Atheist Intellectual Dishonesty 101

Here's another popular picture Village Atheists are posting all over the internet:

Now let's talk about what the author of this cute little pic failed to mention:

1. There are no original manuscripts for most of the works of ancient Western antiquity, including the Greek Philosophers and the Roman Historians.

2. Some of the oldest New Testament manuscripts are dated to the 2nd Century. A recently discovered fragment of the Gospel of Mark has been dated to the 1st Century (right after the Crucifixion).

3. 75% of the King James Edition of the Bible is actually based on the work of William Tyndale, who was one of the most gifted scholars that ever lived. 

3. The reason the King James Translation didn't use the most ancient texts and papyri is because most of them hadn't been discovered, yet. Modern comparisons of the King James version to these older manuscripts show that the Authorized Version is still one of the best English Bibles. The existing codexes that Tyndale, and later the King James team relied on, were good copies of the earlier texts.

4. There are more like 5700 ancient texts (not 8000), and the reason they're not all alike are due to differences in spelling some words, copyist errors in punctuation, or the omission of some words (because copyists usually duplicated texts that were in poor condition).

Dr. Craig Blomberg, Bible Scholar at the Denver Seminary, sums up the majority of the differences:

"The vast majority of these variants involve variant spellings of words that do not affect meaning whatsoever (and the largest percentage of spelling variants involve words with a movable nu at their end—i.e., they can be spelled with or without the Greek letter for the n sound).  Huge numbers of variants also involve the accidental omission of a letter or duplication of a letter or omission of a word or inversion of word order of two or three words or improvement of syntax, style, grammar or diction, where it is easy to determine what the original reading was."


Dr. Blomberg's blog post on this subject can be found here:

http://www.denverseminary.edu/craig-blombergs-blog-new-testament-musings/400000-textual-variants-in-the-new-testament-alone/

In fact, the large number of surviving texts means there are plenty to compare each other to, which makes it easier to weed out mistakes and determine what the originals most likely contained.

This is a far cry from being "contradictory". In fact, when you omit these known differences, the actual number of questionable variants between texts is surprisingly small, and no Orthodox Christian doctrinal issue is in question. Any good Study Bible makes note of these variants in the footnotes sections.

This little criticism from the Village Atheist crowd proves once more that ignorance is contagious, especially on the internet, where few Atheists contend the veracity of what other Atheists post online.