Notices by Microchimera (opphunter88@gleasonator.com)

There could have simply been competing texts early on, and they just got rid of all the ones they didn’t like. So much for your “explanation.”

I literally addressed this possibility multiple times, and why that’s basically impossible, and you ignored it.

You clearly aren’t reading my responses. You haven’t argued my points, you just act like I didn’t make them.

Why do you start these conversations with me if you don’t read what I have to say?

The Gospels essentially copy paste chunks from each other

Luke copies from Matthew, that’s it. Luke also admits he’s pulling from other sources in the prologue. Modern scholars add a lot of speculation and try to make a scandal out of this, but there’s really nothing to it.

There’s no evidence for Q and it was never even accepted by worldwide academia, it only gained traction in pop level books and Jesus Seminar type projects.

pseudo Pauline Epistles

Entirely explained by dictation, which we know happened, because some of the epistles reference being dictated.

There was a lot of reconstruction, editing, etc, going on.

I’m not going to convince you otherwise, but I’ve explained at length why they couldn’t have been significantly edited unless it happened extremely early on. Like, even before the turn of the next century, because they’re referenced by Pope Clement I, and Clement’s first epistle is practically identical in content to a Pauline epistle.

@NEETzsche @caekislove It’s a good example, but it assumes a cross contamination that wouldn’t have existed across different regions in early manuscripts unless the edits happened very early on.

This effect is demonstrated by the existence of different text families for the New Testament. Certain types of mutations remain localized to Alexandria, or the Byzantine mainland, or wherever.

Once one manuscript is translated into Coptic, it has inherited whatever errors every Greek copy prior to that point had, no one is going to translate it into Coptic again, so it’s preserved from any further errors from the original Greek. Instead, it will have its own family of mutations, completely separate from its origins.

I don’t have a good literature term for this, so I’m just going to borrow from biology and call it speciation. One this family speciates, it will, generally speaking, be immune to any attempts at revision. Especially if it’s far away from Rome and Constantinople. However, when text critics analyze these different species, the deviation is, by most accounts, over 95% identical, and most of those differences are typos.

If there was an attempt to edit all of them, it would have to be a worldwide conspiracy, as actually did happen with the Quran.