World's Oldest Bible Going Online 1183
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.
Re:As a literary.... (Score:3, Insightful)
True, that. All the usual religious suspects will throw a fit, because they know well that common insight into how their religion has evolved over time instead of being conceived in perfection ab initio, will destroy any claim to any higher power being the original source.
If you're one of the nutjobs claiming that the bible is "god's word" in the literal sense, and not a human creation, then evidence that "the bible" doesn't exist, but is a collection that changed over time, is the death-blow to a core pillar of your faith.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
From a religious point of view, if there is anything inspired, it would be the first version in its original language. So the closer you get to the original ones, theoretically would be the better.
This news is great, we could actually see one of the oldest copies around. Part of me truly wonders how many more manuscripts (religious or not) would have been available today if people back then don't have the habit of burning every piece of paper they dislike.
Welcome to Rabidly Anti-Christian Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
But apart from misdating the document by 800 years, misstating the impact of putting it online and misrepresenting the likely attitude of Christians to its publication, the summary is fine...
What do you expect from Slashdot? Honesty? That's a laugh.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Bible is not a book. It is a collection of books. The New Testament is a collection of what were considered the best sources available: mostly books and letters.
You might understand better if you knew what faith was and why people have it.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
inspired also means, it is not translated word by word. which would be very dangerous for people, reading a book that old, withouth knowing about the habits in this era, can lead to extreme one sided reading of the bible, and a lot of misunderstandings.
Re:As a literary.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I could comment on the Catholic one, it is so true, well at least in our area (or at least with the devouts). People ( not just Catholics ) would tend to follow their religion blindly even if it contradicts with the Bible (or their religious texts)
I had encountered some that rants that they're doing this and that and that they're not doing this and that... I sometimes would ask them if what they're doing is in the Bible (or the other way around, i.e. they're not doing the things stated in the Bible) (or any other religious text)
I often get the answer that the leaders of their sect tells so. I would tell them that it is pointless to contradict or not follow your "manual" or "foundation". Well my point is moot to them most of the time.
Conclusion: Most of the religions use the Bible as a front. If it contradicts their purpose, they would ignore that part. If it is not there and they like to do it, they would still do it.
okay back to regular programming..
Re:Summary is wildly inaccurate (Score:2, Insightful)
There was no 0th century, so 4th century BC to 4th century AD is 700 years. Ok, it could be 800 years at a stretch, if you can accept that there were 200 years between 19th and 20th centuries (01/01/1801-31/12/2000). Pedantry is fun!
Re:!= The Septuagint (Score:3, Insightful)
Which means it'll possibly be very different.. what we have reflects the collection decided to be correct at the time of the council of nicea. Other books existed and there was some debate about which ones went into the final collection. We have some of the others in the apocrypha, and others were simply lost to history.
Love the inflamatory summary... I mean so what? It's not a complete text anyway, and if you're talking about something written around ad330 it's a time when there were still multiple different versions in common use.
Re:Same as always? (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. I don't believe in the bible either, but would you listen to yourself? It's people like you that made me stand more by my faith for years, because I believed that people wouldn't be so desperately opposed to Christianity if there weren't some truth in it.
I basically can't be bothered reading the rest of your post after this obvious fallacy:
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
You do realise that the Jews have the Old Testament too? How do you think changes to the Christian version of the old testament would somehow go un-noticed? Try thinking about stuff you hear before blindly accepting it just because you want to believe it. That's how Christians end up as Christians in the first place, because they get tricked into being afraid of Hell and are given an easy way out - it's like a form of brainwashing.
I'll be damned if I know what is the ultimate truth about life, the universe and everything, but I think there are too many inconsistencies in Christianity that people make gradually build up excuses for. One of the main reasons I have decided that the bible is a load of rubbish is not just that Genesis only takes 7 'days', but the way things are done are in the wrong order, so it doesn't really even make much sense as a metaphor..
Re:Oh noes! (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know who is represented by the vague term "truly religious" but it seems weird to me that a modern Christian would have trouble dealing with the fact that virtually all manuscripts have some differences. Even if you believe that these people have never read the bible in anything but English. The NKJV, RSV, NIV all have footnotes/marginal notes like "X is not contained in the oldest most reliable manuscripts".
The other weird thing is the assertion (presumably by non-Christians) that the text can't possibly (or can't reasonably) closely approximate the original. Textual criticism is used for just about any ancient book to approximate it's original text. To single out the bible seems ignorant.
I will admit that there are people who do other forms of biblical criticism which are braindead but interestingly enough these hit on both sides of the "It's the truth" line.
In fact considering the wealth of text that there is to work with. It seems also rather weird to claim that the bible is even 'bad' in it's textual support.
I mean sure, disagree with it's content all you want (including things like relying on Alexandrian text types for things like the NIV) but your comments on the text seem pretty uneducated.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:revelations and the Revelation (Score:5, Insightful)
Having the devil cast into a fiery pit with his minions, then everyone else going to a massive city made of gold and gems to live with God and Jesus isn't a happy ending for Christians?
Have you read it?
Anti - religous comments (Score:1, Insightful)
For people who are supposed to be open-minded, there are a lot of closed minded comments being made. I am not pro-religion - but I am a believer in God and of salvation through Christ. God gave us the bible as a means of seeking Him. You can try to explain away the creation of the world - but there will always be a missing piece without the existance of God. I am not saying just accept this on faith - just let God and the Bible be explored with an open mind.
BTW there are over 5,000 extant copies of the new testament and validating the resurrection is not difficult
http://www.gnfi.org/external/TimLaHayeProphecy/reliability_of_new_testament.htm [gnfi.org]
Re:I really wish people would get a clue (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no point trying to counter faith with facts. Many people have *faith* that the Catholic church, and/or Christianity in general, has all kinds of weird, sinister practises and beliefs. That faith is part of how they define themselves and how they build their worldview, and presenting facts will get the reaction you'd expect whenever facts are held up against cherished beliefs. They can always pick some weird incident or some isolated remark or some urban legend or something they think they read in the Da Vinci code or something and focus on that. Like that guy posting just down from here about how his father got caned by the Maris Brothers (sounds like a circus act, but I'm going to assume they were monks). See how this one anecdote about how his family like to be educated by loons justifies the whole belief structure?
The Real WTF (tm) is that this conflict needs to be *constantly repeated* on the internet when there might otherwise be scope for actual discussion. For example, you'd think there could be actual discussion of the interesting textual and linguistic points raised by the Codex Sinaiticus, but there isn't, because thousands of teenagers will jump in going 'LOL this book has been translaited and the translaitions vary haha' first.
Having the Codex Sinaiticus online is very useful for anyone who may be interested in being able to compare early editions of one of the world's most importand (and textually complicated) books. The fact that some bits from the end of Mark are left out (and a few extra bits added on) is hardly the only interesting point -- the whole document is a vital palaeographical record. Not everyone has a copy lying around and there are *some* people out there striving for scholarship, ya know, among the whining voices of faith.
Re:Bad Summary, Questionable Claim (Score:1, Insightful)
Ahem. So... it's not that Darwin bashing isn't allowed (completely avoiding the fact that evolution as it is now is vastly different from Darwin's version), it's just that Darwin bashers are stupid, and stupidity isn't allowed.
Kind of like making a claim that is factually false in a summary to try and artificially create a heated discussion between two belief groups by misrepresenting one groups beliefs as inconsistent with themselves.
Look, I've been both Christian and Ahtiest in my life. Christians, in large, suffer from the inability to change the way they think to accomodate the things that we know at this time. Atheists, in large, suffer from the inability to accept that the entire process of deconstructing a religious belief serves no purpose but to stroke your ego, since the existance of a false belief in a world where belief is a null sum game is by definition a null sum circumstance.
I'm not going to make sweeping statements about Slashdotters, but the fact that I had to scroll through as many comments as I did to find the GP is remarkable. For a system which professes to care for nothing but unbiased truth and fact, Atheists sure seem to not care about being factually correct when it comes to bashing religous types... kind of like the religious types they bash.
There are plenty of solid grounds for both religious and non-religious people to have informative debates about each others beliefs without making up things to try and discredit each other.
Re:Same as always? (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize that the two aren't exactly identical, and the interpretations and recognized additional sources even less so, right?
E.g., the Jews were big on circumcision, the early Christians did away with that, because it didn't sound too tempting to the barbarians they were trying to convert. E.g., the Jews shouldn't eat pork, that was another thing they gave up at Paul's insistence, because for whole other provinces that was most of the agriculture they had. E.g., Judaism is fundamentally iconoclast and that's one of the most fundamental commands, Christianity threw that right into the garbage bin right there. Etc.
So while the general outline of the text may be the same, whole sections of it are, basically, declared as superseeded and no longer valid.
The Ebionites didn't consider those to be superseeded, and frankly, Jesus didn't say anywhere that they are. That was the work of the apostles, at Paul's insistence to proselytize at all cost.
That's one "religious" argument. (Score:2, Insightful)
And points out another point some Christians disagree on.
Some of us believe God allows us to make mistakes. In certain special circumstances, He corrects us more carefully than in others, but, in the end, He doesn't apply force. (Impossible to force a person to be saved.) So, even in the copying and translation of the scriptures, there would be some errors.
Re:re-written (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably because I wasn't Roman Catholic so most of the history I know was since the reform (and even then it's not like I read books about it, just heard sermons or had conversations about it).
Also because we have the bible in English already and a lot of Christians don't know Latin (though plenty learn it and study the original texts too). You don't have to learn about the Wright brothers to go on a passenger airline. Most Christians just go to Church each week and never really learn much from beyond what they hear there (if they're even paying attention). Why are you surprised at that?
Re:Oh noes! (Score:2, Insightful)
According to that site, the oldest version still in existence was written down in 1877. Hardly compares to the bible's > 2000 years.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, are you right! Why, if the Codex' Gospel of Mark was written in the 4th Century BCE as the headline says, then they had three centuries to revise it before the events even happened!
As it is, I (a Christian) do not intend to get very upset about this... much of the Bible does not speak of the resurrection, though much of it does.
Even Christ had to point out some of the finer points to the Sadduccees (God is a God of the living, not the dead; but says "I AM the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" to Moses. Therefore, they must be living.)
Aside from that, conspiracy theorists always go over the deep end, making much out of nothing. Anti-Christian conspiracy theorists are no different.
Re:As a literary.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it is funny to see the religions getting together to get rid of Atheists. It is like George Bush and Saddam Hussein getting together to get rid of pacifists.
Re:I really wish people would get a clue (Score:3, Insightful)
He was caned every day? Which school was that? It must have been hell.
Presumably he's an orphan - no parent could surely countenance sending their child to be caned every day.
Assuming your retelling to be truthful then these people were probably not Christians, you understand that right?
Re:Original (Score:5, Insightful)
(And then, there are some of us who believe that, even if you had the originals and were fluent in the original language, you'd still have to read under inspiration from God to get a full and perfect understanding of the text.)
So there are almost no christians who have a perfect understanding of the text? I mean if the language requirement cuts out a huge percentage of readers, and then they would have to not only feel the inpiration to read for perfect understanding, but also have access to the text at the time of inspiration. How many christians could that possibly be?
I live in a small rural town in the midwest FULL of christians (more than two dozen churches) who think they have a true understanding of the word. So out of 9,000 people, how many could really know what they say they know? Why are the rest of them fooling themselves?
What are the odds that the ones who knock at my door have a clue?
And how can I tell the difference?
C.
theologically correct, not historically accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
They weren't the "best sources available." They chose the books that supported a particular set of theological views. They destroyed the rest that they could find, and persecuted the sects that held different views. Historical accuracy was the objective.
Re:Book burning (Score:4, Insightful)
If there is one thing as a species we are really good at..... it's ignorance.
The hateful and oppressive will always outnumber the pacifistic and enlightened.
Re:Same as always? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sources?
Re:Anti - religous comments (Score:2, Insightful)
contradict yourself much there?
"validating the resurrection is not difficult"
actually it's impossible, since no verifiable resurrection has occurred that modern science has been able to observe and your primary example of christ happened 2000 years ago and doesn't even occur in this earliest known bible.
"but there will always be a missing piece without the existance of God. "
and there is the difference between us. when i see a missing piece to a puzzle i use science to find the truth, you primitive savages fill it with god.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
All the oldest writings the find are only parts of the bible, most often in different languages ranging from greek, latin, vulgar latin, hebrew and aramaic and the like.
For anyone studying the bible from a non-religious perspective, it is obvious that the bible is a patchwork of stories written by different individuals at different times in different languages.
Some of these stories made the final cut, some did not and were forgotten, while others live on as semi-official religious works (I'm not sure of the correct term in english, but in university I studied a great work that tells about Jesus going to hell to pick up all the persons there who couldn't have known about the true belief because he did not yet spread it).
If you have been raised with a certain translation as reference and the notion that this is the word of god, I can imagine that accepting that god delivered his words piecemeal through different individuals and that some other individuals decided what was his word and what was not can be quite confronting.
Re:re-written (Score:3, Insightful)
Because their professed belief in the truths revealed in these documents affects their life in dramatic ways, and can affect the life of others around them as well. To then confess a happy ignorance of the origin and original meaning of their religious texts is surprising to say the least.
Really? Do you need to independently verify all science behind nuclear physics to be a nuclear physicist?
In an area that affects everyone's lives to a larger degree - Do you need to have a COMPLETE knowledge of the history of the country/the COMPLETE biography of a candidate/COMPLETE voting record of a candidate/understanding of macroeconomics, to be a good voter?
Re:Original (Score:3, Insightful)
Most prophecy in the Bible is written so that it isn't obvious exactly when or how it will be fulfilled, until it has been fulfilled.
if you don't know when or how until after it has happened, it's not a prophecy. (defined as knowledge of the future)
Re:Anti - religous comments (Score:2, Insightful)
I would like to address some of your comments.
["I am not pro-religion - but I am a believer in God and of salvation through Christ"
contradict yourself much there?]
Actually, to many Christians that is not a contradition at all. If we remember Voltaire's saying "if you wish to converse with me, we must first define our terms.", we then can realize that we need to understand the meanings of the words in order to understand what is being said.
This is not a Bill Clinton "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" situation, but something much simpler.
"Religion" can be understood as "An organized system of beliefs by which man relates to a higher being." When some Christians say that they are not "pro-religion", they may mean simply that they are not for "organized" religion, such as a large denomination. There are myriad "independant" churches in the USA that are not part of any larger organization. There is no denominational council, there is no "Pope" or "Archbishop of Cantebury", or whoever the Eastern Orthodox version would be.
For many people, the word "religion" means "organized religion". This person may simply not participate in any large organization, but still maintains his or her beliefs.
So, no, this person may not see a contradition in his or her own mind. Please try to be a bit kinder.
["validating the resurrection is not difficult"
actually it's impossible, since no verifiable resurrection has occurred that modern science has been able to observe and your primary example of christ happened 2000 years ago and doesn't even occur in this earliest known bible.]
Well, the bit about it not occuring in the "earliest known Bible" is not correct, as pointed out by many other posters, but I cannot fault your reasoning otherwise. You may be correct in that there may be no scientific way to prove these events. (I am not aware of any, but I am not going to make a definitive statement to that effect without additional research on the matter.) While much can be said about people being willing to die for their beliefs, and that some would hold that willingness to die as "proof" of the veracity of those beliefs, I suspect that the willingness to die serves only as evidence of the perceived veracity of the beliefs in the eyes of those willing to die for them.
["but there will always be a missing piece without the existance of God. "
and there is the difference between us. when i see a missing piece to a puzzle i use science to find the truth, you primitive savages fill it with god.]
Could you please be a little more civil? Calling someone a "primitive savage" is not necessary, especially when trying to engage in what I hope was an attempt at intelligent discourse and debate.
There are many questions which modern science cannot answer. Some are comfortable with that "vacuum" of information and are capable of existing with that void. Others, for whatever reason, find such a void difficult to tolerate and will attempt either to ignore it or fill it with something that makes enough sense to them that they can continue without the uncertainty that the void of understanding would cause.
Re:Welcome to Rabidly Anti-Christian Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot is not rabidly anti-Christian. A vocal section of the slashdot readership is anti-religion, not specifically anti-Christian.
BCE is stupid (Score:1, Insightful)
CE and BCE are stupid. Not only because they look alike, but because they're new. January is named after the god Janus. All words have historical references. Some we know, others we don't. The point is that we have common and accepted terms that we use. What's the point in making up new ones? We still have to learn the old. This is just creating more work and confusion, especially when the new terms look alike.
Re:Book burning (Score:3, Insightful)
Proof please (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
They also use the bible and their personal interpretation of it to justify their own wanton greed and the destruction of the innocent. George Bush, for example, claims to be a Christian. Hasn't he heard "thou shalt not kill?" Yet when he was Governor of the state that executes more men than any other state, he executed more men than any other Governor of that state. How could anyone who believed the Bible act like that?
Christ warned of "wolves in sheeps' clothing" but we have wolves in shepherd's clothing, like Pat Robertson. That man has converted more Christians to atheism than all the athiests at slashdot combined! How could a Christian call for the assassination of a foreign leader? Christians are supposed to love their enemies, and do good to those who harm them. Never trust a preacher who wears a five thousand dollar suit!
If you go into almost any church, you will see a whole lot of people, most of whom are there to be seen by men and many of whom no more believe in God than the average athiest at slashdot.
Re:I really wish people would get a clue (Score:1, Insightful)
Uh huh, and I bet he had to walk to school up hill, both ways, in the snow.
My personal experience ranks right up there with the previous comment. I've gone to both public and Catholic schools. Typically Catholic schools are caring, ban less, and have less problems teaching sensitive issues.
Even assuming he's not outright exaggerating, your talking about one independent, non-archdiocesan Catholic school run by Marist Brothers. Hardly a representation of the state of Catholic school everywhere.
Besides, if your grandparents were sending your father back to school everyday black and blue, well.. idiocy must run in the family.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, and to take it further (Score:3, Insightful)
Using Star Wars to make a theological point...
Only on Slashdot.
The kdawson factor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Original (Score:5, Insightful)
I myself believe in GOD, I just don't believe in the bible. As I've always said. The bible is a book written by man to control man. I have no faith in churches either, they are just a conduit to try to push the "Christian belief" onto it's masses. I'm not saying that the Christian/Catholic mindset is wrong but the measures that the "Church" have used for centuries to gain it's powers go against it's very "word". How many wars have been fought due to religion in general. How many countless individuals have been killed due to "religion" I don't think GOD would be happy that people are using him as a reason to kill someone else just because they don't agree with them. One of the supposed 10 commandments are "thou shall not kill", not "thou shall not kill unless one disagrees with your religious belief"
I could go on and on but I'll stop here. This post is in no way meant to anger anyone but if it happens then well........
Re:Oh noes! (Score:1, Insightful)
Killing is not incompatible with Christianity.
Yeah, at least if you're an excessively naive and suicidal Christian.
Re:Original (Score:2, Insightful)
He is saying that it is written in a way that doesn't particularly make sense until the even occurs. At that point you look back and say, "oh yeah, this did happen like he said it would happen."
It is still prophecy even if God didn't say, "He will be born in Bethlehem", but rather said, "He will be born in a city south of Jerusalem".
Re:Same as always? (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't say the bible was the pristine word of God, I am no longer a Christian, but I also just 'know' some things.
Actually, you just 'believe' some things. Saying that you 'know' them demonstrates the depth of both your faith and your ignorance.
You saying that Lilith was the first woman created and me not finding any evidence for that with a bit of googling/wikipedia, makes it sound like you are just one of those people who takes something they hear randomly somewhere and repeat it as if it suddenly disproves the bible.
Because you can't find evidence quickly on the web, it must be wrong? There must be a name for this particular logical fallacy, right? Besides intense laziness?
You are claiming that scholars edited original Hebrew documents during the "middle ages"? Perhaps with a bit of tip-ex?
There are innumerable books on the subject of who changed the bible and when and yes, many serious changes were made during the Medieval period. Some are known to have happened accidentally, others are known to have been made deliberately, and even the sources of other errors are unknown.
A little research would serve you well in this area.
I do believe that the bible is the work of man these days, but I really don't like when people act as if they can disprove it when they clearly have no clue about the contents.
The contents are the problem. A great deal of material which was collected with the original and even later works was simply expurgated, like the gospels of Mary Magdalene. The majority of the original Christian priests were women, because the head of the typical Roman household was the woman (who was expected to take care of tedious tasks of management) and the original churches were held in hiding, in people's houses. Today women are subjugated at every turn by the majority of so-called "Christian" faiths.
All you really need to know about what God wants you to do per the bible is included in two places: the ten commandments, and the golden rule. God's rules, and Jesus' rule. Most Christians are pretty shaky on all the first ten, and virtually all of them ignore the golden bit - it's "DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU", not "don't do others as you would not have them do unto you." Christians tend to think this statement is about tolerance. It is not. It is about social action. It is about actually going out and proactively improving the world around you.
Any time you see a car with a Jesus fish on it going past a car on the side of the road broken down, you're seeing a hypocrite drive past. Any time you see a man wearing a crucifix walk past a homeless man starving in the gutter, you're seeing a hypocrite walk past. And any time you see a televangelist fly over people living in poverty, you're seeing a hypocrite fly past.
If you want to reinstitute logic in Christianity, you're going to have to eliminate everything written by Saul, just for starters. But I don't know what can be done to stop Christians from being hypocrites.
Re:Original (Score:5, Insightful)
Neat! The same is true of horoscopes and fortune cookies!
Re:Not BCE (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a damned bible. I think we can suspend political correctness and use "AD" this one time.
Re:Best part missing from later versions! (Score:4, Insightful)
"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."
If I write a sci-fi book using the city of London as a location, but populate it with godzilla and flying cars, what relevance does London actually existing have to the rest of the story's veracity ?
Unless the whole document is true, then none of it can be relied upon to be an accurate representation of what went on at the time.
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:First Comment on topic! ... oh wait... lol (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually...
The Christian population in the world has been estimated at approximately 2.1 Billion people. Collectively, this represents the largest religion cumulatively in the world. In one sense you are right, as this is certainly a 33% minority of the entire human race.
However, the entirely non-religious account for approximately 16% of the world population, but are apparently reported (by themselves and totally objectively of course) to have 99% of the intelligence and education world-wide. ;-p
Hilariously, while 84% of the world's population are considered (apparently) hopelessly ignorant and stupid, the other 16% still seem to believe simultaneously that humanity's problems can be solved through democratic governance.
Just FYI
Re:Wrong Interpretation by Poster (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod summary -1 Troll. It's a bigoted fabrication.
Re:Welcome to Rabidly Anti-Christian Slashdot (Score:1, Insightful)
This is just not true. Christians are singled out on slashdot and any story even remotely related (ie ID) will be twisted into a hate fest towards them.
On the other hand, a story about Islam will generally generate lots of sympathetic noises along the lines of how mis-understood they are and how a few bad apples don't the whole bunch (girl).
This is a very relevant point to this discussion as christians already know that the bible was invented and not holy writ. Unlike muslims who believe that the koran is holy writ, passing directly from the archangel Gabby's lips to Muhamed's ear.
If a dead sea scroll type revelation ever occured in Islam (and it may), it would be a very bad thing for a central tenent of their faith.
Re:First Comment on topic! ... oh wait... lol (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to Rabidly Anti-Christian Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps this concept goes back to the times when jews/christians actually were persecuted by the Romans and this helped them bind together as a group and prosper with the whole "the world is out to get us" attitude?
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that it wasn't a dead language as a result of the Church using it, and meaning did change (and often was opaque to start with) in Church Latin. Heck, there are still debates about exactly what certain terms mean in the Latin original of the current code of Canon Law.
The sermon (properly, the homily) in the Catholic Mass was the only part usually in the vernacular even when the service itself was in Latin. IIRC, the usual practice was (and remains, in those groups maintaining the Tridentine Mass) that the homily was in the vernacular when laity were present, but in Latin when only clergy and religious were present at the Mass.
Re:Oh noes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually that decision was taken following a survey of various churches by a guy called Eusebius of Caeserea in the 4th century, in order to ascertain what was regarded as canonical by each congregation. The current canon is a a result of the consensus reached by the survey. Eusebius even included some books he didn't particularly like because weight of opinion by the church was in favour of said books. Everything was put into three categories: books universally acknowledged (4 gospels, Acts of the Apostles, letters of Paul (number not given, would have included Hebrews), the 1st epistle of John and likewise that of Peter, Revelation); disputed books (James, Jude, 2nd Peter, so called 2nd & 3rd John); spurious books (e.g. Shepherd of Hemas).
You're possibly thinking of the Muratorian fragment, which details the views of the Roman church on the their collection of manuscripts in the 2nd century.
The Slashdot article is wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The plural of anecdote... (Score:3, Insightful)
I beg to differ. That went out the window (if it was ever true) when Bibles and other religious texts were printed in native languages, and when literacy become more widespread, and people could read for themselves. Emotion is certainly part of religion, but not its sole component. To claim so is to ignore thousands of years of work by those that have labored over religious texts.
Re:!= The Septuagint (Score:2, Insightful)
If a council issued a statement on something, doesn't mean that it was a new belief, or a newly-settled belief. It may have been the universal belief of Christians back to the apostles. There may have been no camps on the matter. The early council statements often were the first time that Christians gathered to articulate a belief for the first time, or to clarify an articulation. But that doesn't mean there were two kinds of Christians up until the council met, and the other was suppressed afterward.
You're wrong. Most of the councils/synods that issued a doctrinal statement did so because of doctrinal controversy within the church.
So, don't blithely assume that there were all these camps that you're talking about, just from the fact that a council met and talked about a question. If you do want to say that there were these camps, don't say it unless you actually know--who were they, and why do you think they existed? And why do you think that they are part of original Christianity?
They are too many to mention them all. Have you heard of nestorians and monophysites? You obviously need to do some reading - The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine [amazon.com] might be a good start.
To my knowledge, that Jesus was divine--not a mere human--is possibly the least controversial of all theological questions within Christianity
The most controversial and divisive issue was the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ - the god-man union - according to Pelikan (author of the above mentioned book).