Actually it is very much the truth as Norman Geisler points out in his book cited in post #1 of this thread. Here is a link to that book. After it downloads hit the arrows at the top until you get to page 228. Those outside of the US will not be able to download the contents of the book. But you can get a used copy of the 448 page book on Amazon for $4.
The Demon haunted world starts at $4.39.
And
Why People Believe Weird Things is at $4.60.
And a new copy of cosmos is at
$4.16
And if you are looking for something about Religion,
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God is at half that price...
Simon goes and buy a couple.
Sorry. Where was I?
Ha, yeah, that there might be wiser way to spend your money, that's all.
Fixed the quote for you DOC.
Page 228 tells us that the New Testament was quoted so much by 2nd and 3rd century writers (over 36,000 times) that you could reconstruct the entire NT (except for 11 verses) just from their non-biblical writings.
That immediately rose my suspicion.
First because,
note for the serious reader: the following sentence is a bit of ad hominem or "poisoning the well", please skip to the next sentence] well, it's Geisler, if the boy mentioned the sky being blue, it'd be enough for me to get the kind of lingering foubt that requires a call NASA, just to check...
But, mostly, it is because it goes quite against what I know and read...
Please note that, as
Pizzadeliveryninja mentioned, and for the reasons he mentioned, the idea,
advanced by DOC, that this would invalidate Ehrman's argument, is mistaken.
Anyway. The claim, as it stands, is unsupported. Neither Geisler nor
Remnants cite any directly which is strange. Scholarly practice in this case would have been to examine the original work, presumably, an article from an academic journal, to confirm that they were reported fairly and then quote the original research.
This strongly suggest dubious scholarship.
Indeed, looking even a bit deeper into this I found where the story appear to have originated, in "
The Life, Times, And Missionary Enterprises, Of The Rev. John Campbell" where it is attributed to a a scottish judge from the XVIIIth century, named David Dalrymple (who bore the title of Lord Hailes).
Well,’ said Lord Hailes, ‘that question quite accorded with the turn or taste of my antiquarian mind. On returning home, as I knew I had all the writings of those centuries, I began immediately to collect them, that I might set to work on the arduous task as soon as possible.’ Pointing to a table covered with papers, he said, ‘There have I been busy for these two months, searching for chapters, half-chapters, and sentences of the New Testament, and have marked down what I have found, and where I found it, so that any person may examine and see for himself. I have actually discovered the whole New Testament from those writings, except seven (or eleven) verses (I forget which), which satisfied me that I could discover them also.’ ‘Now,’ said he, ‘here was a way in which God concealed or hid the treasure of his Word, that Julian, the apostate emperor, and other enemies of Christ who tried to extirpate the Gospels from the world, never would have thought of; and though they had, they could never have effected their destructionWell,’ said Lord Hailes, ‘that question quite accorded with the turn or taste of my antiquarian mind. On returning home, as I knew I had all the writings of those centuries, I began immediately to collect them, that I might set to work on the arduous task as soon as possible.’ Pointing to a table covered with papers, he said, ‘There have I been busy for these two months, searching for chapters, half-chapters, and sentences of the New Testament, and have marked down what I have found, and where I found it, so that any person may examine and see for himself. I have actually discovered the whole New Testament from those writings, except seven (or eleven) verses (I forget which), which satisfied me that I could discover them also.’ ‘Now,’ said he, ‘here was a way in which God concealed or hid the treasure of his Word, that Julian, the apostate emperor, and other enemies of Christ who tried to extirpate the Gospels from the world, never would have thought of; and though they had, they could never have effected their destruction
The problem with that is obvious, it is an unsupported anecdote. We have no way of confirming that Dalrymple's findings were correct or that, even, he did truly say that. The "Life and Time", after all, was not published until almost 50 years after the death of Lord Hailes and, from what I read, immediately arose suspicions.
The whole affair is detailled in quite a lot of detail
here but, in my opinion, what we have is an unsupported annecdote (I suspect, an example of a pious lie) that has been cheerfully and uncritically discovered by some apologetist and has then been uncritically copied in the apologetist community (in, to use Rincewind bon-mot, quite an incestuous manner) without any serious regard as to its correctness.
I have seen similar phenomenon happen in the evolution denialist community...
As far as I am concerned, it is an urban legend propagated by confirmation seeking believers, not very different of that of the
missing day or
Hole to hell.
Now, I have been wrong before (once, in 1982) but I'd need to be pointed out at some actual scholarly work rather than a second-hand quote about a doubtful anecdote...
