Trump exposes Israel's PM Bibi, "No two state solution."
(twitter.com)
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Bubble, I can appreciate a healthy dose of hyper skepticism when it comes to modern scholarship, but I think that skepticism needs to be tampered down a bit when it comes into contact with legitimate, cold, hard facts.
Skepticism in scientific research is a healthy and important aspect of the scientific method. In the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, scholars and researchers have subjected these texts to rigorous analysis, and their authenticity and age have been confirmed through various methods, including paleography, radiocarbon dating, and linguistic analysis.
In other words, we’ve got multiple schools of evidence converging on the DSS to support their validation, and the scrolls’ historical value is independent of contemporary geopolitical events.
"Legitimate, cold, hard facts".
Kek.
Trust MY experts?
No thanks.
Not all experts are liars or conniving. And I've provided quotes from experts across multiple belief systems - not just Christian experts.
I was recently reading an article where supposedly they found cases where radiocarbon dating is not at all accurate. I think its just the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to subjective analysis of scholars, I completely ignore it. The way sciences are destroyed is by making it all subjective rather than objective.
To me the most important aspect is he origin story of of the DSS. Does not pass the sniff test in multiple ways.
But originally, I was not even thinking about this aspect. I was simply thinking about the subjective interpretation of ancient Bible when it was converted to various languages including English.
There is a book called Naked Bible, by a guy who researched the original manuscripts in Vatican for many years, who did a completely literal translation without an subjectivity - and what it indicates is ... very interesting .. to say the least.
But it any case, I dont like to rub against people's religious beliefs too much. If you want to believe that the version of Bible people are reading at their homes accurately describes the ancient teachings - thats your prerogative. I dont think we will be able to convince each other otherwise.
You see, this issue is not merely a matter of "believe whatever you want to believe." I, just like you, want my beliefs to be based in facts and not falsehoods.
One can say they don't believe what the Bible has to say in it's content; that's' an entirely reasonable statement to make. But one cannot say - with any factual basis - that the Bible we currently posses has been changed beyond any semblance of what the original authors wrote.
We haven't even discussed the fact the we can reconstruct almost the entire New Testament with simply the quotations from the early Church Fathers.
According to some sources, there are more than 36,000 quotations of the New Testament in the writings of the early church fathers who wrote before the council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.
These quotations cover almost all of the New Testament books, except for a few verses. Some researchers have claimed that only eleven verses of the New Testament are not quoted by the early church fathers
If the New Testament did not have the enormous amount of manuscript evidence in its corner, it would still be possible to reconstruct most of it using only the quotations of the early church fathers.
#TheBibleIsReliable
Unfortunately, you rely on subjective opinion of "experts" and "scientific methods" to decide what is fact and what is not. If you want to ignore the valuable lesson we learnt about science and experts, in the most painful way possible, for the last 3 years - its your prerogative. I would not be forgetting that lesson in a long long time.
Would be happy to see someone reconstruct from the quotations of Churh Fathers, and compare the difference between that and the actual New Testament. According to you they are almost the same. That small minor difference - that could be the key message that has been changed.
Allow me to give you a simplified analogy of how textual critics reconstruct the originals with a very high degree of accuracy (99.5%) using the 25,000 plus manuscripts and copies and fragments we possess.
Imagine you have a handwritten letter from a friend, but there are a few smudged or unclear words. To understand what your friend meant, you might ask other friends if they have copies of the same letter. If many friends have copies, and most of them have the same words, you can be more confident about what your friend originally wrote.
Now, think about the Bible as a very old and important letter. Over thousands of years, people have made copies of it by hand, just like your friends with the letter. Some of these ancient copies have small mistakes or missing words due to human error, just like the smudged words in your letter.
The more copies (manuscripts) of the Bible we have from different times and places, the better we can compare them. If most of the copies have the same words, we can be more confident about what the original text said. We can even see where mistakes crept in because they won't match the majority of the copies.
Having lots of manuscripts allows scholars to carefully study the text, cross-reference them, and piece together the most accurate version. It's like having many friends with copies of the letter; the more you have, the better you can reconstruct the original message.
So, in the case of the Bible, having a wealth of manuscripts from various times and places (which we have) helps ensure that the text we have today is very close to what was originally written, despite the centuries of copying and potential errors. This makes it one of the most well-preserved and accurately reconstructed ancient texts in history.