Scriptural Parity
The Voyager probe is probably somewhere out there in the Oort cloud by now. Do you remember the Voyager probe? They referred to it in Star Trek I. Not a Trek fan?
Well what does this have to do with scripture? It is a passing thought that I had. Let’s consider a satellite or say a space probe 100 gajillion miles out there in outer space somewhere. NASA needs to be able to send and receive messages to this space probe right? Well sending may not be a big deal. After all, we can just build bigger beefier transmitters I suppose. Wait a second. Isn’t there a point to which the signal will eventually degrade to the noise floor? You know, that point at which a radio station starts to get staticy? That’s when the noise similar to what may show up on a television with no antenna has the same amount of power as the signal and it sounds all static. Well, this concept is not all that different in interstellar communications. Information gets sent and eventually after about 10000000 light years or something the signal may fade in strength or have a few static pulses in there that overwrite what was actually sent. Instead of a thrustre firing away from Saturn, suddenly the Voyager probe goes crashing into Saturn’s rings and we have the Solar System Protection Agency on our hands.
Well anyway, those clever communications scientists devised a way to encode extra “recovery” information into the signal. That is, the signal can be rebuilt from itself. Sort of like sending spare parts in the signal. If one of the parts gets broken, you can use the rest of the parts to reconstruct the signal. Make sense? If not, go study parity on wikipedia.
This is the question I have in my mind. We know that there are tons of variations in the manuscripts that form our modern Bibles. No biggie. They say that they are 95-96% in agreement. Okay, that works great for most stuff – but sometimes there are big questions – for example the Great Commission. There are those who say that the Great Commission was actually a scribal interpolation or something like that (scribe adding something to a manuscript to support their own pet doctrine).
So my question really comes back to integrity of the scriptures. I suspect that God in His infinite wisdom would have perhaps built in “parity” into the scriptures. Taken from what we call the Old Testament, this would refer to the whole idea of two or three witnesses to confirm a fact. Look it up. It is somewhere in the law.
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