Jesus, the Gospel and the Telephone Game

Many scholars compare the way the Bible's accounts of Jesus were passed on with the children's telephone game, where children whisper a complicated message from one to another. In the process the message is corrupted, and at the end everyone has a good laugh. But how good is the comparison between this game and the way the Gospel stories were actually passed on?
In this video, professor Dan Wallace dissects the telephone game, to argue that the process of transmission of bible from the illiterate Hebrew speaking peasants, fishermen, the low-level local tax collectors of the Roman Empire, and other disciples of Jesus to the highly educated Greek writers of the scripture was not similar to the children telephone game! He, of course, does not mention that the anonymous writer of gospels were not the Hebrew speaking disciples of Jesus, who wrote under the pseudonyms of Matthew the tax collector, Mark the attendant of Peter, Luke the attendant of Paul, and John the son of Zebedee!
According to the Oxford Annotated Bible (a compilation of multiple scholars summarizing dominant scholarly trends for the last 150 years) states (p. 1744):

Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus' life and teachings.

However, even assuming that these gentlemen are absolutely right about the solid structure of the bible transmission, one wonders how can they explain the glaring discrepancies among the same stories, such as the story of the empty tomb or the story of crucifixion, as narrated in the four gospels, without offering incredibly irrational and sometimes hilarious reasoning? In fact, the bible textual contradictions forced an imminent evangelist scholar, like Professor Ehrman to abandon Christianity altogether. He writes:

But it was not long before I started seeing that the "truth" about the Bible was not at all what I had once thought when I was a committed evangelical Christian at Moody Bible Institute. The more I saw that the New Testament (not to mention the Old Testament, where the problems are even more severe) was chock full of discrepancies, the more troubled I became. At Moody, I thought that all discrepancies could be objectively reconciled. But eventually I saw that in fact they could not be. I wrestled with these problems, I prayed about them, I studied them, I sought spiritual guidance, I read all I could. But as someone who be- lieved that truth was objective and who was unwilling to believe what was false, I came to think that the Bible could not be what I thought it was. The Bible contained errors. And if it contained er- rors, it was not completely true. This was a problem for me, be- cause I wanted to believe the truth, the divine truth, and I came to see that the Bible was not divine truth without remainder. The Bible was a very human book. But the problems didn't stop there. Eventually I came to real- ize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mis- takes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies. That is what this book is about.

Unfortunately, many pastors and evangelists deliberately try to confuse their congregations, by resorting to irrelevant evidence and statistics that appear to suggest that the Gospels are the eyewitness testimonies of either Jesus' disciples or their attendants. In other words, Christians are kept in the dark about the scholarly researches   even by Christian scholars. Nevertheless, the mainstream scholarly view is that the Gospels are anonymous works, written in a different language than that of Jesus, in distant lands, after a substantial gap of time, by unknown persons, compiling, redacting, and inventing various traditions, in order to provide a narrative of Christianity's central figure —Jesus Christ— to confirm the faith of their communities.

In fact, researchers agree that the original author of Matthew was actually a Greek-speaking educated Jew, who was living in Antioch, and as someone who was more knowledgeable about Jewish traditions, intended to correct many of the erroneous assertions in the earlier gospel of Mark about those traditions. Thus Matthew who was the tax collector for the Romans, could not be the real author of that gospel, because being a collaborator with the occupiers would have ostracized him from the Jewish community. Even conservative New Testament scholars like professor Bruce Metzger have agreed that :

In the case of the first Gospel, the apostle Matthew can scarcely be the final author; for why should one who presumably had been an eyewitness of much that he records depend ... upon the account given by Mark, who had not been an eyewitness? --The New Testament, p. 97

Similarly, Raymond E. Brown, perhaps the foremost English-speaking Catholic biblical scholar, the author of some 40 books, who taught at Union Theological Seminary for two decades, states :

That the author of the Greek Gospel was John Mark, a (presumably Aramaic-speaking) Jew of Jerusalem who had early become a Christian, is hard to reconcile with the impression that it does not seem to be a translation from Aramaic, that it seems to depend on oral traditions (and perhaps already shaped sources) received in Greek, and that it seems confused about Palestinian geography. --An Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 159-160

The Gospel of Luke, borrows from as much as 65% of the verses in Mark, thus scholars agree that Mark was his source. Thus it is obvious that John Mark, the attendant of Peter, could not be the author of Luke . Note that the author of Luke is also the author of Acts, in which John Mark, the attendant of Peter, is mentioned in Acts (12:12), which implies that the author of Luke-Acts knows him, and has even borrowed a substantial amount of his material. Yet, he never identifies Mark as one of his references! in the words of Randel McCraw Helms, an American professor of English literature:

So the author of Luke-Acts not only knew about a John Mark of Jerusalem, the personal associate of Peter and Paul, but also possessed a copy of what we call the Gospel of Mark, copying some three hundred of its verses into the Gospel of Luke, and never once thought to link the two—John Mark and the Gospel of Mark—together! The reason is simple: the connecting of the anonymous Gospel of Mark with John Mark of Jerusalem is a second-century guess, on that had not been made in Luke's time.-- Who Wrote the Gospels? (p. 2)

According to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, an influential theologian of the School of Antioch, a biblical commentator, and Christian bishop of Cyrrhus (393-~458CE), in the early centuries of Christianity, there were many Christian gospels in circulation, He wrote:

"Arius and Achillas, together with their fellow foes, have been expelled from the Church, because they have become aliens from our pious doctrine: according to the blessed Paul, who said, 'If any of you preach any, other gospel than that which you have received, let him be accursed, even though he should pretend to be an angel from heaven, and 'But if any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness, he is proud, knowing nothing' and so forth. (...)do you avoid it as you would a pest, mindful ever of the apostolic faith, that, I mean, which was set out in writing by the Fathers at Nicaea; do you remain on steady ground, firm and unmoved in the faith, and henceforward suffer neither your clergy nor laity to listen to vain words and futile questions, for we have already given a form, that he who professes himself a Christian may keep it, the form delivered by the Apostles, as says St. Paul, 'if any one preach to you another gospel than that you have received let him be Anathema.'

Among various gospels the church ratified just four of them. They picked the number four because "there were four winds, four points of the compass, four corners of the temple", mirroring the arguments of Irenaeus in the 2nd century. As professor Ehrman writes:

The anonymity of the Gospel writers was respected for dec- ades. When the Gospels of the New Testament are alluded to and quoted by authors of the early second century, they are never en- titled, never named. Even Justin Martyr, writing around 150-60 CE, quotes verses from the Gospels, but does not indicate what the Gospels were named. For Justin, these books are simply known, collectively, as the "Memoirs of the Apostles."
It was about a century after the Gospels had been originally put in cir- culation that they were definitively named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This comes, for the first time, in the writings of the church father and heresiologist Irenaeus, around 180-85 CE. Irenaeus wrote a five-volume work, typically known today as Against Heresies, directed against the false teachings rampant among Christians in his day. At one point in these writings he in- sists that "heretics" (i.e., false teachers) have gone astray either because they use Gospels that are not really Gospels or because they use only one or another of the four that are legitimately Gospels. Some heretical groups used only Matthew, some only Mark, and so on. For Irenaeus, just as the gospel of Christ has been spread by the four winds of heaven over the four corners of the earth, so there must be four and only four Gospels, and they are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."-- Forged: Writing In The Name Of God - Why The Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (p. 250)"

Scholars have shown that the specific wording of the Gospel titles also suggests that the portion bearing their names was a later addition. The κατα ("according to") preposition supplements the word ευαγγελιον ("gospel"). This word for "gospel" was implicitly connected with Jesus, meaning that the full title was το ευαγγελιον Ιησου Χριστου ("The Gospel of Jesus Christ"), with the additional preposition κατα ("according to") used to distinguish specific gospels by their individual names. Before there were multiple gospels written, however, this addition would have been unnecessary. In fact, many scholars argue that the opening line of the Gospel of Mark (1:1) probably functioned as the original title of the text:

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ...

Scholars like Norman Perrin and Barnabas Lindars also find Hebrews enigmatic because it does not appear to represent the views of any early Christian community. In fact, most scholars agree that the Book of Hebrews and 1 John, which are anonymous texts, have been erroneously attributed to the apostle Paul and John the son of Zebedee. According to the Oxford Annotated Bible (p. 2103)

Despite the traditional attribution (of Hebrews:to Paul) ... [t]here is not sufficient evidence to identify any person named in the New Testament as the author; thus it is held to be anonymous.

The Oxford Bible also maintaines that:

The anonymous voice of 1 John was identified with the author of the Fourth Gospel (i.e., John) by the end of the second century CE ... Since the Gospel was attributed to the apostle John, the son of Zebedee, early Christians concluded that he had composed 1 John near the end of his long life ...-- (p. 2137)

Some scholars argue that the opening verses of 1 John is probably composed by a leader of a circle the Johannine teachers who were faithful to the apostolic testimony of the Beloved Disciple, and this is why that opening employs the first person plural "we", referring to that circle.

The Patristic literary texts written by Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, that were produced in the late second century, before the doctrine of orthodoxy became fixed, are more likely comparable to Hebrews. In fact, scholars agree that one cannot detect any unambiguous profile of these author's doctrinal ideology, the main characteristics of their congregations, or the historicity of text's occasion from the analysis of these early Patristic texts. Hence, it would be absolutely silly to consider Hebrews as a manifesto of Christianity. Furthermore, it is under this light that the view of professor Bart Ehrman, the eminent textual criticism expert's must be examined, who states that:

Because our surviving Greek manuscripts provide such a wide variety of (different) titles for the Gospels, textual scholars have long realized that their familiar names do not go back to a single 'original' title, but were added by later scribes. --Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, pp. 249-250

Moreover as professor Armin Daniel Baum, an evangelical theologian and the professor of New Testament at the Freien Theologischen Hochschule Gießen writes :

While most New Testament letters bear the names of their (purported) authors (James, Jude, Paul, Peter, or at least "the Elder") the authors of the historical books [the Gospels and Acts] do not reveal their names. The superscriptions that include personal names ("Gospel according to Matthew" etc.) are clearly secondary. --The Anonymity of the New Testament History Books," p. 121

They were not only the four gospels that were attributed to wrong authors in the words of Professor Ehrman:

Scholars are highly uni- fied in thinking that Paul did not write the book of Hebrews, even though it was included in the canon of the New Testament by church fathers who thought that it was. 9 The letters l, 2, and 3 John sound in many ways like the Gospel of John, but they are strikingly different as well, especially in the historical context they presuppose. They were probably not written by the same au- thor, who was not John the son of Zebedee in any event, but by a later Christian living in the same community, which had begun to experience a different range of problems from those presupposed in the Fourth Gospel. Later Christian writers who accepted the books as sacred authorities needed to assign them to an apostle, however, and so it made sense to claim that they, like the Fourth Gospel, had been written by John the son of Zebedee. Assigning anonymous books to known authorities did not stop with the writings of the New Testament. Just to give one ad- ditional example, I might mention one of the most interesting books not to make it into the canon of Scripture. For centuries there were Christians who thought the book should be included. I think we can all be glad that it was not. This book provides one of the most vitriolic attacks on Jews and Judaism from early Chris- tianity. Had it been included in Scripture, Jewish-Christian rela- tions may well have turned out even worse, if that can be ima- gined, than they did. This book was originally written anonym- ously, but it later came to be attributed to one of Paul's closest companions and co-workers and so is known as the Epistle of Barnabas.

On the Bart Ehrman and James White Debate on the Reliability of Bible!

On Wednesday January 21, Dr. James White and Dr. Bart D. Ehrman were engaged in a debate in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. The resolution on the floor: “Does the New Testament Misquote Jesus?” After the debate the two men had a completely negative impression of each other. Dr Ehrman posted the video of the debate in his blog with with an introduction that in part read:

I normally do not have an aversion to the people I debate. But James White is that kind of fundamentalist who gets under my skin. To be fair, he would probably not call himself a fundamentalist. Then again, in my experience, very few fundamentalists *do* call themselves fundamentalists.

and Dr white wrote:

He did not prepare for the debate, had no idea who I am, and did not read anything I’ve ever written, hence, he was in a tough spot, given that I had studied his works so thoroughly. As a result, he made horrific blunders in misrepresenting me in his rebuttal. (...) I think those in attendance were a little surprised at Dr. Ehrman’s treatment of me, but I wasn’t overly surprised,

In the debate itself Ehrman , based on the facts that there are as many differences in the manuscripts as there are words in the New Testament, argued that those differences do matter, some of them are distorting the doctrinal principles of Christianity and some actually change the meaning of whole books of the bible, such as the book of Hebrews. White argued that the differences are inconsequential and didn't matter.

Dr. Ehrman argued that since the manuscripts of the Bible exist in multiple fragments which contain many discrepancies, therefore they in fact do not preserve God’s word. He asked if God inspired the texts then why didn't God also preserve the original texts? Dr. White retorted that Dr. Ehrman elsewhere in his writings and interviews denies "the orthodox doctrine of inspiration"! The problem with this line of argument is that, every other religion can easily utilize "the orthodox doctrine of inspiration", and sell any garbage they want to sell! As, indeed, many do so. The argument doesn't go anywhere, because I don't believe in the authenticity of your doctrine and you don't believe in mine

Ehrman and White also debated how old the manuscripts of the New Testament are. They  agreed that the differences between the older manuscripts are more numerous, and more pronounced than the differences among the more recent manuscripts. For instance, the 2nd to 4th century manuscripts have many more corrupted texts than those written in the subsequent era of the 4th to 9th century. This, of course, would imply that finding an old manuscript is not going to be of much help for identifying the original text of the bible. Because the earliest uneducated, and untrained scribes have been less careful or less concerned about the authenticity and veracity of their texts. Accordingly, professor Ehrman argued that it is impossible to know what the original manuscripts contained. Dr. White maintained that the differences among some of the oldest manuscripts are not that significant, which is, of course, a bogus argument, because one needs to look at a larger sample than just two, in order to arrive at a valid inference.

White argued that Scripture manuscripts are more reliable than any other classical manuscripts, and he wanted that Ehrman to admit that based on the similar reliability criteria as those of classic manuscripts,  scriptures would be more reliable. However, why use   a probabilistic criteria for the words of God, or at least for words inspired by God?!


Dr white, like other evangelical textual critics, tried to argue that textual differences are inconsequential. He argued that most of the original bible can be reproduced from the existing manuscripts. Of course, as we have argued in the past, the original bible is the gospel of Jesus in Hebrew, and not 27 books written mostly by anonymous Greek writers pretending to be Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John! Ehrman response, however, was that "If these discrepancies are immaterial, then why is it that Dan Wallace is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars running around cataloging and photographing manuscripts? (...) What does he tell his sponsors, those funding him? I'm doing all of this because it doesn't matter?! Of course he doesn't tell them that, because they do matter! Why check for all the variants and look very carefully at all of them if they don't matter?"



In the above video Dr. White, tries to refute Ehrman's argument about the discrepancy of a story in Mark and Matthew in which Jesus “came into his own city” (probably Capernaum—Matthew 9:1). Soon thereafter, a man by the name of Jairus, one of the rulers of the synagogue, fell at Jesus’ feet and worshipped Him saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay Your hand on her and she will live” (Matthew 9:18).

Whereas in the in the gospel of Mark, the man says that his daughter was “at the point of death” (Mark 5:23) and in the gospel of Luke the man says that “she was dying” (Luke 8:42). Many evangelists try to whitewash such a difference in the "inspired words of god" by arguing that the alleged contradiction may be a simple misunderstanding of what Matthew actually wrote about the dying child. According to them the Greek word, rendered “ she has just died,” does not of necessity mean that she had actually died! It just means that she was “dying” or about to die! They argue that there is not as much difference between Matthew’s arti eteleutesn (“has just died”; cf. Hebrews 11:22) and eschates echer (“is dying,” NIV) in Mark 5:23 . This is a very interesting argument, we can say anything we want and then say that it could mean something else! It is quite amusing to read a number of other various explanations offered by various apologists who had let their imaginations running wild. Some, like the sixteenth-century Lutheran scholar Osiander, even  tried to alleviate the tensions by claiming that Matthew and Mark–Luke were simply reporting different incidents!

Dr. white, on the other hand, argues that Matthew's version is just a summary of the events in comparison to Mark, and this is why Matthew just has cut the chase and moved from "dying" to "died". Of course the discrepancy among the three narratives is not just the question of dying versus  died. While in Matthew the petitioner is an unnamed ruler (ἄρχων εἷς, Mt. 9.18), both Mark and Luke assert that his name was Jairus and that he served as a synagogue leader (εἷς τῶν ἀρχισυναγώγων ὀνόματι Ἰάϊρος, Mk 5.22; ἀνὴρ ᾧ ὄνομα Ἰάϊρος . . . ἄρχων τῆς συναγωγῆς, Lk. 8.41). According to Matthew, on the first meeting with Jesus, the father informed Jesus that his daughter had just died (ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν, Mt. 9.18) and made a request for him to come along to raise his daughter from the dead (ζήσεται, Mt. 9.18; cf. the similar translation,‘dann wird sie wieder lebendig’, Einheitsübersetzung).

According to Mark and Luke, the child was on the verge of death but still alive when the father came to Jesus (ἐσχάτως ἔχει, Mk 5.23; αὐτὴ ἀπέθνῃσκεν ‘she was dying’, Lk. 8.42): his request was for the healing of his daughter, not for her resuscitation. In comparison to Mark and Luke some features are strikingly absent from Matthew, such as the accompanying crowd (Mk 5.21, 24, 27, 30-31; Lk. 8.40, 42, 45; cf. 8.47). There is, in fact, a reference to ‘the crowd’ (ὁ ὄχλος) in Mt. 9.23, 25, but that crowd corresponds to the θόρυβος before the house of Jairus in Mk 5.38, not to the crowd that accompanied Jesus and Jairus from the start (cf. Cousland 2002: 40). Further points include the haemorrhaging woman’s address to Jesus (Mk 5.33; Lk. 8.47), the dramatic report of the messengers from the ruler’s house evoking Jesus’ words of comfort (Mk 5.35-36; Lk. 8.49-50), and the information about the girl’s age, which happens to correspond to the duration of the haemorrhaging woman’s illness (Mk 5.42; Lk. 8.42).

Furthermore, at the climax of the episode Matthew allows no bystanders to witness Jesus performing the resurrection miracle (Mt. 9.25), while in Mark and Luke the room where the miracle takes place tends to become somewhat overcrowded with Jesus, Jairus, his daughter, his wife and three of the disciples, Peter, James and John (Mk 5.37, 40; Lk. 8.51). In addition, the narrative context of the Matthaean version, notably its spatial setting, differs from Mark and Luke: Jesus and his disciples seem to be in a house in the company of ‘many tax collectors and sinners’ and visited by disciples of John the Baptist (Mt. 9.9-13, 14-17), while according to Mark and Luke Jesus had just disembarked from the boat that had brought him back from the country of the Gerasenes and was now by the lakeside surrounded by a large crowd, presumably in open space (Mk 5.21; Lk. 8.40). Further discrepancies can be added to these few examples, but those listed here are the most prominent and have been subjected to much painstaking research from an early period.




And here are various Greek versions of Mark  5:35:

 ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 5:35 Greek NT: Nestle 1904
 Ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος ἔρχονται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχισυναγώγου λέγοντες ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανεν· τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον;
ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 5:35 Greek NT: Westcott and Hort 1881
 Ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος ἔρχονται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχισυναγώγου λέγοντες ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανεν· τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον;
 ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 5:35 Greek NT: Westcott and Hort / [NA27 and UBS4 variants]
Ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος ἔρχονται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχισυναγώγου λέγοντες ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανεν· τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον;
 ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 5:35 Greek NT: RP Byzantine Majority Text 2005
 Ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος, ἔρχονται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχισυναγώγου, λέγοντες ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανεν· τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον;
 ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 5:35 Greek NT: Greek Orthodox Church
 Ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος ἔρχονται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχισυναγώγου λέγοντες ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανε· τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον;
 ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 5:35 Greek NT: Tischendorf 8th Edition
ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος ἔρχονται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχισυναγώγου λέγοντες ὅτι ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανεν, τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον;
 ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 5:35 Greek NT: Scrivener's Textus Receptus 1894
Ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος, ἔρχονται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχισυναγώγου, λέγοντες ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανε· τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον;
 ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 5:35 Greek NT: Stephanus Textus Receptus 1550
Ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος ἔρχονται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχισυναγώγου λέγοντες ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανεν· τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον
 Mark 5:35 Greek Study Bible (Apostolic / Interlinear)
 Ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος ἔρχονται ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχισυναγώγου λέγοντες ὅτι ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανεν· τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον;

... and here are various Greek versions of Matthew 9:18

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 9:18 Greek NT: Nestle 1904
Ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς ἰδοὺ ἄρχων εἷς προσελθὼν προσεκύνει αὐτῷ λέγων ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν· ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ’ αὐτήν, καὶ ζήσεται.

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 9:18 Greek NT: Westcott and Hort 1881
Ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς ἰδοὺ ἄρχων εἷς προσελθὼν προσεκύνει αὐτῷ λέγων ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν· ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ' αὐτήν, καὶ ζήσεται.

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 9:18 Greek NT: Westcott and Hort / [NA27 and UBS4 variants]
Ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς ἰδοὺ ἄρχων εἷς προσελθὼν / ἐλθὼν προσεκύνει αὐτῷ λέγων ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν· ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ' αὐτήν, καὶ ζήσεται.

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 9:18 Greek NT: RP Byzantine Majority Text 2005
Tαῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς, ἰδού, ἄρχων εἷς ἐλθὼν προσεκύνει αὐτῷ, λέγων ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν· ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ’ αὐτήν, καὶ ζήσεται.

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 9:18 Greek NT: Greek Orthodox Church
Ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς ἰδοὺ ἄρχων εἷς προσελθὼν προσεκύνει αὐτῷ λέγων ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν· ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ’ αὐτήν καὶ ζήσεται.

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 9:18 Greek NT: Tischendorf 8th Edition
Ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς ἰδοὺ ἄρχων εἰσελθὼν προσεκύνει αὐτῷ λέγων· ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν, ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ’ αὐτήν, καὶ ζήσεται.

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 9:18 Greek NT: Scrivener's Textus Receptus 1894
Ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς, ἰδού, ἄρχων εἷς ἐλθὼν προσεκύνει αὐτῷ, λέγων ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν· ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ’ αὐτήν, καὶ ζήσεται.

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΤΘΑΙΟΝ 9:18 Greek NT: Stephanus Textus Receptus 1550
Ταῦτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς ἰδού, ἄρχων ἐλθὼν προσεκύνει αὐτῷ λέγων ὅτι Ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν· ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρά σου ἐπ' αὐτήν, καὶ ζήσεται

Matthew 9:18 Greek Study Bible (Apostolic / Interlinear)

Ταύτα αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος αὐτοῖς ἰδοὺ ἄρχων εἰς προσελθὼν προσεκύνει αὐτῷ λέγων ὅτι ἡ θυγάτηρ μου ἄρτι ἐτελεύτησεν· ἀλλὰ ἐλθὼν ἐπίθες τὴν χεῖρα σου ἐπ’ αὐτὴν καὶ ζήσεται.

On the Christian Apologists Propaganda Techniques to Prove the Authenticity of the Bible

A fascinating technique employed by the Christian apologists is to overwhelm their audience with a barrage of nonsensical numbers that are totally unrelated to the problem of verification of the hypothesis that they are trying to maintain, that is the bible text is not corrupted. The reality is that these apologists are barking at a wrong tree. The issue of corruption of bible has nothing to do with the question of variations among different manuscripts.

For instance, to maintain the hypothesis that the biblical manuscripts are not corrupted, the apologists talk about 5824 Greek manuscripts, more than 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and between 5000 to 10,000 of manuscripts in other languages like Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, Georgians, Coptic and so on.  According to them this means there are between 20 to 25 thousands of biblical manuscripts. To further overwhelm their audiences, they then talk about numerous church fathers, pastors, bishops, dickens and so on that in their numerous letters, sermons, homilies , and so on, in which they have quoted various verses of the bible, and claim that the entire New Testament can be reconstructed from these documents.

They cleverly misrepresent the question of the corruption of the bible as a question related to variations of the text among various manuscripts, and they pretend that the question of the corruption of the text is related to some trivial differences in misspelling of some words that have no bearing on the doctrinal issues of Christianity. Again to prove their points, they resort to another barrage of irrelevant numbers. related to variation in wording, including word order, omission or addition of words, and spelling differences. They argue for instance that the Greek New Testament is made of approximately 140,000 words (some even provide the exact number of 138,162 words). They then offer an  estimate of the variations among manuscripts (about 400,000), and arguing that the vast majority of such differences cannot be translated at all, or that the number of variations is correlated to the number of manuscripts, and a vast majority of them are so insignificant that do not affect any doctrinal issues.

To continue with this diversionary tactic  of confusing the audience, they then talk about the dating of manuscripts and try to prove that these were written very close to the time of Christ. By this stage the audience has forgotten that at issue is not the corrupt manuscript, but the corrupt version of 27 books of the bible, including the four gospels that are written by anonymous Greek writers, under the pseudonyms of Mark, Luke, Mathew and John, that are so different from one another in reference to birth, teaching and the death of Jesus,

They do not mention that the Hebrew Bible has 24 books, a "canon," which was affirmed at the Councils of Jamnia in A.D. 90 and 118. The Protestant Old Testament  reordered these 24 books into 39 books. For instance, they divided the book of Samuel in the Hebrew Bible into ; Samuel I and II!

The Catholic Old Testament, on the other hand includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Baruch (includes the Letters of Jeremiah), I and II Maccabees, and additions to Daniel and Esther. These books were included in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of a different Hebrew canon. Greek Orthodox bible includes 4 more books: ;I Esdras, ;III and IV Maccabees and Psalm 151.

During the period between the completion of the Old Testament and the first writings included in the New Testament (i.e. the period between 450 BC and 50 AD), many essays, psalms and historical accounts circulated throughout the synagogues and early churches. Some of these documents gradually came to be regarded by certain of the believers as actually inspired and deserving of a place in the canon.

 The first definite listing of the accepted books of the Bible  is usually dated  around 367 AD. However, a second set of booklets had been assembled through the years, and these were given the name Apocrypha ἀπόκρυφα (meaning “hidden”).  These all were written before the birth of Christ, and many early Christians regarded them as the word of God, and in some editions of the Bible they were interspersed among the Old Testament books.

When  Martin Luther,  translated the bible in 1534, he decided to extract  the apocryphal books from their usual places in the Old Testament, and  place them at the end of the Old Testament, since he was of the opinion that they  “are not held equal to the Sacred Scriptures and yet are useful and good for reading!”  Subsequently, many Protestant Bibles omitted them completely. However, in 1546 the Roman Catholic Council of Trent specifically listed the apocryphal books approved by the Roman Catholic Church as inspired and they are always included in Roman Catholic Bibles and are usually interspersed among the books of the Old Testament.

The Authorized King James Version called these books ‘Apocrypha’. It separated them, because the  2 Esdras 14:46 says:

 But keep the seventy last, that thou mayest deliver them only to such as be wise among the people: For in them is the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the stream of knowledge.

The Roman Catholic Bibles  does not call them Apocrypha. They call them deuterocanonical, which means that they belong to the second canon. The first list is of books first written in Hebrew. This second list is of books first written in Greek.

The 1538 Myles Coverdale Bible contained an Apocrypha that excluded Baruch and the Prayer of Manasseh. The 1560 Geneva Bible placed the Prayer of Manasseh after 2 Chronicles; the rest of the Apocrypha were placed in an inter-testamental section.

The Douay-Rheims Bible (1582–1609) placed the Prayer of Manasseh and 3 and 4 Esdras into an Appendix of the second volume of the Old Testament.

The apocrypha was a part of the KJV for 274 years until being removed in 1885 A.D

1 Esdras (Vulgate 3 Esdras)
2 Esdras (Vulgate 4 Esdras)
Tobit
Judith ("Judeth" in Geneva)
Rest of Esther (Vulgate Esther 10:4 – 16:24)
Wisdom
Ecclesiasticus (also known as Sirach)
Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremy ("Jeremiah" in Geneva) (all part of Vulgate Baruch)
Song of the Three Children (Vulgate Daniel 3:24–90)
Story of Susanna (Vulgate Daniel 13)
The Idol Bel and the Dragon (Vulgate Daniel 14)
Prayer of Manasses (Daniel)
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees

The term "Pseudepigrapha" comes from Greek words meaning false writings (pseudo=false and epigraphe=to inscribe) and refers to works that attempt to create Scripture under false names. Both Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha were written–scholars believe–during the same general period of time, and it is not inconceivable to imagine the discovery of future texts that (along with the Qumran library and other assorted scrolls) might continue to inform our knowledge of the world from which they emerged.

• Apocalypse of Abraham
• Apocalypse of Moses
• Letter of Aristeas
• Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah
• Joseph and Aseneth
• Life of Adam and Eve
• Lives of the Prophets
• Ladder of Jacob
• Jannes and Jambres
• History of the Captivity in Babylon
• History of the Rechabites
• Eldad and Modad
• History of Joseph
• Odes of Solomon
• Prayer of Joseph
• Prayer of Jacob
• Vision of Ezra

The apologists do not like to talk about the books  that were burnt. In fact during the dark ages if anybody had these books, the Inquisition, which was an ecclesiastical court of the Roman Catholic Church, and its mission was the discovery and punishment of heresy would torture and kill them. Even today evangelical Christians are in absolute horror to talk about these books, which include:

• Gospel of Mary the Magdalene…
• Gospel of Philip
• Gospel of The Twin/Thomas
• Book of Enoch
• Secret Book of James
• Apocalypse of Paul
• Letter of Peter to Philip
• Apocalypse of Peter
• Gospel of Truth
• Gospel to the Egyptians

The quality of the writings included in the Pseudepigrapha varies greatly from one to the next. For example, the Didache includes many valuable historical elements from early Christianity, while the Gospel of Thomas has no connection to the biblical Thomas and was written by a Gnostic writer in Egypt.

The Apostle Paul had to deal with false writings or Pseudepigrapha even in his time. In 2 Thessalonians 2:2 we find him concerned about a "letter seeming to be from us." In other places, Paul would note, "I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the sign of genuineness in every letter of mine; it is the way I write" (2 Thessalonians 3:17; also 1 Corinthians 16:21; Galatians 6:11; and Colossians 4:18).

The reason  some of the Pseudepigrapha  were removed or destroyed is because some powerful sects claimed that they presented  false or blasphemous doctrines.  In 1252, Pope Innocent IV officially authorized the creation of the horrifying Inquisition torture chambers. It also included anew perpetual imprisonment or death at the stake without the bishops consent. Acquittal of the accused was now virtually impossible. Thus, with a license granted by the pope himself, Inquisitors were free to explore the depths of horror and cruelty. Dressed as black-robed fiends with black cowls over their heads, Inquisitors could extract confessions from just about anyone. The Inquisition invented every conceivable devise to inflict pain by slowly dismembering and dislocating the body.

Many of the devices were inscribed with the motto “Glory be only to God.” Bernardus Guidonis, the Inquisitor in Toulouse instructed the layman as to never argue with the unbeliever, but as to “thrust his sword into the man’s belly as far as it will go.” George Ryley Scott describes how the inquisitors, gorged with their inhumanity, and developed a degree of callousness rarely rivaled in the annals of civilization, with the ecclesiastical authorities condemning every faith outside of Christianity as demonic.

At the time of the Reformation, Protestants decided that, because the additional books weren't in the Hebrew Bible, they shouldn't be in the Christian Bible, either (though they were included in early editions of the King James Bible). Catholics, at the Council of Trent (1546), decided to keep the "deutero-canonical" books.

Dr. William Lane Craig's misunderstanding of probability laws and misrepresentation of professor Bart Ehrman's argument !

It is so sad, if not disturbing,  when people with a poor understanding of mathematics and statistics try to impress the laypersons with their erroneous use of these tools. Dr Craig is one of such individuals. For a quick  example of his misunderstanding I start by reviewing a  short instance of one of his errors and then deal with his misunderstanding of the laws of probability as is documented in this video.

In a different debate, with a Muslim scholar, who was quoting psalms 5:4-7 that says, Jehovah, who according to Dr Craig is the same as Jesus, hates wicked people and thus cannot be the "most loving" god according to Craig's definition:  

 הכִּ֚י | לֹ֘א אֵ֤ל חָפֵ֖ץ רֶ֥שַׁע | אָ֑תָּה לֹ֖א יְגֻֽרְךָ֣ רָֽע 

 ולֹֽא־יִתְיַצְּב֣וּ הֽ֖וֹלְלִים לְנֶ֣גֶד עֵינֶ֑יךָ שָֹ֜נֵ֗אתָ כָּל־פֹּ֥עֲלֵי אָֽוֶן: 

 דֹּֽבְרֵ֪י כָ֫זָ֥ב אִישׁ־דָּמִ֥ים וּ֜מִרְמָ֗ה יְתָ֘עֵ֥ב | יְהֹוָֽה:

5. For You are not a God Who desires wickedness; evil does not abide with You. 

6. Confused people shall not stand before Your eyes; You hate all evil doers.   

7. You destroy speakers of lies; the Lord abhors a man of blood and deceit.  

 Dr  Craig  responds by saying that " Notice that, love and hate, paradoxically, are not contradictories. Indeed we will often speak of someone having love-hate relationship with someone else!  These are not contrdictories, because you can love a person and yet hate certain aspects of his personality's, his actions, what he does, what he stands for, and so forth, ...", and then in his rebuttal Craig continues with this same line of argument and says: "As I explained, love and  hates are not contradictoreis, and he [Dr. Ali] says: 'in  what language?'  Well, its simply a point of logic! The opposite of black is not white, or a contradictory of black is not white. The contradictory of black is not-black. The contradictory of P is not any p. So  it is not the contradictory of love to say hate, indeed we often speak of having love-hate relationships with certain individuals, don't we? The opposite or the contradictory of love is not-love. and bible never says God does not love evil-doers!" 

Of course, any high-school kid with an elementary knowledge of Algebra can see immediately the flaws in this sophistry. In fact, if one represents love, not-love and hate in a Cartesian space, it would be immediately obvious that hate is far more stronger than not-love which is represented by the value zero in the continuum from hate in the negative set to love in the positive set. The point is so obvious that needs not any further elaboration and lets now turn our attention to his misunderstanding of probability-based inferences.

     

In his debate with professor Ehrman,  Doctor Craig states : "When we talk about the probability of some event or hypothesis A, that probability is always relative to a body of background information B. So we speak of the probability of A on B, or of A with respect to B.[ Pr (A/B).]" 

The students of probability should immediately realize that  how nonsensical it would be to find a high probability  for resurrection, Let's assume that we adopt the standard 95% confidence band and  are able to reject the null hypothesis of no-resurrection. This would mean in each one hundred deaths there are 95 cases of resurrection! Very interesting!  Of course, Dr. Craig  may now want to change his alternative hypothesis. I will deal with any change that he might propose when he does that for the time being let's continue with the rest of his argument. He then says: 

"So in order to figure out the probability of the resurrection, let B stand for our background knowledge of the world apart from any evidence for the resurrection. Let E stand for the specific evidence for Jesus’ resurrection: the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and so on. Finally, let R stand for Jesus’ resurrection. Now what we want to figure out is the probability of Jesus’ resurrection given our background knowledge of the world and the specific evidence in this case.

Calculating the Probability of the Resurrection
B = Background knowledge
E = Specific evidence (empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, etc.)
R = Resurrection of Jesus
Pr (R/B & E) = ?

Now probability theorists have developed a very complex formula for calculating probabilities like this, and I’m going to walk you through it one step at a time, so that you’ll be able to get it.
The first factor that we need to consider is the probability of the resurrection on the background knowledge alone:

Pr (R/B) is called the intrinsic probability of the resurrection. It tells how probable the resurrection is given our general knowledge of the world.
Next we multiply that by the probability of the evidence given our background knowledge and the resurrection."

 Now of course, the value of this intrinsic probability is very close to zero, because according to the Christian belief R  is representing  only one event, i.e., the resurrection of Christ,  while B is set of all possible background knowledge, which could be a very large number (if not infinity), because it includes the knowledge of all the people who understand that in the bio-physical world the phenomena of empty tomb, and post mortem appearance, etc, can each be explained by numerous possible scenarios, including  one  suggested by Professor Ehrman. Thus, we have already a numerator of the new probability, that is multiplied by zero, and the outcome would be zero. Dr Craig continues   

Pr (E/B&R) is called the explanatory power of the resurrection hypothesis. It tells how probable the resurrection makes the evidence of the empty tomb and so forth. These two factors form the numerator of this ratio.

Unfortunately, for Dr. Craig, the value of this second argument in the numerator is also close to zero. Since there is only one empty tomb, and again virtually an infinite number of possible scenarios. Dr, Craig now explains the denominator of his probability of resurrection and says:  

Now below the line, in the denominator, just reproduce the numerator. Just move everything above the line down below the line:

Finally, we add to that the product of two more factors: the intrinsic probability that Jesus did not rise from the dead times the explanatory power of the hypothesis of no resurrection:

Students of probability, understand that this denominator  is in fact the union set of the null and the alternative hypotheses, in other words, it is the set of all possible events, which is of course,  very close to infinity.  Thus, the result is the ratio of (zero/infinity) which is unambiguously equal to zero. 

 It should be quite obvious that, this  whole exercise, is extremely silly. Because, to construct a probabilistic model, we need to specify  a probability law on a suitably defined sample space. Although, there are no hard rules to guide this first step, other than the requirement that the probability law conform to the three axioms which are:

I. (Nonnegativity) P(A) ≥ 0, for every event A. 

II. (Additivity) If A and B are two disjoint events, then the probability of their union satisfies P(A ∪ B) = P(A) + P(B). More generally, if the sample space has an infinite number of elements and A1, A2,... is a sequence of disjoint events, then the probability of their union satisfies P(A1 ∪ A2 ∪···) = P(A1) + P(A2) + ··· . 

III. (Normalization) The probability of the entire sample space Ω is equal to 1, that is, P(Ω) = 1.

We can assume that these conditions are satisfied,  However, the problem is that our sample includes only one observation (which is highly dubious), and our degrees of freedom is just zero!   

Bart Ehrman and Sam Harris.interview on Christianity.

Sam Harris, a  wannabe-philosopher  pseudo-scientist demonstrates his art of mixing "leading questions" with "soft questions" in his interview with professor Bart Herman, who is in all fairness a prominent scholar of Christianity.    In the interview Harris tries to employ Ehrman's genius to propagate his own bizarre atheism with old-school Islamophobic bigotry. This is something like what he tried unsuccessfully with professor  Noam Chomsky, however a great improvement over his tortured debates with Jordan B Peterson, the right-wing crusader who is a darling of Fox, and the words of Tabatha Southey: “the stupid man’s smart person”. Southey writes: “Peterson’s secret sauce is to provide an academic veneer to a lot of old-school rightwing cant, including the notion that most academia is corrupt and evil, and banal self-help patter.” 

Knowing Harris' penchant for self-promotion, professor Chomsky,  was  not interested in a debate, because such a debate would have implied that Harris understood Chomsky’s argument in the first place. Harris, who pretended,  has been offended over  some comments Chomsky had made referring to Christopher Hitchens as a “religious fanatic who worships the state,” reached out to him and asked for a debate.

So I just wanted to clarify that, although I think we might disagree substantially about a few things, I am far more interested in exploring these disagreements, and clarifying any misunderstandings, than in having a conventional debate. 

If you’d rather not have a public conversation with me, that’s fine. I can only say that we have many, many readers in common who would like to see us attempt to find some common ground. The fact that you have called me “a religious fanatic” who “worships the religion of the state” makes me think that there are a few misconceptions I could clear up. And many readers insist that I am similarly off-the-mark where your views are concerned.

Chomsky was more smart to let himself be abused for Harris' self promotion. He responded: 

Perhaps I have some misconceptions about you.  Most of what I’ve read of yours is material that has been sent to me about my alleged views, which is completely false.  I don’t see any point in a public debate about misreadings.  If there are things you’d like to explore privately, fine.  But with sources.