Hi,
I was specific. Here it is again. That was your original claim. That is not a minor correction, that is precisely the retreat to which I have referred. You have abandoned the original claim and now make it clear that it needs to be corrected. You have changed the claim from 'very largely accepted even by many in your "world of archaeology"' to 'has many supporters'
And you have postured incessantly about a minor tweak to avoid substantive discussions.
and you have stopped talking about the route of the Exodus and you're only talking about the identity of Sinai.
And that is a fabrication where you take the limitations of the time posting and falsely extrapolate. e.g. I was discussing the Wilderness of Shur, which is an Exodus route issue. I quoted from an Aqaba site that made some good points, yet was supporting the weaker idea of a crossing at the Straits of Tiran. I made reference to the Farrell Till idea that there might not be enough time in the Biblical chronology to get to Nuweiba. The issue of the columns was one I pointed out, to which I would like to return, and for overall studies I recommended the Lennart Muller book about the whole route. And the Galatians quote is about Arabia as the location, not the particular mountain. Very little of the discussion is only about the specific mountain, other than the Hershel Shanks quote, however that really seals the simple fact that the overall view of the question had a radical shift starting with the Ron Wyatt research and identification. If Jabal-al-Lawz is now seen by somebody well informed like Shanks as the best candidate, then the best candidate supports an Aqaba crossing to Arabia and not a Red Sea to Sinai crossing, nor a marsh crossing.
Here you made a blunder assertion about my position that was far more significant than my tweaking the concept of how to describe the significance of Ron Wyatt and the Sinai discovery (btw, I put 1970s, but I might have to check if there was anything substantive before the 1980s).
And that is one example of why I see your attempt as posturing more than substance.
What we're left with is 'Wyatt's identification of Sinai is considered possible by some archaeologists'. That's a far cry from 'the Exodus route he discovered (or, in a sense, rediscovered) is now very largely accepted even by many in your "world of archaeology"', and does not qualify for 'the most significant Biblical archaeology research of the 20th century. ' (snip more posturing repetition)
And I went into the route issues far more than you. Why don't you try to post substantively instead of posturing?
You clearly did not understand Merling's reference to the map (which you took out of context). That was not his argument for the location of Shur.
Merling did not give his supposed Egyptian supports, so it really boiled down to his only argument. "Look in your Bibles". Do you have Egyptian supports he omitted?
No, spoken like someone who knows what they're talking about. I feel no need to back Hort; his textual theories have long since been improved on..
Not to any substantive changes to the errant Hortian text, other than most versions replacing the absurd western non-interpolations.
The Critical Text remains in most all particulars the Hortian text.
(Allowing also that very occasionally Vaticanus blunders were abandoned due to papyri readings, and thus the Byzantine pure Bible readings were restored. In these cases showing the Vaticanus, and often Sinaiticus, propensity to error, and that usually by abbreviating text, the very common textual error.)
And if you are not backing Hort, then are you backing the Wilkinson attack on the Hortian errors?
The Alexandrian is the earliest, most widespread
This is a grossly ignorant statement. Earliest is very debatable, most widespread is simply nonsense. Now, either clearly support this claim or retreat and abandon it. What scholar claims the Alexandrian is the "most widespread" and what manuscripts and ECW are used for support?
and most well attested of all the text types, with greatest level of agreement with all four text types, since it shares textual agreement with the Western, Caesarean, and Byzantine types
Where do you get this material?
Here, to help you, let us take a question. Tell us two text types that have no sharing or textual agreement.
If you can not do that, then you are clearly flunking Logic 101 in making some sort of claim that could be made for any group. (Allowing the dubious idea that there is a meaningful concept of a Caesarean text-type.)
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The actual fact of the matter is that ultra-minority readings, with minimal auxiliary support, are rather common from Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, which is the base of the Alexandrian Critical Text. Such minimal support is a sign of textual weakness, and by comparison "distinctively Syrian" (Hort, ie. Byzantine) readings are few and far between.
Most Byzantine variants, when opposed by the minority Alexandrian manuscripts, have far better support among the auxiliary versions like the Old Latin and Vulgate and Syriac, and far better support among the ECW. You should spend a little time looking up specific variant discussions in the apparatus and then augmenting that with reading about the variants.
textual evidence shows that the Alexandrian text type remained popular until supplanted by the later Byzantine type from the 9th century onwards (2nd century papyrus fragments and quotations in Christian writings prove this type arose in the 2nd century, and it remained commonly used throughout the next two centuries)
The one clear evidence along this line is that gnostic Egypt (read the Kurt Aland warning) had a Vaticanus type text in P75 in the early third century. There is no widespread evidence of an Alexandrian text.
However, church writers-scholars like Irenaeus and Tertullian and Cyprian, knowledgeable in Greek and Latin, were generally not quoting the variants that are in the Alexandrian text of Vaticanus. And even Clement of Alexandria and Origen often were not quoting that text, and would about equally give us Byzantine variants rather than the Alexandrian (John William Burgon was good on this, and is supported by later material, check the discussions on the textual forums the last years, some of the discussion focused specifically on Clement of Alexandria).
Even Hort tells you that the Byzantine text had strong support back in the 300s, and he had to invent a phantom "Lucian recension" to try to pretend-block that from being genealogically earlier.
"the fundamental text of late extant Greek MSS generally is beyond all question identical with the dominant Antiochian (Byzantine) ,.. text of the second half of the fourth century... The Antiochian Fathers and the bulk of extant MSS ... must have had in the greater number of extant variations a common original either contemporary with or older than our oldest extant MSS"
books.google.com/books?id=4IAXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA92 The Byzantine is the latest of the text types to have emerged (there are no early papyrus texts of the Byzantine type,
You really need to read the Aland warning about the localized nature of the papyri, (The Text of the New Testament, 1995, p. 59) which is noted along with the gnostic influence in Egypt. Also you should understand about their "wild" nature. Overall, they have minor evidentiary significance, and have been fairly equally used as evidence or supposed proof by pro-Hortians and those opposed. e.g. See the David L. Brown article "Early Witnesses to the Received Text".
and it is not quoted in the early Christian writings until the 4th century);
Byzantine variants are consistently quoted by the early church writers, even the papyri that you emphasize fairly frequently support Byzantine and TR variants. The ECW far more so. Do you ever read ECW evidence on variants on John 1:18, 1 Timothy 3:16, the Mark ending, Acts 8:37 and 100 other variants? Even looking at the apparatus would help you avoid these errors. You could learn a lot just studying Mark ending and Pericope Adultera evidences.
no early translations were made from the Byzantine type (since it did not exist until later)
More nonsense. Read about the Gothic, which is 4th century and considered Byzantine. Even the Syriac Peshetta (misspelling due to bot action) is far more Byzantine than Alexandrian, on about a 3-1 basis. The debate continues as to when it was translated, and the case for as early as around 200 remains strong, the latest would be about 400 AD.
and this text type has the largest number of fraudulent additions and alterations, reflecting later Christian theological inventions.
This is a laughingly circular accusation, as it is totally dependent upon your other misinformation.
The Byzantine text has no witness among the early papyri, only A and 02 among the uncials
Total fabrication. At least read a site like Bob Waltz, which describes each uncial. Even UBS-4 lists about 9 Gospel manuscripts that are so consistently Byzantine that they omit them in the apparatus when they support the Majority variant - E F G H N O P Q Sigma.
Do you just make this stuff up as you go along?
no witness among the early versions, and no witness from the earliest patristic writings; instead we find it in Chrysostom and Theodoret.
You will find Byzantine text support from Irenaeus, Tetullian Cyprian, and virtually every Ante-Nicene writer. NONE of the writers are exclusively supporting ANY one textline, so your claims vaporize to nothing.
Why so many incorrect assertions?
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I'll give a partial answer to the question. Hortians like Bruce Metzger became very skilled in un-level-playing-field argumentation, combined with word-parsing. You can see a lot of that above. Even in the major writers, assertions were made about the ECW that would use a totally different (inconsistent) standard of analysis from one sentence to the next. Fortigurn is simply following the leaders in that regard, although he did add a few unique twists.
And when your sources are experts in word-parsing, and then you go out on your own in loose exposition, the earlier technique of deceptive word-parsing quickly morphs into assertions that are simply false, as above.
Yours in Jesus,
Steven Avery