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Erasmus was very specific in his description of this copy, he believed it to be a very close copy of the Autograph itself and said so explicitly. What is also obscured is the copies Erasmus had access to in Italy, the copies he had in England that he couldn't bring with him to Basel
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Thomas, in all that studying you've done on that very specific topic, surely you have names for these Greek manuscripts? Surely you assume those manuscripts he had access to in Italy and England read book instead of tree?
Could you help unobscure them for me? All I want is to be able to look at one of them, or have someone trustworthy you can quote that has looked on them, and to tell me without 15 paragraphs, and in plain language that the wording is book and not tree!
Because if what the guy Steve quoted who quoted another guy is right, then only 2 manuscripts of either major school out of 5000 (or however many of those that contain the last part of Rev which I assume are much fewer) then the chance that Erasmus had on of those is zero.
If he had any full manuscripts of Rev. then they would have said tree and not book, right? Where's the half truth in that? If you can't point to a text in Switzerland, Italy or England that existed at the time which had book instead of tree, then you are reduced to proofs like the Vulgate had it, therefore the overwhelming majority of Greek texts from all traditions are all wrong.
And it comes down to Erasmus being directly inspired. And if he were alive today, I think he would repeat himself, as he was quoted by Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), p. 135:
"You cry out that it is a crime to correct the gospels. This is a speech worthier of a coachman than of a theologian. You think it is all very well if a clumsy scribe makes a mistake in transcription and then you deem it a crime to put it right.
The only way to determine the true text is to examine the early codices."
-----Added 12/8/2008 at 10:40:42 EST----- Quote:
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No, once you understand the issues, the disruption to the peace and purity of the Protestant Churches and the decline of orthodoxy that has resulted because of it should terrify you because the Faith is at stake.
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That's a pretty bold statement, Thomas. Yesterday one of our pastors preached from a non TR text without any warnings. I say for the third time on this thread do you really understand what you are accusing people of?
A thousand years before Erasmus, Augustine said
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"Those who are anxious to know the Scriptures ought in the first place to use their skill in the correction of the texts, so that the uncorrected ones should give way to the corrected."
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On Christian Doctrine (book 2, chap. 14)
We're not Catholics, and Erasmus wasn't the Pope.