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> Faithfulness to an imagined "original text" is often asked for, often attempted, but wholly futile. I think this overstates the case, especially when it come
by memling 4y ago
> Faithfulness to an imagined "original text" is often asked for, often attempted, but wholly futile.
I think this overstates the case, especially when it comes to the text of the Bible. Thousands of variants exist, but this is precisely because the text was so widely copied. The prevalence of manuscripts and pieces of them dwarfs every other ancient document by orders of magnitude. The abundance provides a means of reconstructing the text with a high degree of probability.
Whether that correlates with truth is of course another question but skepticism about the transmission of the Bible would lead us to much deeper skepticism about every ancient document. Perhaps that's warranted! But it seems like a losing proposition if you are to retrieve anything from written history.
- moloch-hai 4y agoI am fully on board with considering the value of the text regardless of its provenance, and with measured skepticism about all received documents, ancient or modern. Best evidence is that actual physical existence of a Jesus in Palestine is about 50% likely, but the likelihood that (such a) He said any of what is received is roughly nil.
- memling 4y agoFor the interested do you have a set of sources?
- moloch-hai 4y agoPretty representative material. Of course various people differ in detail. https://independent.academia.edu/RichardCarrier https://independent.academia.edu/RichardCarrier Unfortunately he really would rather you buy his books than read his blog posts, so they are hard to search. https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/2014/08/car388028 https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/2014/08/car388028 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTllC7TbM8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTllC7TbM8M
- memling 4y agoThanks for passing this along. Carrier's innovations in the work of Bayesian inference applied to history are interesting and definitely worth exploring in greater detail. It's been a fun rabbit hole to go down!