Sunday, July 14, 2013

“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”


This is one of Jesus' most famous lines from John 8:7 and is shown in nearly every portrayal of him. But according to Dr. Bart Ehrman, world renowned New Testament scholar, there is a textual variant of this passage. This story was not originally in the gospel of John, and was added by scribes many centuries later.

In the earliest manuscripts of the gospel of John, this story simply doesn't appear. "The Greek authors who wrote commentaries on the gospel of John over the centuries," Ehrman says in a lecture on his book Misquoting Jesus, "don't mention this story until the tenth century, a thousand years after the days of Jesus." He continued that the writing style in this passage differs from the writing style of the rest of the gospel. "Scholars have known for years that this story did not originally belong in the gospel of John."

But the question arises, where did the story originate from if not from the text? No one knows for sure, but Ehrman suggests a theory. "Some scribe had heard the story, they heard the story and decided that it illustrated some of the teachings in John chapter 7 and so they wrote out the story in a margin. A second scribe came along, saw the story in a margin and thought that it belonged in the text, and then wrote his manuscript by writing the story in the text. Another scribe comes along and copies that manuscript and that manuscript gets copied, and so on until it becomes part of the textual tradition."

And that's how these kinds of variants get added into the "holy" Bible.

It is amazing how so blatant an alteration and how so gullible a mind can be fooled into faithfully observing the text of the Bible as the wholly inspired word of god. But in truth, the average Christian will not know this. You have to in some way have been a person who's done some research into the historicity of the New Testament in order to know such a thing. But after having done so, I cannot see how any believing Christian can still think the Bible is the perfect word of god.



6 comments:

  1. Many modern Bible translations footnote that this passage is not contained in the earliest manuscripts. Is it a part of oral tradition that was appended to this gospel? Is it a passage from the original testimony of John that was inadvertently omitted from the manuscripts that survive, and was later recovered to the text by a scribe? Who knows?

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    1. Yes, I don't know. But the fact that millions of Christians are so easily willing to believe unquestionably these verses and other verses like the last few in Mark as the perfect words of an infallible creator shows you how ludicrous it is in elevating the bible and putting it on a pedestal.

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  2. The truth is, that other than the passages you mention above, most of the discrepancies between NT manuscripts are very minor differences in spelling, choice of a word, and things of that nature. And it's rather remarkable, given that there exist thousands of these ancient manuscripts, that there aren't many more, and significant discrepancies between them.

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    1. Thing is we don't have any of the original manuscripts; it's just fragments before about 200 A.D. And the 40-70 years that it took to write the gospels after Jesus' alleged death is plenty of time for mythical embellishment.

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  3. You mean "alledged resurrection", right? If Jesus lived, he also died. I don't know how long it takes to create and propagate a myth across the entire Mediterranean region, given primitive transportation and communications. 40 to 70 years? Perhaps.

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    1. Well, I'm an agnostic as to whether Jesus was mythical or real, but I lean towards him probably having been real in some sense. So yes, if he lived, he died, but a resurrection? I think not.

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