Where? For what? Where is Wesley? And the even more influential Whitefield? What rough beast slouches toward Lagos waiting to be born?
Do you like Tull?
People what have you done?
Locked him in his golden cage.
Golden cage
Made him bend to your religion
Him resurrected from the grave
from the grave
He is the God of nothing
If thatās all that you can see
You are the God of everything
Heās inside you and me
Heās right here. It is the greatest of all mysteries and as simple as possible. All things are become new when He comes into our lives.
If I had a million dollars for you in an envelope and handed it to you, what would you do to receive it?
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Well for one someone would first have to believe it contained the money so that they too would open their hand and accept it instead of just tossing it to the ground.
Then secondly they would have make sure they kept holding on to it and did not give up and let it fall.
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I would take it and then look. Iād receive it first.
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Ye cannee beat Jethro.
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You would have to have an appropriate level of trust in the person handing you the envelope first. There are some people that have tried to hand me something that I refused to take.
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Sure. Absolutely.
After you have become familiar with that individual, checked her out and found she is an okay person, it is easier to receive such an envelope, especially when she asks for nothing in return.
Obviously, the point Iām making is that this salvation business, or this spirituality Iām referring to, is just that simple. It is freely offered, and, nothing happens until it is received.
If I can talk you into believing, someone can talk you out of it. By receiving him, He gets to demonstrate his love for you. That is altogether a different ball game.
There is healing and wonders and joy and freedom I never imagined could be a part of my life. Those kinds of things just did not happen to guys like me. I was going down for the count. I could not break free from me and the hell Iād created for myself. Couldnāt stop hating, drinking, smoking, lusting, being jealous, being alone and lonely.
ā the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants ā¦ā Bart Ehrman
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Can you cite the work? Is that The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture?
Youāre fielding me well Ralphie. Iād have to agree on the oecumenical essentials. And broad and deep translation of Koine Greek words and whole concepts, essentials to some - like alleged misogyny, homophobia, just war, PSA and damnationism, etc, etc - expressed by all but one Hebrew thinkers, and the boundaries between the literal and the allegoric and literary allusion.
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There is one particular quote by Bart Ehrman that has been elusive in finding. I have heard Dr. Dan Wallace reference it (and a few others), but I have never seen it in its entirety. This particular quote is elusive because the book that contains it has been released in several versions. It doesnāt appear in the earliest versions, nor does it appear in the latest versions. The name of this particular book is called Misquoting Jesus . And the particular edition that contains the quote has a Q&A section with Dr. Ehrman in the back of the book.
CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS
They have included pictures of the two pages where this quote is found.
Isnāt that remarkable? Even though there are 400,000 errors and they are forged and no one knows who wrote them and they werenāt written for 50 to 80, 90 years after Christ was murdered, everything about the essential truths, everything about the foundations of Christianity, are accurate and trustworthy and always have been.
āDoes Johnās Gospel teach that Christ is the āunique Godā himself?ā Bart asked. Since then, he has changed his mind and now believes that each one of the gospels conclusively proclaims Christ is God.
Well, I donāt know what you mean, but if I did, I bet Iād like it. 
A quick Google search indicated Ehrman has made this type of statement many times with varying numbers of errors. I found this in a softcopy I have of his The New Testament, 2000.
Which pretty much sums up what he thinks about the NT.
āBruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. And even though we may disagree on important religious questionsāhe is a firmly committed Christian and I am notāwe are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like , there would be very few points of disagreement āmaybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands.
The position I argue for in Misquoting Jesus does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzgerās position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.
He isnāt consistent is he?
Sorry Ralphie! Yeah, I bet you would : ) The essential truth for me, the essential proposition, is the Incarnation with its ultimate (circular, yep) āproofā, the Resurrection. It doesnāt matter how flawed, how human, how erroneous our response was and remains to that.
I feel I should understand just what you mean, but I donāt. I think you mean the only thing that matters, no matter how poorly I may understand it, is that Jesus is GOD and He rose from the dead. Bottom lineāthatās it. Thatās all there is practically speaking.
Is that sort of what ur saying?
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Well, I agree. Itās pretty important.
In many ways, for me, what is critical after I have come to embrace the facts about him, is, ānow what?ā I think there is a place for investigating how it all came down, how can we know for sure the accounts handed down to us are for real. This is Big stuff. Sometimes, I fear the motivation for pursuing as much information as is humanly possible, is the fear of letting go and following God. It is a scary thing for many of us to begin to travel on a path where we give him control of our choices and the outcomes of our lives.
It is common to associate Jesus with our experience with a church or our relationships with our fathers, etc. And, we may find it very difficult to find other trustworthy people who know what are struggles are, or care, or who know what the heck weāre talking about as we attempt to grow as spiritual beings. It is safer to stay focused on the phenomenon that is the incredible mystery of GOD. Am I sure the stories we have about him are true?
He is only speaking on textual grounds. He is saying we can trust the text preserved is similar enough to the autographs in preserving the overall message of the original works or series of works. The majority of what you wrote is irrelevant and does not apply to his quote. Bart is not a Christian. I have several of his works including his NT introduction which is quite excellent and extremely balanced as any NT intro should be. He does not believe essential Christian doctrines are true and I have seen him argue with Daniel B Wallace that the lack of manuscript attestation the first 100-200 years for many NT texts rules out any real certainty.
There are many additions, omissions and simple textual errors in the manuscript tradition and 100-200 years of copies of copies of copies before we get any significant manuscript evidence of any work. There is a dark period in the tradition.
Conservative scholars have been touting 5,000 manuscripts, the vast majority of which come from the 6th century and beyond, and the textual record of the Bible as if it supports their claim to inerrancy or that the Bible as it stands is pretty much delivered by God. Nothing could be further from the truth. They also like to quote the limited changes that occur later in the record when these works were authoritative scripture and uncritically extend them back to when we have no manuscript evidence. Many scholars feel the earliest manuscripts and patristic citations show more diversity the earlier we get.
The textual record shows without equivocation that Godās followers are far more concerned about inerrant Bibles than he ever was. No single person in the entire history of the church has ever possessed such a thing. In fact, I would go so far as to say it never even existed. By the time all the works were written there were errors in many of the copies of the works as they were passed along and used in individual communities. These communities only had a few works to start.
Not to mention many Biblical works are now thought to have come in several different versions by the authors themselves. Which version is inspired? An inerrant Bible was not corrupted over time. Individual works that had already been corrupted in copies were combined into a single inspired corpus later to be identified as the NT.
If God inspired the Bible or incarnated himself, we can be confident he would have left us a trustworthy record of it. By trustworthy, I mean in achieving his salvific purposes. Not in relating facts about history.
Belief in the textual integrity of the Bible is ultimately an article of faith and the magisterial teaching of the Church, not a fact of history. Same with canonization inspiration. But yes, the NT has way better manuscript attestation than classical works.
Vinnie
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Sorry again Ralphie! The failure to communicate is all mine. And yes, Jesus is the only warrant for God we have. So be nice. Thatās it.
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[quote=āVinnie, post:79, topic:46151ā]
He does not believe essential Christian doctrines are true and I have seen him argue with Daniel B Wallace that the lack of manuscript attestation the first 100-200 years for many NT texts rules out any real certainty.
[/quote] I donāt need church leadership to establish authenticity of scripture or traditions. They can get in the way. They can be useful, too.
It is too bad. He knows better. The copies of copies of copies of copies came from originals that were written at some point, and the slight variations we note in them add up to nothing significant if I understand his conclusions. Thatās my conclusion about the variants. His mentorās conclusion, too. I am in good company, for a change!
Was Jesus Christ? Based on quite a few pieces of evidence, He sure was. Bartās experience as a born-again disciple matches perfectly with millions of others. There is significance in that, which is overlooked Iām afraid. If we could say the same things about a new drug being considered for approval by the FDA, the balance would favor approval.
The inerrancy, or the lack thereof, of Scripture is a topic worth studying, IMO. Pursuing my relationship with him is more significant for me personally. He has made his personhood abundantly clear in my life. I was not and am not capable of generating the changes that took me from a near āhell lifeā to a loving one, without even trying.
Like, I donāt have to prove I love a beautiful woman to anyone. I know sheās beautiful. I know I am in a relationship with her even if no one believes me. That is ok.