I think it's a bit more simpler than the comments suggested so far.
True, apostasy is a very real part of the context. But in this introductory verse, the apostle is not addressing apostasy.
Instead, he chastises them for not having gone on to a …
God issued the punitive sentence for Cain. Cain replied that it was such it would lead to a revenge murder against him. But God in his graciousness put his protective hand upon him, so that no one would dare murder him under penalty of a sevenfold…
I think the replies here, as diverse as they are, pretty much reflect the state of scholarship in regard to this passage.
I'm not sure anyone can give an interpretation which is full-proof.
I'm perfectly happy with conceding that I don't understan…
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matt 1&version=68
This is the momentous text by Westcott and Hort (1880s) which looks very much like our standard critical edition today, but not exactly.
[quote author=Orthodox11 link=topic=6657.msg88945#msg88945 date=1212107310]
Since there have been quite a few threads asking for this and that verse in the original Greek, I thought I'd post this here so people are aware of, and have access to a rel…
There's so much more Old Testament than New Testament. The New Testament was written within a period 50 years, and the Old Testament over a stretch of a thousand years or so, and is so much larger.
If you were to make the New Testament proportiona…
[quote author=minagir link=topic=5982.msg86941#msg86941 date=1210203933]
well.....my problem is the "you who have been shown grace""
in our coptic church we say, "Rejoice O full of grace, the Lord is with you.", based on the coptic translation, "[co…
To answer an earlier question, NKJV is not based on the United Bible Society's Greek New Testament. We no longer have the exact Greek text that the KVJ and thus the NKJV was based upon. Closest to it would be the edition by Scrivener in the 1800s,…
I was a proof-reader for the NKJV when it first was published.
It's much better than the KJV, just because it has modern punctuation!
But it is based on the text of Erasmus' Greek New Testament in the early 1500s and so, only had 5 manuscripts out…
Like I said, the standard modern English translations all are based on something like the Alexandrian text type.
But the Greek text accounts for only one of the two types of differences in our New Testament. While some differences arise as a resul…
Yes, working on the full of grace text...asap.
But the differences in the manuscripts can now be classified by text types or families. Some manuscripts look more like one group, while other manuscripts look like a different group.
There are three…
I'm not Orthodox, and I don't want to suggest anything contrary to the Orthodox Church. However, I'm pretty good at Greek, plus I can manage my way through Coptic as well.
New Testament was written in Greek and translated into Coptic. Old Testame…
I'm not sure it is possible to be aware of all our sins. There are sins which are not entirely obvious. For example, let's say you read a chapter of your Bible today. Isn't that good? But perhaps you should have read two chapters. Or, perhaps y…
Is it official teaching of the Coptic Church that suicide sends a person to hell? If a person is a professing believer and has truly put his trust in Jesus, is he condemned to hell for killing himself? Further, aren't there exceptions? For exampl…
Basics: there are over 5700 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Since human scribes are prone to various copying mistakes, probably no two of them are perfectly alike. If two church scholars back in the 1200s met each other to discuss a coupl…
Most New Testament Greek scholars use a critical edition of the Greek called UBS4 or NA27. Both texts are the same.
Do Copts use this critical edition? It differs somewhat from the Greek text behind the King James Version. I've been told, althou…
Oops, I didn't paste the link to some digital Coptic Bible resources:
http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2006/09/coptic-digital-resources.html
In a question such as whether Adam knew, one must ask, What is the author's intention? Did the author intend to suggest Adam didn't know what he was eating? This is a much better question than, Can the text allow the possibility that he didn't k…
Thanks for all the kind words.
In regard to Old Testament, we do indeed have many, many manuscripts containing the Coptic Old Testament. The problem is that they are not of a single manuscript, but are almost always fragmentary. These fragments h…
I'm not good enough to produce an English translation of any substantially long Coptic text fit for anyone to read. I meant only to say that I've studied enough Coptic to have read Matthew plus part of Mark. I'm just a Coptic newbie!
Right, I get…
Thanks, all.
I've had the same frustrations with reading biblical texts from the remenkimi site. However, for whatever reason, I've found that the downloaded fonts do get imbedded into my word processor. Then, if I cut and paste a text from the r…
I would suggest that the number is symbolic. Note, for example, that the tribe of Dan is missing from the list. The idea is that every single last person who rightly belongs to the people of God will be saved, whether Jew or Gentile.
Thus, we sho…
Yep, been there, and this is helpful. However, today I'm looking for passages in 1,2 Samuel and 1,2 Kings (Greek: 1-4 Kings), 4 Maccabbees, Ezekiel, and Sirach.
Do Copts not have the Bible written in Copt?
If I were in Egypt, what version of the …