Texas triumphs with new law banning abortsions after 6-weeks, child w/ heart beat

That’s an emotional argument as well as a Straw Man. There’s fairly widespread agreement across the board that once viability has been achieved that it becomes increasingly morally arbitrary where the fetus is located. The State definitely has a compelling interest in restricting terminations of late-stage, viable pregnancies to a very limited set of circumstances. That isn’t what we’re talking about here, though. We’re talking about an effective ban at a mere 6 weeks. This is where the everyday, pre-scientific biblical language of “fully formed” vs. “not fully formed” and “born” vs. “not born” or “harm” vs. “no harm” (rather than non/post-biblical concepts like “persons” and “immortal souls” and “ensoulment”) comes into play.

It’s anecdotal, but I’ve personally never met a pro-choice person who thought a purely elective late-term abortion was ok. I’ve even met some who thought it deserved jail time. People who do think that’s ok are out there somewhere, but they’re a small minority representing an extremist view based on emotion. Likewise, the notion that terminating a pregnancy all the way to the moment of conception is tantamount to murder is an emotionally-based extremist view with no objective justification. There is plenty of constructive progress that can be made on the issue without surrendering to extremism from either direction.

 

It may be that you're conflating 'existence' with 'creation.' When you say "God is before existence," I think you are indicating that 'God is' prior to His creation and existence of the universe. Yet it seems to me that "God is" is merely another way of stating, "God exists." The usual definition of 'exist' in this context is 'to have actual being, to be real'.

What if we legalize reaching into the money tills at banks and businesses and withdrawing whatever one desires, too? Boys will be boys, and if we don't legalize this non-violent form of robbery, those boys will keep walking into places with weapons to demand money, and people will get hurt or killed.

When abortion was illegal, the difficulties surrounding obtaining an abortion operated as a major deterrent. Reducing the number of deaths is a worthy objective. Besides, more women bore their children to term, put them up for adoption, and made some childless couple very happy.

As for why they presented the adulterous woman alone to Jesus, quite clearly they did not care a whit about the act or who was doing it; they only wanted to catch Jesus in a quandary, but they failed miserably.

 

The story of the woman caught in adultery in John’s Gospel isn’t found in the earliest manuscripts. I’m not sure where the story came from, but the passage was unknown to Greek Fathers like John Chrysostom, nor is the story included in the Byzantine lectionary for Pentecost, on which the immediately preceding and proceeding parts of the passage are read each year. It’s thus not universally considered to be part of the Bible, and has been excluded in some modern translations. It would seem to be prudent to treat such passages the way the OT Deuterocanonicals have always been handled within Anglicanism: as sources of exemplary moral instruction but not doctrine.

 

I am afraid that some of your scholarship is off there. Didymus the Blind who predated John Chrysostom by about a generation was aware of the text. Jerome included it the Vulgate which was based of Greek Manuscripts. He believed said he used the oldest and best Greek Manuscripts. It is or part of it is included in over 1000 of the earliest manuscripts and it is not included in less than 300 manuscripts and most of those come from Egypt.
It was also included in the Didascalia Apostolorum or with a clear reference to it and that is dated to around the early 230's

 

But when you question what should be in teh Bible and what should not be in the Bible you really start to question the church. The Holy Spirit inspired and breathed out all scripture. The church, when guided by the Holy Spirit, determined the New Testament included this text in the church as inspired. There was always controversy about the Deuterocanonicals but once the canon was decided up on the New Testament there was no longer controversy about that. The Church has always, since setting scripture, that this text was inspired so we should accept it ont he authority of the church.

 

What I’m relying on is spot-on, actually. Anybody can consult the relevant textual research for themselves. It’s not my opinion and it’s not a controversial point of scholarship anymore. Anybody can consult Chrysostom (for example), or the Byzantine lectionary. The first known Greek manuscript to include the story is from the 5th century. It doesn’t matter if Didymus lived before Chrysostom; what matters is the age of the manuscripts. That’s an important distinction that often gets overlooked in lay discussions of textual criticism of doubtful passages, such as this one.

 

I suggest you have not understood a whit of what I wrote. Perhaps if you read some of Tillich in relation to the existence of God, you might get what I am saying. Existentialism, and the lived experience are not the only sources of authority.

God Bless your 2nd Amendment. In seems in Australia we have legalised people reaching into peoples bank accounts and making withdrawals. The Government does it. The Banks do it. The energy authorities do it. The Telcos do it. And indeed even Microsoft did it to me only this week.

You may be correct, however the point I was making is that there seems to be an acceptance of this kind of reasoning, going right back to Adam who was happy to tell God that it wasn't his fault, it was the the woman you gave me who made me do it.

I acknowledge this, however I would also argue that the passage has been largely received as part of the canon proper, and that there is a value in the account.

 

You literally just contradicted yourself here.

he first known Greek manuscript to include the story is from the 5th century. It doesn’t matter if Didymus lived before Chrysostom;...... Didymus lived in the early 300's so that is basically 100 years before what you just stated. It is included in the Didascalia Apostolorum which is from the early 200's. I am not sure what int he world you are talking about when you say the 5th century. It is only not included in the Alexandrian Codices for the most part. It might have been added later as it was part of oral tradition of what Jesus said but the church treats it as scripture so it is scripture. For some odd reason you have taken some sort of extreme Protestant position on scripture that only the oldest matters. What matters is the church. It has been deemed scripture by the church and should be treated at such. I am not arguing that it was in the oldest of old manuscripts. What I am arguing is that it is indeed old, it is scripture because the Church deemed it as such, and that your scholarships and statements on who includes it and how old it is, well is just wrong. I also did a quick google search of the Byzantine Lectionary. In consulting my Orthodox Study Bible some Greek Fathers did not comment on the passage but some did. It also lists that it is indeed read in the Orthodox Church.

 

It’s not my opinion. It’s accepted textual scholarship. What you’re suggesting has disturbing implications, e.g., that we should accept as “inspired” something that we can be confident was not part of the original manuscripts. The only way around that is to assume - counter to the traditional understanding - that inspiration applies to the canonization process itself. But then, what is the basis for a closed canon? Dismissing textual scholarship creates more problems than it solves.

 

When I say it is indeed read in the Byzantine Lectionary it is not in the course of the typical year lectionary but it is read on one of the Feast of St. Mary of Egypt.

 

It is amazing the church survived all these years until we got these new fangled ideas floating around. There is a nice Baptist church somewhere out there for you with your line of thinking. We have a closed canon. It has been closed for around 1600 years. The Bible canon was closed, for the New Testament, a long long time ago. What was included was included as inspired. The church spoke and we all accepted. (well until about the past 30 years) Now there was more debate on the Old Testament but even know we have over 400 years of closed canon, for each church branch on that.

 

There was no contradiction. If (hypothetically) Didymus lived before Chrysostom, but the extant manuscripts of Chrysostom are older than those for Didymus, then the textual evidence for what Chrysostom actually wrote is better than the evidence for what Didymus wrote. If the older manuscript says a particular passage said A, and a latter one says it said B, and you’re dealing with not one but multiple instances of such a disparity, then the text containing B was probably either miscopied or tampered with, even if the manuscript containing A is attributed to an author who is known to have lived after the author to whom the manuscript containing B is ultimately attributed.

I’m not saying throw the story out of the Bible. I’m saying it’s important to recognize that the textual evidence for it isn’t great, and that it’s prudent to bear that in mind when basing theological arguments on it. It’s certainly part of the tradition even if it’s now known to not strictly be part of the canon (which is a list of books, not verses), and thus has abiding value. That shouldn’t be a controversial position, certainly not among Anglicans, who have always been prominent in textual scholarship. Anyone who has dealt even cursorily with the different manuscript traditions knows that there is not and never has been a uniform canon of scripture on a verse-by-verse basis across Christendom. There are passages in the Greek OT used by the Orthodox that do not exist in the Hebrew versions of the same books that are used by Protestants and Roman Catholics. Both versions are considered “the canon” within those respective traditions, and neither tradition has anathematized the others’ versions of the proto-canon (as opposed to the deutero-canon). This is basic. You’re the one who sounds like a Baptist, frankly.

 

It is simply laughable to suggest that we should alter our doctrine every year based on the varying changes in archeology. A hundred years ago the Bible talked about the Hittite People, but there was zero scholarly evidence for any such people existing in the Near East. Therefore the atheistic Christians proclaimed that the Bible was full of fictions.

Until there was found so much evidence for the Hittite people that it now forms a separate branch of archeology altogether.

If the passage @bwallac2335 refers to can be found in great usage in the Early Church, that is more than sufficient evidence for why the Church can and should consider it canon. We may or may not ever recover the original autographs from the 1st century AD, and therefore the usage from the Church is all we need for validation and approval.

 

The Pericope Adulterae (The passage about the adulteress and he who is without sin cast the first stone) is a gloss, or interpolation. It was added later. The three oldest complete Greek manuscripts - The Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Sinaiticus (my profile picture) do not contain it, nor do any earlier papyrus fragments. From that point on it is found in an increasing number of manuscripts every decade until it becomes ubiquitous after it is included in the Vulgate. Invictus is correct, it is generally accepted by academics of all denominations that the text is an addition. I suspect your bible does too. Unless you're reading a KJV version, or an exceptionally old bible, it likely puts John 7.37 - John 8.12 in square brackets with a footnote that it is not present in the oldest manuscripts.

This also isn't a modern position by academics. Both Catholic and Protestant academics have been saying the section is an addition since the 15th Century. Scribes have been marking the passage with an obelus since at least the 8th century, if not earlier. The open and honest consensus is modern (as in from the mid 19th century), but the idea is not. It's also not the only one - if you go through your bible you'll likely find similar asterixis, bracketed verses or footnotes on the ending of Mark and Matthew 16.2-4.

I personally don't know what to think about glosses. Perhaps we should only view them as informative writings like we would read a patristic writing. Perhaps the fact it has remained in the accepted bible spread by all people for so long - including the several hundred year period where it was disseminated and increasingly included by scribes - is evidence of divine will. I was actually going to make a post about this topic a few weeks ago to see if this Forum had useful thoughts to guide me, but I didn't.

Lastly, Invictus is a bit off in that it is unlikely to be a 5th Century addition - Augustine comments on the proliferation of the verse in a way that indicates it could not have been a contemporary addition of his time (although he gets it wrong. Augustine incorrectly believes its absence from manuscripts means there is a movement to remove it from the bible. Evidence shows the opposite was true, there was a movement to include it more readily). Most academics, through the writings of others referencing the text not through manuscripts, believe it popped up in Syria in the 3rd century, and was proliferated through to the 5th century.

 

This is a Straw Man. No one is talking about “altering doctrine” on this thread (certainly not every year!), based on archaeological discoveries. The textual criticism of the first verses of John 8 isn’t new, and no doctrine hinges on it or any other of the very few NT passages that have poor manuscript evidence. That’s absurd.

This is pointless. You ACNA guys on here that pounce on whatever I say just because I’m Episcopalian, and repeatedly call me an “atheist” and a “heretic” and all other manner of vile nonsense (with no intervention from a Moderator, I might add), either aren’t actually reading what I’m saying, or you don’t understand it and don’t want to. Nothing that I have said on this thread has been radical or out of step with mainstream Anglican scholarship. And I’m not going to get taken to the proverbial woodshed because I happen to ruffle the fundamentalist feathers of a few people who aren’t even real Anglicans. It’s casting pearls before swine.

 

Yeah I don't think anyone is saying that it is in the original manuscripts. I am only claiming that it is scripture and should be treated as such. What is really being discussed here is how authoritative is the church. Does the traditions of the church and the decrees of the church hold? Does the Holy Spirit guide the church when making important decisions, like what is to be included in the Bible? Can the church speak in an authoritative voice on issues? How you view the questions I posed will be how you address passages like this. I do think it is innovative and dangerous to start thinking maybe we should question the church on what should be read a scripture and what should not be read as scripture.

 

I think this is a very sensible statement, thank-you.

 

I am confident that the Byzantine manuscripts are far more reliable than Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, and Sinaiticus.

As I posted last October:
The key here is that the older text is being presumed to be more accurate. But this is an assumption that does not necessarily follow. One should ask what was the level of accuracy and faithfulness in scribal copying, for this will affect accuracy more than age. Moreover, the alleged older text might not actually be older!

Some facts about Sinaiticus:
1. Tischendorf had an audience with the Pope, and thereafter he seemed to make a beeline for St. Catherine's monastery.
2. He claimed to have found the folios (this portion which he brought back from his initial trip is known as "Friderico Augustanus,") in a 'burn basket' for use in lighting fires. But it was written on parchment (animal skins) and is to this day snowy white in color. Parchment does not burn well and it stinks when burned, so they never would have used it to light fires; it's impractical. Moreover, parchment was too valuable to be destroyed; normal practice would have been to erase unwanted writing and re-use the parchment for another document. Tischendorf's story doesn't make sense. Was he lying about the source of the discovery?
3. Tischendorf made a second trip to retrieve the remainder of Sinaiticus, after which he spent 2 months in Cairo before bringing the codex to Europe. When he brought it to Europe, the codex was yellowed (presumably with age) but the yellowing was (and is) rather uneven and streaky. Since Tischendorf lingered in Cairo for a couple months with this codex before taking ship, could he have utilized this time to apply an aging agent like lemon juice to make his 'discovery' appear more ancient?
4. Tischendorf never had a chance to get his hands back on the first portion (Friderico Augustanus), which to this day is white and shows no sign of yellowing. No one could readily make this comparison until recently, but both portions have been photographed (using color bars to calibrate the photos) and posted at www.codexsinaiticus.org where anyone may see this difference between the two portions.
5. When viewing these photographic copies, one may observe that the document contains extensive erasures, write-overs, corrections, errors, margin additions, and so on. It exhibits signs of having been sloppily or hurriedly done.
6. Moreover, Sinaiticus is woefully incomplete. It is missing all but 4 chapters of Genesis, all of Exodus, all but 3 chapters of Leviticus, all but 12 chapters of Numbers, all but 5 chapters of Deuteronomy, most of Joshua and Judges, all of Ruth & 1 Samuel & 2 Samuel & 1st & 2nd Kings... but it does have parts of 1 Chronicles twice. In one particular spot of Sinaiticus, the copying of 1 Chronicles actually leaves off at Chapter 19, verse 17... then the very next words on the parchment are from Ezra 9:9 (in the middle of a sentence!) which it continues (in Ezra) as if everything were fine and normal! (But Sinaiticus does include something of note that would have gratified the RCC back then: Sinaiticus contains the Apocrypha.) All signs point to the codex having been a second-rate copy job, and certainly not something we should rely on or give great credence.
7. For some reason, the parchment and ink of this codex have never been tested to determine its age. Testing was planned in 2015, then suddenly and inexplicably canceled.

Who benefited the most from the existence of these folios? The discovery of Sinaiticus and allegations about its antiquity helped bolster the perceived reliability of Vaticanus, because the two tend to agree with one another textually. This was very useful to the Roman church in the 1800s. And the discovery influenced (indeed it dominated) the work of Westcott and Hort, which in turn led to a huge boom in new Bible editions ever since (a boom which seems bent upon supplanting the KJV).

Sinaiticus is in the family of "Alexandrian" text types. The KJV was translated from the Syriac or "Byzantine" group of texts. The number of extant ancient Byzantine manuscripts and fragments exceeds the number of Alexandrian MSS and fragments by about ninefold (if I recall the numbers correctly). Yet if one counts up the number of deviations and variations (the number of copyists' changes for whatever reason), the Alexandrian ones contain far more alterations/errors than the Byzantine ones. Byzantine MSS are much more uniform, even though there were 9 times as many opportunities for errors to be made.

Alexandria was a hotbed for new theological ideas. Origen and others in that region came up with some odd concepts. Is it possible that some scribes, influenced by the novel ideas of their teachers, took it upon themselves to alter a phrase here, delete a word there, and so on? Or was it just carelessness? We can only guess.

As far as age goes, the Syriac Peshitta and the northern Italy Old Latin (used by the Vaudois) both align most closely with the Byzantine texts. And the Peshitta and Old Latin translations were made in the mid-2nd Century, which suggests greater accuracy in the Byzantine Greek family of texts than those from south of the Mediterranean.

"Codex" Sinaiticus is unworthy of the word "codex." It is a junk document. Its "discovery" coincided with the RCC's angst over English-speaking Protestant Christianity's near-universal adherence to the KJV, and with the RCC's desire to unseat that version in favor of versions that more closely aligned with Vaticanus.

See the photo of Sinaiticus I posted last October in the post following my previously linked post. Sinaiticus was "found" so it could bolster Vaticanus, but in today's internet world one can easily see that it is a fraudulent piece of garbage.