Re: OT: Racial superiority / Intelligent design was Re:

On Jan 31, 1:47=A0am, "HeyBub" <hey...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Judson McClendon wrote: 
> 
 
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>
> Uh, no. The earliest surviving manuscript of the New Testament is a two-in=[/color
]
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> square from the Gospel of John, dated to mid-fourth century.

Um, by the mid fourth century we have complete parchment bibles such
as Sinaiticus!

=46rom the third century we have more or less complete manuscripts of
most NT texts, including gospels.

The earliest surviving fragment, to which you refer, was dated to 125
AD by all the paleographers who found it, plus or minus 25 years.
That dating still holds, despite intermittent efforts by odd scholars
to try to date it later.

> That the Gospels themselves originated earlier - Mark is dated about
> 65 CE - they probably were transmitted orally for several centuries.

No, that can't be so.

> Of course Mark never saw Jesus, so he was not a witness himself.

He recorded the testimony of Peter, who was.

> And no early manuscript of the Gospels has ever been found in
> Aramaic, Hebrew, or Latin.

Not least since they were composed in Gr... :-)

> That there are no manuscript fragments from earlier times may be the resul=[/color
]
t
> of the Council of Nicea creating an establishment church

No such thing occurred at the Council of Nicaea.  Christianity did not
become the state religion until 50 years later, in the time of
Theodosius I.

> and that organization's zeal to vacuum up any non-conforming texts.

This story unfortunately is not recorded in any contemporary text,
despite the "Da Vinci Code", and doesn't reflect how things actually
happened on the ground.

All the best,

Roger Pearse