Cicero wrote:Thanks Aristotle Smith for the concise summary of the issue. I tried to find an apologetic response on FAIR's site but was not able to locate one; do you happen to know the typical response?
This is the apologetic to the text-critical issues by Royal Skousen.I've never made it through the whole thing, I keep getting stuck at the following and giving up:
Royal Skousen wrote:There are a number of serious problems with Larson's argument. Consider first his statement that his selection of "all the major late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical editions of the Greek New Testament" represents "a diverse range of critical positions" (p. 119). What Larson fails to describe here is the basic unity of all these critical editions, that their practice derives from a single school of textual criticism whose foundation was established by the German scholar Johann Jakob Griesbach in the late eighteenth century. The basic assumption of this school is that in choosing between competing readings, one selects the more difficult and/or shorter reading, when no other explanation seems apparent. Given this assumption, we should not be surprised at the "agreement" between these different critical editions.
Of course, Larson simply assumes that the results of modern New Testament textual criticism are correct and lead us back to the original text of the New Testament. There are several problems here. First of all, there is no way he can demonstrate that the reconstructed text of the critics is in fact the original text. The text that has been reconstructed is based largely on third-to-sixth-century manuscripts, not the original autographs.
In other words, the Book of Mormon is correct because scholars do text criticism wrong. Never mind that text-criticism is the least theologically driven part of studying the Bible (I would say it plays no part, but it's probably played a minor role once or twice) and uses the same techniques as do scholars studying Homer, Virgil, or any other document.
The source critical problems are similar to the Deutero-Isaiah problems so the apologetic will be similar. You have to argue something crazy like Jesus really said the final phrase in the Lord's prayer, but then the oldest sources left it out, but the tradition survived until wiser scribes put it back in the proper place, even though all previous scribes had left it out. Whatever.
