the Critical Text (Westcott-Hort recension) statistical charade of false %s began with Hort and continues today

[Steven Avery]

sister threads

the Critical Text (Westcott-Hort recension) statistical charade of false %s began with Hort and continues today
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.973/post-2149

statistical illiteracy in textual scholarship - Daniel Wallace struggles with numbers
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.294

statistical illiteracy in textual scholarship - Norman Geisler struggles with numbers
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.977

We might add one on how Wallace corrected the really absurd errors of Geisler et. al. on the number of variants.
See also:

statistical charlatans used to support Bible text confusions
https://www.purebibleforum.com/index.php/threads/a.492

The statistical charade tries to pretend various things.

a) the text is settled 98%, 99.5%, etc.
b) there is not much difference with the Received Text and the Critical Text

 

[Steven Avery]

First we will simply give some references.

Show Jack McElroy page.

Facebook - Jack McElroy
King James Bible Debate
https://www.facebook.com/groups/21209666692/permalink/10153348088886693/

Claims like the 99.5% one (remember Ivory Soap) are really simply demonstrations of statistical illiteracy. I highlighted one such example of "How to Lie With Statistics" from a paper from Daniel Wallace. You are right about the supposed little leaven, but there are 1,000s of hortian corruptions in 8,000 verses including about 45 verses missing in the Critical Text. And these are often highly salient doctrinal corruptions, like the Mark ending, John 1:18, 1 Timothy 3:16, the heavenly witnesses, and much more. The .5% number is simply ... statistical illiteracy.

There is a whole mangle upon mangle comedy of statistical errors here.

Hort gave you this turgid nonsense:
https://books.google.com/books?id=gZ4HAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA2

"The proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt is very great, not less, on a rough computation, than seven eighths of the whole. The remaining eighth therefore, formed in great part by changes of order and other comparative trivialities, constitutes the whole area of criticisrn. If the principles followed in the present edition are sound, this area may be very greatly reduced. Recognising to the full the duty of abstinence from peremptory decision in cases where the evidence leaves the judgement in suspense between two or more readings, we find that, setting aside differences of orthography, the words in our opinion still subject to doubt only make up about one sixtieth of the whole New Testament."​

​

1/60 of the NT would be the equivalent of about 120 full verses, a reduction from the actual thousands of significant variants. I'll see if I can find the lineage to the later and greater absurdities.

This type of nonsense quote became popular

Biblical Hermenutics: A Treatise on the Interpretation of the Old and New Testaments
Milton Spenser Terry
https://books.google.com/books?id=UQ8_AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA132

Maurice Robinson has been involved with these numbers, in a much stronger way, starting here.

New Testament Textual Criticism: The Case for Byzantine Priority
Maurice A. Robinson
http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/v06/Robinson2001.html

I'll plan on extending a whole section.

 

[Steven Avery]

Hort to Heide - let's deceive the Christians pure Bible beleivers

James Snapp dealt with some of the Hortian stuff, but did not nail the circularity.

[textualcriticism] 99.5% Reliability and the "Dark Age" of the Text
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/textualcriticism/conversations/topics/4200 On Behalf Of James Snapp, Jr.

Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 3:21 PM
​

Dr. Ehrman:

The claim that the revised text securely preserves 99.9% of the original text can be traced to F.J.A. Hort, who wrote in 1881,

"The books of the New Testament as preserved in extant documents assuredly speak to us in every important respect in language identical with that in which they spoke to those for whom they were originally written,"

"The proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt is very great, not less, on a rough computation, than seven eighths of the whole. The remaining eighth therefore, formed in great part by changes of order and other comparative trivialities, constitutes the whole area of criticism,"

"The amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation is but a small fraction of the whole residuary variation, and can hardly form more than a thousandth part of the entire text."

You asked how Fadie came up with the claim about 99.5% number.

Well, how did Hort come up with the claim about 99.9%? By conducting textual criticism upon the extant witnesses and drawing conclusions about how much of the text could be securely reconstructed (99.9%) and how much of the text could not be securely reconstructed (.1%).

Here is where K. Martin Heide accepted the Hort charade. Let's watch the shell game.

The Reliability of the New Testament
Assessing the Stability of the Transmitted Texts of the New Testament and the Shepherd of Hermas (2011)
K. Martin Heide
https://books.google.com/books?id=UaRkR3WI0rYC&pg=PA126

How stably or unstably was the text of the New Testament transmitted? The different editions of the Greek text of the New Testament already provide us with a rough indication for estimating the stability of the text. Almost 5,000 of the 7,947 verses of the New Testament, as contained in the major text-critical editions in the last 150 years (Tischendorf, Westcott-Hort, von Soden, Vogels, Merk, Bover, Nestle-Aland), show no differences at all in the text.1 Can the stability of the New Testament text be defined more accurately?2 After thirty years of intensively researching the text, Westcott and Hort provided the following evaluation of the New Testament transmission: according to their representation, at least seven-eighths of the text is accurate and requires no further text-critical research.3 Clarity exists therefore in this portion of the transmitted text. The outstanding 12.5 percent or one-eighth remains subject to textual criticism. This 12.5 percent, however, consists mostly of minor variants with no alteration of the meaning of the text itself and, according to Westcott and Hort, has already been sufficiently clarified. This in turn leaves a marginal percentage (one-sixtieth of the text that, according to Westcott and Hort, is unclear and should be regarded as subject to further research.

How dumb and circular can you get.

Only include editions that omit the Mark ending, the Pericope Adulterae, "Father forgive them" and tons of historic and well-supported scripture, and then begin an analysis from that point.

As a humorous aside, ignore the fact that two Tischendord editions had about 1,000 differences, his text changed with his Sinaiticus veneration.

The textcrits take the seminarians and Bible believers for fools. The seminarians generally live up to the expectations.

=========================

(Searching for "one sixtieth" or "seven eighths of the whole" or "a thousandth part" and "Hort" finds similar examples. K. Martin Heide is one of the brighter textcrits, yet he still deceives his readers completely on this issue.)

My hope is to come back to this and put it together in a more orderly form.
And I do believe the Heide quote is sufficient to show the ongoing deception.

 

[Steven Avery]

Will Kinney weighs in on some of these points.

Are all bible versions 99.5% the same?

https://web.archive.org/web/20180712115117/http://brandplucked.webs.com/arebibles995same.htm

 

[Steven Avery]

Facebook

Scarlett Clay

📜The vast array of manuscripts has enabled textual scholars to accurately reconstruct the original biblical text with more than 99.9 percent accuracy. #apologetics

business.facebook.com

■The vast array of manuscripts has enabled
textual scholars to accurately reconstruct the
original biblical text with more than 99.9
percent accuracy. #apoloqetics

A.T. Robertson

Another noted Greek scholar, A.T. Robertson, said the real concern of the controversies surrounding the original wording
of the New Testament is on "a thousandth part of the entire text."35
Furthermore, the one-tenth of a percent in dispute does not influence any foundational belief.

======================

Hoeksema

It is in this connection that I said we should keep the proper perspective. In the first place, lest anyone imagine that this makes all of the New Testament highly doubtful, it should be emphasized, on the contrary, that the New Testament is extremely well preserved. A.T. Robertson, An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament Broadman Press, 1925, writes, pp. 69, 70:

But the wealth of manuscript evidence is a great blessing and helps us to restore the original text. There is but a single manuscript that preserves most of the Annals of Tacitus. Only one manuscript gives the Greek Anthology. The poems of Catullus come to us in three manuscripts later than the fourteenth century A.D. The best attested texts like those of Sophocles, Euripedes, Vergil, and Cicero can only count the manuscripts that give them by the hundreds. And these are from 500 to 1600 years after the autographs were written. The manuscripts of AeSchylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Thucydides are 1400 years after the death of the authors. Those of Catullus and Euripides are 1600. Those for Plato are 1300 and those for Demosthenes are 1200. Only Vergil has one manuscript in the fourth century and two in the fifth (cf. Kenyon, op. cit. p. 5).
But this is not all. There are some 8,000 manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate and at least 1,000 for the other early versions. Add over 4,000 Greek manuscripts and we have 13,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament. Besides all this, much of the New Testament can be reproduced from the quotations of early Christian writers. It was obviously impossible for the New Testament to perish from the earth unless the world itself were to be destroyed. Even then much of it will go to heaven in the minds and hearts of the saints.

But, secondly, of how much importance are the textual variations? One scholar, Nestle, sets the number of textual variations at about 150,000. He tells us that only one-twentieth of these has any significant authority to support it. But, mind you, of this one twentieth there is again only one-twentieth which is of any significance for the meaning of Holy Scripture. This already reduces that 150,000 to about 375 significant variations in the whole of the New Testament! Add to this the fact that there is no single article of faith which depends on these variant readings! And add to this the fact that even of these 375, many are of very small importance! Another scholar, Hort, tells us that “the amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation . . . can hardly form more than a thousandth part of the entire text.”

Geisler

From God To Us Revised and Expanded

Where did the Bible come from? How do we know the right books are in the Bible? Does the Bible contain errors? What are the oldest copies we have of the Bible? How do we know that the Bible hasn't been changed over the years? Why are there so many translations of the Bible, and which one should...

books.google.com