I will share my initial response (below). Feel free to add or correct:Just read this (see below) from a guy named Marc Winter. Was curious what you think and if he's correct in this assessment:
"Read the New Testament with these thoughts firmly affixed in your minds. The ONLY authenticated and verified text, written by the authentic identified author in the New Testament is the original Pauline letters; 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians and Philemon. 1 Corinthians 14:33b-35 was inserted by a copyist, we have copies before and after showing its insertion.
"As in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak. Rather, let them be in submission, as in fact the law says. 35 If they want to find out about something, they should ask their husbands at home, because it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church."
"Practically all non fundie scholars agree that 1-2 Timothy and Titus were forged, written in Paul's name after his death, and that with spurious intent."
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What's your response to this?
Keith
Hi Keith,
These are not new or unusual claims to come from skeptics and from more liberally-minded scholars. The thing to bear in mind is that the scholars who make such claims are not better-trained, better-informed, or less agenda-driven than are a great number of other scholars, who, looking at the same evidence, reach opposite conclusions.
This sounds like Bart Ehrmann-type of stuff. He is a famous scholar, not because of his superiority over other scholars, but because of the controversial claims he makes about the Bible, and the media's love for quoting and promoting him. He actually is somewhat naive, it seems to me. If you read his story as to why he left behind his former evangelicalism, it is clear that his evangelicalism was of a rather unsophisticated and superstitious variety—easy to abandon, with the acquisition of a little knowledge of textual issues. What's is amazing about his story is that he claims to have gotten through both Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College before gaining an understanding of textual issues that a well-read teenaged Christian can easily acquire. He was a certain kind of fundamentalist, and what he learned disproved his variety of fundamentalism—which he mistook for a disproof of Christianity and the New Testament, in general.
I believe he is very mistaken—but not because of any failure on his part to look at the evidence. The evidence is out there for any scholar to see. The question is that of what prejudices the examiner brings to his assessment of the data.
My response is that the evidence can be made to fit more than one theory, depending on underlying presuppositions. If one presupposes that a sinister group of religious controllers of the manuscripts was motivated to foist tampered-with, or false, documents upon a naive and ignorant constituency, this guiding principle will certainly yield a cynical opinion about the origin of the documents.
On the other hand, if your beginning presupposition is that Christians are generally interested in honesty and in truth, and that those who preserved the scriptures in the earliest centuries actually knew who had written and passed them down to them, and that they had nothing to gain (but martyrdom) by promoting a religion they knew to be built upon falsehood, then the evidence is capable of yielding very different conclusions.
An age of cynicism and (justifiable) disillusionment with the institutional church has inclined unbelieving western scholars of this generation to take the more cynical approach, without compelling necessity. From the fact that the church has exhibited corruption and power-abuse for many centuries, they extrapolate backwards to a vision of the founders having the same evil intentions. They forget that, for the first three centuries (during which most of the New Testament canon was agreed upon), there was no opportunity for power-brokering in the church. The church was not in any sense politically "empowered" until the mid fourth century. This was to late for corrupt leaders to start introducing new forgeries into the canon. Those who were selfless enough to accept leadership of the flock, in those early centuries, were generally led themselves to the arena and the lions.
Blessings!
Steve