Being a theist has nothing to do with it if you are presenting logical arguments. I've read some of
Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus" (Paperback) by Timothy Paul Jones (Author)
He presents logical arguments in presenting his case. Read the book and then show me something he says that doesn't make sense.
Well, DOC. Your definition of "logical Argument" is once again humorously faulty.
I've read the first thirty some pages. It took until page 31 before even the first argument against Erhman's point was made. The first 30 pages were nothing by exposition of how smart Erhman is and how it was right, but wrong.
On page 31, one is finally presented with a summary of arguments to be made in the book. Unfortunately, even these are so fundementally flawed as to be unsavable from any amount of exposition.
The over arching argument, to which all other arguments function as mainly premises, is The argument is that even though there are errors in the bible, and we do not have original manuscripts, we can still rely on the bibles we have as a reliable source for god's inerrant truth. As stated "The inspired truth of Scripture does not depend on word-for-word agreement among all biblical manuscripts or between parallel accounts of the same event. "
The premises to this argument are:
1.) "I do not believe that one passage of Scripture ever directly contradicts other passages."
2.) "Assuming god DID inspire the original New Testament writings and he protected those writings from error, are the available copies of the new testament manuscripts sufficiently accurate for us to grasp the truth...? I beleive the answer to this question is yes."
3.) "The ancient manuscripts were not copied perfectly. Yet they were copied with enough accuracy for us to comprehend what the original authors intended."
4.) "To the casual reader, Misquoting Jesus could imply that the early copyists were careless and lacking in literary skill."
5.)"So which is it? Have centuries of careless copying tainted the texts beyond recovery? Or are the New testament documents suffiently reliable for us to discover the truth...?
The failures of these premises lie in the following:
To point 1: it's an assertion and one that does not bear out in reality. Indeed, The Jesus birth story is on example that perfectly demonstrates this contradiction. The genealogy of Jesus is another example.
2.) Affirming the consequent.
3.) Affirming the consequent.
4.) Strawman argument. Bart in no way implies that they were merely careless errors. Note the weasel words of "To the casual reader...could imply" this is the height of intellectual dishonesty. This author isn't arguing against Erhman's arguments but the presumed Miss-understanding of Erhman's argument.
5.) False Dichotomy.
So, to summarize, Misquoting truth is loaded with logical fallacies and confused reasoning. Indeed, it even contains a clearly dishonest misrepresentation of Bart's argument as a smoke screen against having to address the actual argument.
