Grace Seeker : It is enough for me that Thomas recognized and addressed Jesus as "my God", and Jesus accepted it (John 20:28)
---but what if like the poison verse , this verse was also added later ? Very few ( only 3 or 4 verses ) go against the entire Bible & u r putting ur hereafter only on those few verses & ignoring the rest of the teaching ?
Hope I don’t sound rude but is it wise to do so ?
You have made several statements here, and poised more than one question. Because they are interwoven it will take some time to unpack what you have said so that they can be properly discussed.
First, there is the implied accusation that it is unwise to base one's faith on just a few select verses. I would agree. I also would suggest that the same standard be applied to the Islam and the Qur'an. Would you concur with that? It is far to ease for people to misunderstand the meaning behind a single verse. Even when attempting to read it in context, it may be that because we are not from that time, that culture that we still do not fully grasp it the import of what it is saying. When those who know us well are known to sometimes misunderstand us, surely we can see how this could happen with something read in scriptures, even by those who might have been present at the time it was spoken. For this reason, I do not make it a habit of hanging my beliefs on any single passage.
Second, with regard to Jesus being God, I did say that the passage about Thomas is enough for me, but I also noted that there are many other passages I could have referred to that also convey the same idea. Thus you note that while I did not cite every one of those passages to you, that in formulating my belief I have remained consistant to what I already addressed in point #1.
Third, the integrity of the Johanine passage in which Thomas greets Jesus as "My Lord and my God." has never been seriously challenged, and I am aware of no textual variants with regard to this passage.
But this raises a larger question. I wonder if you understand the science of textual criticism with regard to the Bible? I suggest that you should. Most Christians would not, nor would they be expected to. Just as you have scholars for the work of interpretation in Islam, so we have scholars for the work of textual criticism with regard to the Bible. But it might help you to have some idea as to what they do in order to better understand the difference between questioning a passage such as the longer ending of Mark which included the comments about the poison and the passage in John where Thomas calls Jesus "my God" and Jesus accepts it.
I know that you are very much aware that the original autographs of the Bible have been lost to history (and probably crumbled into dust). Thus all that remains are copies and copies of copies. You probably are also aware, but haven't spent much time thinking about the fact that originally the bible was not written as a single book. But that means that when copies were made, they didn't always copy the whole Bible. Sometimes they only copied portions of it. The might have copied the Torah, or the Prophets, or just one prophet when dealing with the Tanakh. And with regards to what became the New Testament, the folks who handled the first copies might not have even thought of them as anything extra special at the time, but just a letter from a friend, something to share with other friends. Have you ever gotten a multipage letter from a friend while sitting in the midst of a bunch of other friends who knew the writer as well, and rather than reading the letter as a whole taken it apart and passed it around for all to read in bits and pieces. In the process of making copies, this could easily have happened with some of the material.
Knowing this is why I try not to get too bent out of shape when Muslims talk about the Bible being corrupted. I don't think it is in the way they mean, that it isn't trustworthy, but to try to say that nothing has happened to any of it is equally ludicrous, and not a postion that I would feel comfortable trying to defend. Indeed, in the process of copying and making copies of copies, the Bible (or portions of it) had been reproduced literally thousands of times (even tens of thousands of times) before the invention of the printing press. (One can hardly imagine how many copies of it exist today.) For the purpose of textual criticism. Some of the latter copies are preserved in full. Some of them where never meant by the writer to be used as part of a Bible, but were just copies from a Bible to be used as the lessons to be read in worship for a given Sunday's lesson. (These sorts of copies are called lectionaries.) And of course some of what we have found are but the tattered remains of very early copies, where sometimes more is lost than remains. Each one of these early handwritten manuscripts, no matter what its original purpose or how small the piece of it left, has been given a name or a number.
When publishers prepare to print a Bible, the first thing they do -- long before translating -- is try to determine what the original autographs actually where. In other words they need to determine among the tens of thousands of copies and copies of copies, and passages copied into lectionaries, and small fractions of copies that exist just as scraps, etc... what the original text actually said.
It is of course a huge task, and we are fortunate that there are people who make it their life's work to study these things. But it isn't quite as bad as it might at first sound. The good news is that for the vast majority of the scriptures there really aren't any questions or doubts. Copy after copy after copy, even those that were simply people quoting passages in letters to friends and writing them for lectionary readings say exactly the same thing. The passage about Thomas calling Jesus "My Lord and my God." from John 20:28 is one of those type of passages.
But the passage about drinking poison and handling snakes in Mark 16 is not. With that passage we have what are called variant readings. And in fact, the ending of Mark 16 is one of the most contested passages with variant readings in the entire Bible.
Variant readings can occur in several ways. And once they have occurred, unless you have the original to compare it with, you probably wouldn't realize that it was in error.
One of the drawbacks of making copies is that once a mistake has been made, unless it is so obvious as to be corrected, it will appear in all the copies of that copy from now on. Because of this, consideration must be given to the age of the manuscripts that contain a particular reading as well as the number of manuscripts that contain it. If an error is made in an early manuscript, all the copies from it will contain that error. If it was an often copied manuscript, there will be many manuscripts that contain that error, so the true text cannot be arrived at by counting manuscripts.
But with the Bible these copyists errors tended to group themselves geographically to the general regions in which the text that was being copied existed and was copied over and over again. Today, we have access not just to one text, but to texts from all over the world, and by comapring them are able to work backwards with a high degree of certainty to what the original text most probably was. (If you would be interested in learning more about this process, I recommend the following site:
An Introduction To Textual Criticism.)
Of course, "probably" is the operative word. With most passages, because there are no variants, we have complete certainty. With others, because the variant is something as simple as failing to dot an "i", we have every bit as much as if there were no variant at all.
One of the jobs of the scholar of textual criticism is to help us make a determination of exactly what level of confidence we can have in any given text as rightly reflecting the original autograph or not. Different people have different personal rating systems. But one of the most common is to rate them like with grades in school: A, B, C, and D. A passage that has no variants simply isn't rated at all, as there is no question as to what it was. But when there exists 2 or more different possibilities, each is graded as to the level of confidence that the textual scholar is willing to assign to it after comparing it with the other possibilities. That passage to which the highest level of certainty can be assigned is the one from which the translation used by the publisher will be made. However, sometimes, with a famous passages such as the Mark 16 passage, the publisher may wish to include a translation of the famous passage even though it is doubted and indicate such by way of a footnote. So read your footnotes. But also let that information be a hint to you. If you are reading a Bible and see a footnote that says: "other ancient manuscritps read
xyz" it is telling you that the
xyz is actually considered less likely than what was printed. It is put in there for information purposes only, not because reading the footnoted passages will give you a more accurate understanding of the original text.
What any of this has to do with the actual topic of this thread, I don't know. Perhaps, if you have more questions along this line, you should make them and I can answer them in a thread where such questions are more appropriate.
