CP3S said:
Phew, this thread has been lively lately! Took me a while to dig this up.
darth_ender said:
Well, I do find that the NIV actually seems to drive home a different point, that being that prophets did not privately interpret the revelation as it proceeded from God, while the others seem to emphasize that the readers of scripture are not to privately interpret the revelations of God as they've come through the prophet. The NIV seems to preclude my theory that prophets' revelations aren't word-for-word dictations while the others seem to allow for it.
Hmm, I still feel all translations are explicitly claiming that the words written were from God himself and not from men.wikipedia link to, is no such thing. It merely explains the process I am about to explain.
Even if it wasn't just via visions, there were still only a very small handful of men who are claimed to have ever seen them.
If you were determined enough, you could go see the Dead Sea scrolls (they toured their way through America a few years ago), or any other set of fragments you wanted for yourself.
Your argument here is not very clear. Let me point out that every book of scripture that claims to contain God's word also has its own style. In fact scholars often use this style to argue for or against the authorship of the presumed author (for example, most argue that Paul did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews). I don't think any Christian would deny that even the many "Thus sayeth the Lord"s of the Old Testament are stylistically different from each other, depending on the prophet who wrote them. My point is that God used the human vessel to provide his revelation, and that there are limitations to what that human vessel can comprehend and put into words. If God were revealing something to Ezekiel, he wouldn't be providing a parable about about semiconductors. He also would provide the revelation in a cultural context and in wording that Ezekiel and his audience could understand--thus, the human fingerprints. If Ezekiel and his people were unable to understand ideas we modern humans can, how fruitful would it be for God to give it to them?
There isn't even one shred of tangible evidence that the source material for any of the Mormon scriptures ever existed. All evidence points to The Book of Mormon being authored by Joseph Smith (though it could have been someone else), and its original language to have been English.
Ooh, this could be a fun discussion. If we do proceed down this road, I will definitely move my responses to the Mormon thread. But for now, I will offer you this outdated article:
Wordprint is an extremely questionable method. It is far from conclusive, and really determines nothing.
Usually, translated works by different authors but the same translator are shown to be of the same author by the wordprint method, but not always. The inconsistency there goes along way in telling us that, ultimately, this study on the Mormon books really tells us nothing.
We even have the "Book of Abraham" (that's the one, right?) written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, that has no correlation whatsoever to what Smith claims to have translated from that same piece of papyri. This is the point where you start talking about the necessity of faith, which would be an obvious requirement.
Yes, this would be worth discussion as well. Perhaps I will address in the Mormon thread.
We actually discussed it a bit last time.
I still feel that the Book of Abraham and the revelation that it is nothing of the sort, should have been the end of Mormonism.
To his credit as well, he spent relatively little time working on the Book of Mormon, approximately two months of actual reading with transcribers.
That is hardly unreasonable. With people to do the transcription work, this would be very doable.
Choose your own adventure! If you wish to continue this discussion, head on over to the Interrogate the Mormon thread!
The variations of the Septuagint and Vulgate are not inconsequential, as they were based on different Hebrew source material than we have before us. If they were modern translations, it would make little difference. But they are ancient translations, taken from a less standardized source, and thus offering their own unique perspective. It's obvious you are knowledgeable on this topic, more than I, but I am at least aware that they are translations of a source different from the Masoretic, making the textual differences valuable for scholars. The Dead Sea Scrolls link I provided above demonstrates such to be true for at least the LXX, and the Vulgate would still contain some similar value.
I didn't mean to claim that they were not inconsequential at all, they are very useful tools. But through the very nature of translation, they are undeniably altered from the get go. Also ancient translation focused more on ensuring meaning was intact, rather than focusing on a literal representation of the document being translated.
The LXX is the one I am most familiar with, since it was Greek that I studied. Many of the variations are found in poetry, a few extended books, and the addition of several books. The Apocrypha, which many Christians use and consider canonical, contain these extra books and the "deleted scenes" from other books.
I have nothing to argue with you about in this last section.