Woody said:
Silas said:
Yes, I agree about the KJV -- it came from the
textus receptus .
The catholic bible came from the
codex vaticanus.
It is my understanding they aren't the same, especially regarding Jesus as God's
only son. Perhaps you can clarify this.
The RSV for example says Jesus is only "a" son and not "the" son of God "according to some ancient authorities" explained in footnotes-- in other words a created being. In fundamental circles we refer to this as the
arian heresy.
Well, the Bible is quite specific about Jesus not being the only son of God - it states that Adam is as well (Luke 2).
Secondly, the RSV is not a Catholic bible, so I don't know why you've brought that up, particularly.
"according to some ancient authorities" seems to be a strange way of putting it if it actually means some of the more ancient manuscripts.
The Catholic Bible didn't "come from" the codex Vaticanus, that's simply the oldest complete copy of the whole NT possessed by the Vatican (thus its name). The language of Roman Catholicism used to be Latin, and the Latin Bible used throughout is the Vulgate of St. Jerome. (The equivalent of the KJV for Catholics, the Douai-Rhiems bible of the 16th Century, is an English translation of the Vulgate.) The Vulgate itself was translated in 400 CE by St. Jerome. Translating the Old Testament, he made
some reference to Hebrew texts (he was helped in his task by Rabbis, believe it or not), but a great deal of his translation came from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures.
One important justification for translating from the Greek OT instead of the original Hebrew is quite simply that it was the Septuagint scriptures that Jesus knew, and the Disciples, and the Evangelists. On this thread, The Devil Inside mentioned the "almah <> virgin" debate. But the reason that Matthew quoted Scripture as having said "Behold, a virgin shall conceive" was because the Greek version uses the word "parthenos", which quite definitely means "virgin". (By the way, this is why the NJB is not an official Catholic bible, because it translates the almah word in Is. 7:14 as "young woman". It also transliterates YHWH as Yahweh, throughout).
Again, if you are trying to make an issue between "Fundamentalist Protestant" and "Catholic" positions, Arianism is a heresy in Catholicism - in fact it was the very 325 CE Niceaen Synod we are talking about upthread was called to deal with this heresy. Conversely, I seriously do not believe that the RSV, or
any other translation of the Bible was created by closet Arianists determined to destroy the prinicple tenet of Christianity. (I remember once, ghost7584 actually cited the NIV as being inspired by the Devil, despite it actually being the most conservative Protestant version there is).
Woody said:
It's hard to find a bible scholar on this forum.
For bible discussions, I went over to theologywebsite.com (as a declared atheist I hasten to add) but they closed it down a couple of months ago!
They suggested christianity.com, there is a ginormous forum, and it was too much for me, 800 people online at a time! Also, I didn't particularly like this as the blurb for the very first subforum section you see:
FaithWalk - Christians Only
This folder is only for protestant conservative evangelical Christians who agree with the Statement of Faith and the Range of Doctrine.
But it seems to me it isn't
so hard to find biblical scholars here, even amongst the atheist members!
