If you cannot refute this Glenn, then you know who you are

Glenn, who needs the inerrancy of his book like a duck needs water (because the presence of the Holy Spirit [who is actually living and teaching today- John 14:26] isn’t important to him) is now lying to himself and gaslighting his readers.

Unless he can defend his faith against Stan’s argument for biblical inerrancy with one that is ironclad. If he cannot, then he admits to be being wedded to lying and gas lighting. Every protestant Christian should be honest about the Bible and what it is based on. Stan fell well short. His attempt makes a fantasy of the argument of inerrancy. And now Glenn is  hiding the facts, and a false teacher to others. Sounds like what the worst Catholics do with infallibility. That’s who you’ve let yourself become.

I sent Glenn my refutation of Stan’s recent attempt to preserve inerrancy. Stan tells us that only the original documents are inerrant. We cannot trust translation. We cannot trust punctuation (and therefore cannot trust interpretation in many cases). We cannot trust anything added AT ALL to the look of the original documents. Inerrancy, according to Stan these days, depends upon the original languages and visual appearance of the hand written Hebrew (OT inferred) and Greek (NT inferred) original texts.

Not that we have any originals of any single book or even part of a book in all the Bible. 

No matter, Stan is existentially sure that the oldest texts we have and on which we base our Bible are ABSOLUTELY faithful facsimiles. Screenshots, if you will, of the dried ink papyri of Moses thru, well, it depends upon how you date the books of the New Testament. So, to give dates… Moses lived likely but not certainly around the 13th century BCE, give or take a century or two (zero evidence of Moses or even Israelites in Egypt “ outside the Bible), and maybe 100 AD for the oldest Gospel, John?, give or take a decade?

So, Stan’s inerrancy rests on us having absolutely faithful facsimiles spanning 1,500 years before the oldest manuscript we have (around 200 AD) which contains long portions but never the whole of Paul's earliest letters, 1 and 2 Thessalonians. (The oldest complete Christian Bible we have comes another two centuries later - though it’s OT isn’t complete and it incudes the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.

🤔

I responded to Stan on Wednesday, the 24th of July. I sent a copy. Which he cannot acknowledge because to be openly aware and honest to the facts jeopardizes his existential life as a radical Protestant, too. My presentation of the facts against Stan were first put this way:

“Yesterday, Stan played pick-up sticks trying to preserve an inerrant Bible. He only found straw.

Wisely, Stan throws out translations in considering inerrancy. He throws out any copy that adds things not found in the original texts: things like punctuation and paragraphing. Presumable anything added to the original texts erases inerrancy. Say, like vowels for instance.

Stan claims that only the original documents, or absolutely faithful copies of them, in the Hebrew and Greek languages… are inerrant. 

I have questions.

1. Aramaic? The Hebrew Bible uses Aramaic as well. Will Stan amend his inerrant imprimatur to include the Aramaic found in the Hebrew Bible?

By his own standards, I think he would.

2. However, the Old Testament that Christians like Stan and, in fact, almost every single Christian reads is a translation of a Hebrew Bible that Stan believes to be original and inerrant, but, by his standards, cannot be. The Hebrew Bible being used as the Ur-source - the original - is the Masoretic text. The Masoretic text is a copied, edited, and denoted text compiled by a group of Jews, the Masoretes, in the years 700 AD to 1000 AD. The oldest known complete edition is from 1009 AD.

This is the only known Hebrew Bible. Is this the Bible that Stan thinks is inerrant? 

It can’t be. Older texts make clear that the oldest Hebrew Scriptures didn’t have vowels. The Masoretic text has diacritical marks denoting the vowels thought appropriate to the word. They were added. There are different choices to make. This falls under Stan’s exclusion of unoriginal marks. Especially given that they introduce the reality of variable interpretations.

Before the edited version of the Masoretic Hebrew Bible of 1009 AD, there was no common Hebrew Bible of the last few centuries before Christ and for the next thousand years. Various Jewish and Samaritan groups had various versions of the Hebrew Bible.

The Dead Sea Scrolls - the oldest of which are from around 400 BC -  have multiple versions that don’t agree with the Masoretic text.

We do not and cannot know if there ever was an original whole Hebrew Bible before 1009 AD. We don’t have an Ur-Source.

It is fact that we don’t have any of the original texts of the canonical Hebrew Bible. And in the cases of the first five books and the histories and the psalms and the most of the prophets, existing texts come more than 500 years after there may have been an original text. Not even close! All of our New Testament sources are well within 500 years of any original. And the oldest is just a century after or a little more than.

(btw, Stan infers that we actually have originals and that only those are inerrant: “Don't let the parts that aren't in the originals throw you. Do your due diligence.” Hmmm. Maybe a little more due diligence on his part before certainty.)

So my question. Isn’t Stan, when referring to the Masoretic text of 1009 AD, our “Hebrew Bible”, by his own standards, pointing to an errant ghost?

3. The New Testament writers always quote the Hebrew Bible not from Hebrew texts but from a Greek translation of them. Therefore, according to Stan, they are using scriptures that are not inerrant. Usually they are using the Septuagint. The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the existing Hebrew texts in the middle of the 3rd century BC. 

The Greek Septuagint and Stan’s Hebrew Bible of 1009 AD don’t always agree.

It is true that sometimes, especially when Paul quotes from the Psalms, it clearly looks like he is quoting from Hebrew versions. But, sadly for Stan, he often paraphrases. In fact, most of the New Testament writers paraphrase from both the Septuagint mostly and Hebrew texts sometimes.

So, don’t we draw two conclusions?

a. The New Testament writers (God-breathed as Stan would say, as his sole basis for claiming inerrancy [didn’t prove insurmountable for Adam, though; a man, god-breathed, made a little lower than angels and far more glorified by God than a book, but, errant])… the New Testament writers, and therefore the New Testament, doesn’t take Stan’s desire for inerrancy very seriously.

b. By Stan’s own standards of inerrancy, we have to cut out any talk by the New Testament of the Old Testament because it’s based on texts that are not inerrant. And the “god-breathed” talk itself is carried out in free, interpretive paraphrase of a Greek translation of one among variable Hebrew interpretations of an unknown original 

So my question. Isn’t Stan, when referring to the “New Testament”, by his own standards, really pointing to an errant ghost? With bad breath?”