Acts 17:6 (New Living)
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Not finding them there, they dragged out Jason and some of the other believers instead
and took them before the city council.
“Paul and Silas have caused trouble all over the world,” they shouted,
“and now they are here disturbing our city, too.

From the owner of another website forum:

From: Daniel B. Wallace ...
To: ...
Sent: Sunday, December 21, 2014 at 04:00:22 PM EST
Subject: your comments on Aramaic NT at danielbwallace.com

I have allowed you to post several lengthy comments about an Aramaic original NT at danielbwallace.com, but it is my policy not to let this blogsite be a place for an individual to advance an ideology or use the site for propaganda. So, you have posted your last comment on this blog.

dbw

Stephen said

And it gets to the larger question of authority. Whom do you trust? The old nobly democritizing idea of the individual believer interpreting the scriptures by his own lights comes a cropper by fracturing into sects innumberable. If it's "true" then why can't people agree on what it means? And when scholars agree on what it means then why is it usually so different than what many Christians seem to think it means? I'm not objecting to the scholarly enterprise. Just pointing out that it seems to rather undermine the idea of a textual revelation.
  

Who fractured Christianity into sects innumerable, if not John the Revelator? Payback time arrived... His book actually dropped from heaven, but he is done, condemned. People will have to listen, better sooner, then later...

Stephen said
Sola Scriptura has always seemed self-contradictory simply because its hard to imagine conditions under which we could ever rely on the scriptures only. And even if you read the ancient languages you're still relying on the idea of the "preferred" text, a compilation of all the best guesses of generations of scholars (with no idea of their individual religious convictions of course).
Am I the only one who found the idea that there is no actual Bible in existence, that it is in fact an artificial creation, utterly flabbergasting? Scholars take this for granted; when I asked Prof Ehrman about it he seemed a bit mystified by the objection.
I think a lot of believers imagine there is a hermetically sealed vault somewhere - perhaps a mile under the Vatican - where the proto-manuscript is safeguarded, and all the various translations derive from that pristine original. But if you were really going to house the Bible in one spot you would need a huge warehouse with tens of thousands of shelves, each dedicated to scraps of codices and scrolls and papyri. In a very real sense what we call the "Bible" doesn't exist.
And it gets to the larger question of authority. Whom do you trust? The old nobly democritizing idea of the individual believer interpreting the scriptures by his own lights comes a cropper by fracturing into sects innumberable. If it's "true" then why can't people agree on what it means? And when scholars agree on what it means then why is it usually so different than what many Christians seem to think it means? I'm not objecting to the scholarly enterprise. Just pointing out that it seems to rather undermine the idea of a textual revelation.
  

atrocious Greek grammar in the Greek translation of Revelation
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Greek Revelation’s mistranslation of the original Aramaic for Rev 2:22 and Rev 10:1
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mistranslation at Greek Rev 1:13
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================
Tau and Omega

The book of Revelation was originally written in not Greek, but rather Aramaic.
When the Aramaic Revelation got translated into Greek, the translator likely interpreted the ‘tau’ as already being an omega, and put down simply the letter Ὦ.

Revelation 1:8 (Aramaic Bible in Plain English)
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I am The Alap and The Tau,
says THE LORD JEHOVAH God,
he who is and has been and is coming, The Almighty.

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Egō Ἐγώ I
eimi εἰμι am
to τὸ the
Alpha Ἄλφα Alpha
kai καὶ and
to τὸ the
Ō Ὦ Omega

see
'Raphael Lataster,' _Was the New Testament Really Written in Greek?: A Concise Compendium of the Many Internal and External Evidences of
Aramaic Peshitta Primacy_ (March 2008), 118-120
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I read something the night before last in David Clines' ** you do not have permission to see this link ** on Job that is relevant but instead of posting it here, it might be better as part of a new thread either on Job, which I've been considering, or more likely one that talks about the reception, interpretation, adaptation, and perhaps translation of texts.

I saw Les Misérables in London soon after it opened, loved it, and then read the novel by Victor Hugo, in my opinion an overly long, rather boring novel that I had to force myself to finish. I know many of you will strongly disagree, but that doesn't matter, it was my reaction to the original. I loved the way in which the playright and others involved in the production adapted, revised, and distilled a great story into a beautiful and moving musical. Eventually the movie version came out and resisted seeing it for years because I didn't like what I heard of Amanda Seyfried singing an octave higher than I remembered in the play. But then I was reminded of Hugo’s use of ** you do not have permission to see this link ** (the lark) as a symbol for Cossette. Eventuality (only recently) I broke down and bought the DVD and watched it several times. Explaining some of the novel's elements left out of the play and movie (eg, the coin incident) to my daughter choked me up and I realized some of the beauty of the novel that I had not originally appreciated. A text comes to its completion as a conversation among its audience,band a classic multiplies the audiences involved in the conversation.

Even when we don't have an original autograph, some scholars will still imagine earlier sources or versions based on various criteria and methodologies. Do they succeed in this quest? Probably not all that well, but it is still an attempt to appreciate multiple dimensions of a text that may not be apparent otherwise.

So what we have with New Testament texts is access to a communal conversation among authors, audience, community leaders, early and later scribes, etc. Would it be nice to also have the various forms of autographs, sure, but we do have is a window into a larger dialogue that continues to this day.

Just my two cents.

*Dans le pays on l'appelait l'Alouette. Le peuple... s'était plu à nommer de ce nom ce petit être pas plus gros qu'un oiseau, tremblant, effarouché et frissonnant... Seulement la pauvre alouette ne chantait jamais.

In the neighborhood they called her the Lark. The people... took pleasure in giving this name to this tiny being, no larger than a bird, trembling, frightened, and shivering... Only the poor lark never sang.

But a couple of further pessimistic thoughts, with respect to the Gospels more than the Paulines:

It isn't even clear to me that there was a single autograph. Even today, works can go through multiple editions (there may be several versions an author circulates privately as he continues to work on it, versions which sometimes circulate quite widely; then there are sometimes even multiple "final", printed editions). 

Adding to that is the more general question, Who is the author? Who is a redactor (does he count as an author)? Who is just a scribe taking liberties? I think it is common to recognize, especially in some of the gospels, that there are sometimes several voices at work or several layers in the text (John and Luke are prime examples). 

All the evidence suggests that the earlier we go, the less reliable transmission was and the freer people were with changing the text. And the earliest period is precisely where we have the fewest data. Thus when the texts were most in flux is when we have no direct view of the process. Indeed it seems that in the earliest stages the texts were, one might say, living documents.

So not only is it not clear how we could recover the pristine original with the data we have, it isn't even clear that there is a single pristine original to recover.