Bill Pratt | April 8, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman wrote in his book, Misquoting Jesus, that his Christian beliefs began to fall apart when he realized that there was a mistake, an error, in the Gospel of Mark. Now, I think that the alleged mistake is not a mistake, but let’s assume for a [...]
Bill Pratt | October 26, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt We don’t know. Scholars divide sharply on this issue, although it seems that the majority of New Testament scholars believe that verses 9-20 were not part of the original Gospel written by Mark. Why? Because the two oldest manuscripts containing Mark’s Gospel (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) do not contain these verses, church [...]
Bill Pratt | August 12, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Textual critics are the scholars who study the manuscript evidence for the New Testament and determine which readings among the various manuscripts are likely to be the original (see previous post for background). Although the vast majority of the variants are simple spelling or word order errors made by copyists, there [...]
Bill Pratt | August 8, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Christians are often confused about this question, so I want to give a quick summary. The 27 books of the New Testament (NT) were originally written in the common Greek language of the first century. They were all hand-written, likely on papyrus. These hand-written manuscripts were then copied, by hand, for [...]
