Robert,
Going back to your post #6, I concur with the first six paragraphs, where you elaborate on the idea that “the argument for the Traditional Text that says it was the text in use by the church universally down through the ages is fallacious.” As you show, this is a misunderstanding some TT or AV proponents hold. In another thread (contemporaneous to this one) I discuss this issue (I will give the link to the post so as not to make this too long):
http://www.puritanboard.com/showpost...4&postcount=47 (that is from “The Merits of the AV” thread). It is far more nuanced than those you critique have claimed. Seeing their errors, some – perhaps yourself – have flown the coop of such bad information.
A little further in your post (#6) you say you “developed a great appreciation for the Alexandrian manuscripts”; I can also agree that they are not “the works of heretics” but are indeed valuable items in our repository of MSS. Although P75 and B are very close, the other primary Alexandrian MS,
a (Sinaiticus) differs (I am sure you have heard these stats before!) from B in 3,036 places just in the Gospels. Some of the excisions based
almost exclusively upon B &
a include the last 12 verses of Mark and the word “God” in 1 Timothy 3:16. Were Hort’s theory of the Antiochian rescension true, and were his conjecture that B and
a represented a neutral (uncorrupted) text,
then you had somewhat of a case for exalting these two almost
lone witnesses against the
thousands who testify against them. But modern scholarship has shown Hort’s theory on both counts false, the first with utterly
no historical evidence at all – mere supposition – and the second these exalted codices shown to be ancient yet unreliable. Have you ever considered the work of Burgon, or Hoskier, or – in more modern times – Pickering, or Robinson on the assessment of the Critical Text?
I am not sure what you are referring to in this paragraph:
And the Lord's Prayer is a very good case study. Tradition Text adherents generally say that the Lord's Prayer as found in Luke in the Alexandrian Text Form is a corruption though the same thing is not found of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew. Critical Text people say that this is a clear case of later harmonization in the Byzantine Text form (where a scribe copied the longer version from Matthew into a copy of look making them match). Harmonizations are one of the things that identify a manuscript tradition to be secondary.
In the CT the end of the Lord’s prayer in Matthew – “for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” – is omitted; the note in the NIV says “some late manuscripts add” it, as not belonging in the original. Would you like to make this a “case study” of the reliability of our respective texts?
I can appreciate your being disillusioned because of the often poor presentation of the TT position. I try to make the case cogent, accurate, and winsome,
for it is the word of our Lord we are discussing!
But as I once heard said, “You can’t argue someone into liking the taste of beer.”
Steve