Readers of the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog will have seen the post about how shared transcriptional errors are evidence of two texts having a common ancestor.
Given that there is still resistance to the acceptance of mainstream science among some Evangelicals, I thought it appropriate to mention that the exact same reasoning is used in biology to make the case for evolution. Where there is a matching transcription error in organisms’ DNA – such as that which results in human beings and some other primates not producing Vitamin C and thus being prone to scurvy – this is evidence of the error being due to shared dependence on a common “source” of this shared genetic material.
I hope that more Evangelicals will understand textual criticism and how it relates to Biblical studies. I hope that more Evangelicals will also understand the similar reasoning in the natural sciences and how it relates to our scientific understanding of life on this planet.
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