mark's Gospel was considered by some theologians to been written in a style of "play". Mark writes like you could play it on a stage. People come in, talk, go out.
Mark's ending, with the cross, was in many ways like the ending of a drama. It opened doors not just for talk about the play, but also for thinking about the matter.
I cant recite what I have read further, but the theologian was going into detail, why the ending did suggest something else to happen, which would have been obvious for people of that time, so mark didn't need the resurrection to be mentioned. it was obvious for them that there was more to it, like it is obvious for us now, that "I am your father" is a reference to Star Wars, but later, when time passed, the resurrection was added to the book.
Most christians know, that Mark did not mention the resurrection chronologically in the original. But, there were 3 other gospels, and plenty of people writing about the resurrection, and even Mark pointed the resurrection out in a lot of passages. So, no, there is no debate at all on our side.
Still, thanx for the news. Accurate timing (BCE?) and some insights which books are in this old bible would have been better, though.
So, if it was dated to 4 BCE (thats BC for you christians who havn't adopted the new format for dates) ... how does it have the gospel of mark (which was written after christ?)
I never speak about my faith on slashdot generally, since doing so tends to get exactly same reactionism without considderation as talking to a Southern Baptist about evolution does. Most Christians in the rest of the world think American Christians are idiots who give us all a bad name. Not least because they seriously underestimate the very God they will use as an excuse to do anything they want and control everybody else.
Enlightened Christians have long since decided that Genesis is METAPHORICAL not LITERAL. Many parts of the Bible are literal truth and we often have archeological evidence to back them up (See the Towns built by Solomon for example - archeologists on those digs actually use the book of Kings to know WHERE to dig for WHAT part), many parts are not. The prodigial son is not literal truth - it's a teaching story. So why is it so hard to think that Genesis was a teaching story for a humanity 3000 years to early to understand the science of evolution ? It's point is that God created the universe and life, not HOW ! Evolution and the big bang theories make no claim otherwise (at least, when it's done by proper scientists without an agenda).
What's worse is that they really don't seem to get what 'allmighty' MEANS. God is not bound by time ! He says it in the gospels and they still pretend otherwise. There is no reason why both the creation tales in Genesis AND evolution can't all three be literal truth ! God could create the earth in six days AND in the universe in a hundred billion years without contradiction - time happens to other people. Any God who couldn't do that wouldn't even be very potent, let alone OMNIpotent !
It's like the old question of whether God could create something to heavy for him to lift. The answer to one of faith is a simple "yes". And afterwards, he could lift it. This is only logically inconsistent if you are bound by the laws of logic - God can change them to suit himself.
Many people have forgotten that Christianity is all about love. Try this one out. A common reading of some texts get people to claim 'do good unto all, and especially good unto others of the same faith'. I read it the exact opposite: do ESPECIALLY good to people of other religions. Don't try to convert people with long speeches, or draconic laws ! The bible tells us that most important act of mission we must do is the example of love. American fundamentalists are creating a global impression of Christians as people without understanding or empathy or love - and that is undoing the single most important task given to them by God AND Jesus. Charity is the ultimate form of mission - and charity without agenda, those who - impressed by it - ASKS - you then teach why you do it, that you are trying to show the same love you have received. If Christians were any good at actually acting according to their faith - we would not be in the PR disaster we are in.
Some protestant theological schools (notably my own church's) even have a required subject for preachers called "criticism of scripture" which studies historical alteration of the Bible, modification of meanings, likely entries that got added by accident and the like and evaluates it line by line to try and improve the quality. It takes a lot of time and effort to make a correction (think 30-40 years) which then goes for ultimate approval (with all the evidence) to the synod - but they do happen, and being rash with them would be irresponsible- and it helps that every preacher voting at the synod will have studied the subject, and probably participated in some of the research when they were students.
So the vision of Christians as closed-minded bigots is limited to a few groups scattered around the world, with the American bible-belt most likely the single largest concentration - it is not how most Christians live and act. Most Christians do NOT think the SPLA deserves any of our support. We do not think we should get to write the laws either, quite the contrary - our mandate according to Jesus is to follow the law, whatever the
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
As it happens, I have a friend who was a believer, so much so that he learned Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic so that he could read older versions. He ended up concluding that the translators had done so much revising that if god existed, he would have prevented the distortion.
He's a happy atheist today.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Christians -- at least, English-speaking Christians -- seem to be alone among the world's major religions in relying exclusively upon translations of their sacred texts. Muslims believe that one can truly understand the Koran only in the original Arabic; Jews are instructed in Hebrew in their youth; Hindus learn Sanskrit in order to read the Bhagavad Gita and other writings. But among Christians, only scholars and specialists have even the slightest knowledge of the Greek in which the New Testament is written.
Curious . . . .
...to be a Christian. Old texts go a long way to proving the authenticity of the Bible - not the other way around. Often times, after a discovery such as this one, the media gets all excited. Never mind the fact that most of these discoveries 'reveal' things already known to religious and secular scholars. Have a look in a Bible, check the footnotes. They mark passages that don't appear in all notable manuscripts. Christians don't hide this, nor do they need to.
I have a BS in Physics from a state school (Emphasis on theory not some science-math-wimpy-education-track). I have listened to the higher criticism of the Bible as well as equally capable defenders of the faith. Those in defense of the Bible have a better case.
Now, if you take someone who has poor logical and rhetoric skills and put them up against a professor, it is easy to make the educated side seem to have the correct position. But, that works both ways.
Have a listen to what some well educated and well spoken men of God say in the defense of the Bible. Of course, there are charlatans, who masquerade as if they know what they are talking about and make Christianity look stupid. But, every field has those - cold fusion, anybody?
I would suggest Ravi Zacharias rzim.org if you are looking for a modern man with excellent logical skills and comprehensive knowledge on the subject. He has Q&A sessions (often at colleges after a debate) and takes questions such as yours seriously and gives educated answers that actually address your criticism. Take a look here for the past 100 broadcasts of his 'Let My People Think' program, you might find answers to some questions you have had. If he isn't to your liking, look for another - there are many.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"