So how does one know which version is the oldest without trusting the magical science of radiocarbon dating, which is the same science that says everything is much much older than the Bible says?
...for working out if a manuscript is 200 or 1500 years old, radiocarbon dating is sound.
Whether or not the date is correct (and whether or not this is really year 5784 since Adam, etc) was not my concern (certainly not the OP in the thread.
)
Neither is which text is allegedly older, since what we know for certain is that none of the existing texts are the Original.
The question should be what rendering is most faithful to what He Wrote.
And how can we KNOW, so best to "
study, to show yourself approved"?
I have contended that THE major key, IMHO, to that understanding is
internal consistency.
Does an alleged 'translation' contradict itself? (For example, say one thing about marriage in one place and something contradictory in another?) What can we learn from studying those differences? I.e., do we correct the error, or throw it out?
"Carbon dating" is only one tool that may be of use. There are others, and, I contend, better, in that determination; NONE of them perfect.
As an engineer, with a background in what are called "error correction [ and detection ] codes," or ECC, I know that we can design codes and modulation techniques that enable data to be sent, received, recovered, and even corrected, from things like a radio signal, a magnetic disk, optical disks or tape drives (both my own specialty) and thus recognize the significance of the things we can see in history and in the various texts we have of Scripture that appear to have similar characteristics.
Scribal notations in many texts (which Yahushua referred to, rendered the "
jots and tiddles," in some English renderings of Matthew 5:17-19) are just one
example of such. And they are almost NEVER rendered in those English translations.
The example I have frequently referred to here on BF (and elsewhere, at greater length) that I personally find perhaps the MOST persuasive, is the "information density" of the original Hebrew text, particularly in Bereshiet (Genesis) 1. The letters, without spaces as Written, can be "parsed" or read in multiple ways, depending on where we choose to break the words, but only in the original language.
When we do that, we see that "Bereshiet bara Elohim et hashamayim v'et haeretz' as the Masorites 'parsed' it (and they are not alone - that's how most do it, having been taught) can also be read to produce other intelligible sentences in both Hebrew and related Aramaic. And those renderings produce information like (but not limited to - there are at least seven I know of) "the creator of man" and the "creator of fire" is Yah, to a statement that He is the Healer as well.
Just what does that prove? I leave that to each of us, as students. But I contend that the "information density" of that original text is astounding - to the point of even appearing Divine.
And a field of engineering mathematics for communication and data storage has attempted to quantify just how much information can be "stuffed" into a given "communications channel" (like a wire, and optical stream, or a bunch of text characters) and then recovered. (See "Shannon's Law," or theory, if you prefer.) [Aside: BTW, the very best human codes ever designed can't TOUCH the information density of a bit of the DNA double-helix! And they don't approach Shannon's limit, either.]
And they aren't a "proof" of Who Wrote them.
But they impressed me enough, as a skeptical engineer, to study His Word, as actually Written, as best I could, for myself.