The Bible and the Dead Sea Scroills
This is an interesting thread. First it has to be acknowledged that archaeological 'evidence' rarely, if ever 'proves' anything that has a spiritual dimension or is regarded as spiritual truth.
Archaeology can uncover artefacts that show the level of skill reached by the inhabitants of a place at a particular time, and even the foreign influences that were imposed on a community, but no article can show, show, for example, that Jesus is the Son of God, or that Mohammed received inspiration from God. That is not the function of archaeology.
The 'correctness' of the Dead Sea Scrolls is constanty overemphasised, much to the detriment of arguments in favour of the Bible texts. But, unfortunately, both the Dead Sea (Cave I) text of Isaiah and the Septuagint text happen to be inferior articles, the former "rather an anticlimax" to the hopes of the scholars, and the latter "among the poorest [texts] in the Greek Bible."
The insistence that any text is pristine, that is, that it is in the form in which it was in the original monograph has to be challenged, because no originals texts have survived.
It took hundreds of years to give us the Bible, thousands, actually, if you include the Old Testament. The documents had to trickle in from different times, different places, and different writers.
The Tanakh, the Torah; Nebiim, the prophets; and the Kethubim, the literary writings. These are the three things that make up the Bible, all from different authors.
Some parts are poetry, some parts are prophecy, and some parts are history. There are lots of chronicles, etc. Some parts are the law from different times and different places, hundreds of different manuscripts.
Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the oldest manuscript we had of the books of Moses (the first five books) was from the ninth century A.D. the Ben Asher Codex.
There are eight thousand different old manuscripts of the New Testament, no two alike. So there is a lot of collating, comparing, and arguing about which passages are which and what order they come in.
Then when you have translation, there is no agreement about that. Year after year there are new revised translations coming forth. Well, if the last translation is reliable, why the new revised, improved Cambridge, or Anchor, or whatever it is, edition of the Bible? It's processing all the time.
The Koran was produced in less time than the Bible, but it is heavily dependent ON the Bible. Large chunks of Biblical text are found within its pages, so the time of production has to be considered in the light of its plagiarism of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures.
I will conclude by asking: When will you know when the original Biblical monographs have been restored, and what difference will it make to Christianity in general and your faith, assuming that you are a Christian, in particular? Does faith depend on a perfect script? Is half a loaf better than no bread at all?
MORGANITE
:)
