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Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity – One Point of Contrast
Qin Shi Huang (260 – 210 BC) is the most prominent of the Chinese emperors. He united China through conquest, began the Great Wall of China, and had the Terra Cotta warriors built. He’s significant to Confucianism – and especially the textual transmission of Confucius’ works – because toward the end of his reign he…
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Matt Slick Errs on Textual Transmission / Textual Criticism Again
Matt Slick has again (The Bible Thumping Wingnut, Episode 61, around 30 minutes into the episode) erred on the topic of textual criticism. Unfortunately, Mr. Slick seems to be confused about the transmission of the New Testament compared to the translation of the Old Testament. His comment about adding up numbers seems to be based…
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Textual Preservation of the Old Testament
Each of the books of the New Testament is well preserved as can be seen using the tools of historical research. Historical research, however, can only get us so far with respect to the Old Testament. For example, until recently the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament were not very old, and the oldest…
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Textual "Corruption" of the Quran
A very impressive presentation on the corruption of Quran may be found at this link (link to beginning of relevant section). This was much more detailed than any similar presentation I had seen before. The following is a brief outline: 1. Preservation of the Bible [I will omit these points, which were things I already…
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Does Allah Preserve His Words?
Since I am on James White’s blogging team, and am friends with him, I was sure to carefully read an article posted with the alarming title, “Exposing James White’s Deceit and Ignorance of Islamic Scripture,” from the “Calling Christians” website. The title wasn’t supported by the body of the piece. “Deceit and Ignorance” turned out…
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More Important than the Dead Sea Scrolls?
That’s what this article (link to article) claims about the Faddan More Psalter. The article reports that about 15 percent of the text has survived the supermillenial bog burial. I think the claim is somewhat exaggerated, though doubtless one would never have expected to find such an item in a bog, nor would one ever…
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Adventures in Textual Discovery
Dan Wallace reports on an interesting experience he had in examining a manuscript of the New Testament (link to report). The report illustrates the steps that are, even to this day, being undertaken to preserve the text of Scripture. Of course, not every manuscript find has the same excitement to a layman as the one…
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Most Ancient Hebrew Inscription
Here is an interesting article about a pottery fragment with inscribed words found near the place that is thought to be the site of David’s victory over Goliath (link). One of the most important notes from the article is the fact that this new artifact pushes back the secular chronology of Israel by centuries: According…
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Augustine on the "We Gave You the Scriptures" Argument
One argument that we sometimes hear from Roman Catholic apologists is an argument that Roman Catholicism gave us the Scriptures, in the sense of preserving them for us over the centuries. This claim is, of course, anachronistic (the folks who preserved the Scriptures from the 4th decade to the 4th century, for example, could hardly…
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Jerome Regarding the Septuagint
I recently happened to stumble across this interesting translation of Jerome’s Prologue to Chronicles (link). Jerome makes a number of interesting comments about the Septuagint: 1) Jerome begins by noting that the Septuagint is not a pure translation: If the version of the Seventy translators is pure and has remained as it was rendered by…