WIST Quotations

Ehrman, Bart -- Misquoting Jesus, Introduction (2005)

Dave — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 15:50:31 +0000

How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes — sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.

Bart D. Ehrman (b. 1955) American Biblical scholar, author
Misquoting Jesus, Introduction (2005)
(Source)

Ehrman, Bart -- “The Textual Reliability of the New Testament: A Dialogue between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace,” Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in Faith and Culture (2008-04-04/05)

Dave — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 18:50:06 +0000

The question is then how can we decide what anybody in the ancient world said. We can’t. We wish we could. It would be nice if we could. You would like to think that because you can go to the store and buy an edition of Plato that you are actually reading Plato, but the problem is that we just do not have the kind of evidence that we need in order to establish what ancient authors actually wrote. In some cases, we have all these data, and sometimes we have just one manuscript. Sometimes we have a manuscript that was written two-thousand years later, and that’s it! So, as much as we would like to be able to say we know what ancient authors actually wrote, we often just do not know.

Bart D. Ehrman (b. 1955) American Biblical scholar, author
“The Textual Reliability of the New Testament: A Dialogue between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace,” Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in Faith and Culture (2008-04-04/05)
(Source)

Reprinted in Robert Stewart, ed., The Reliability of the New Testament (2011).

Acheson, Dean -- “Acheson’s Rule of Bureaucracy”

Dave — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:24:15 +0000

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) American statesman
“Acheson’s Rule of Bureaucracy”
(Source)

Quoted in Alan Otten, "Politics and People: More Rules," Wall Street Journal (1977-09-08). Paul Dickson's The Official Rules (1978), indicates that it was recalled by Harold P. Smith for Otten.