Why are the Epistles Considered Scripture?

royallighting7 said:

I've always thought since the Jews were commanded to teach their children the law, they would have to have copies and teach their children to read very early.

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Have you any idea how much scrolls would have cost (and how fragile they were)?

The idea of individuals owning books being anything other than an extraordinary exception only dates from the age of printing.

When you wanted to read you would go down to the Synagogue and select from whatever they had. If there was a definitive set at all it would be in the Temple.

Consider this:

The Early European ages, around the time of Christ, had druids that kept the tales, histories and lineages of the peoples. If they jacked with them at all, they were killed.

Jews were meticulous too. When copying, if someone messed up one page, judged by templates, they burned it and the ones touching it and started over, to keep it holy. The folks doing the copying could not read, they were artists. Thus they couldn't affect the topic and words any.

Atheists used to argue that we didn't have any hebrew writings, just septuagint and it had been copied and corrupted. THEN came the aramaic scripts of Nag Hamadhi and showed the scripture was right to the word, well, maybe one said a instead of the, but they were consistent, no changes occured.

As anally retentive as they were about keeping it holy, to imagine them rewriting it or changing it, is like expecting a bird to swim the rest of it's life, under water, Oh, and live a normal life span.

royallighting7 said:

I've heard from some source that the time between the last Hebrew prophet and Christ's birth was about 400 years, but you say that Daniel was around 160BC. I'll have to do some research and learn more.
I wonder what kinda process the Jews went through to decide.


I've always thought since the Jews were commanded to teach their children the law, they would have to have copies and teach their children to read very early.

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heterodoxical said:

Atheists used to argue that we didn't have any hebrew writings, just septuagint and it had been copied and corrupted. THEN came the aramaic scripts of Nag Hamadhi and showed the scripture was right to the word, well, maybe one said a instead of the, but they were consistent, no changes occured.

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Um, I think you mean Qumran.

The evidence of Qumran in that regard is often mis-stated to prove what people want to prove. They quote the similarity for the books that are most similar (Isaiah, IIRC), while there is considerably more divergence in some other texts.

In practice we have three main streams of Old Testament text: the Masoritic (ie the surviving mainstream Jewish stream) where the oldest manuscripts are not that old, the LXX (the Greek translation) and the Qumran texts. Most of the time they are very close, sometimes one diverges from the other two, occasionally all three differ. We have no direct evidence from manuscripts substantially before Christ's time, nor do we know anything about how the texts were copied and preserved before that time (the knowledge of copying techniques often quoted is later rabbinic practice).

Cultures can preserve stories remarkably well - there is an aboriginal oral story from not far from here that clearly describes a local geographical event that occured over 10,000 years ago - but not all cultures do that in the same way or with the same effect.