Reddit mentions of Homeri: Opera - Tomvs 1, Iliadis Libros I - XII Continens (Greek Edition)

I might do an AMA at some point. I just joined reddit about a month ago (first time), so I was still exploring the community.

>That said, I've often heard from anti-theists that ancient Greek (NT Greek) had no punctuation, and no spaces between the letters, making it very difficult to translate. Even more difficult would be interpreting allegory as is often used by Jesus, and occasionally also Paul.

The first part is true. You can see what they mean here, in this picture of a leaf of Papyrus 46. It's the equivalent of writing English like this: BETTERSLEEPWITHASOBERCANNIBALTHANADRUNKENCHRISTIAN. This seems intimidating, but let's look a little bit closer.

Remember that people write to store information. Storage is useless if the information can't be retrieved later. That means that at some point in history, someone found it possible to retrieve information stored in this format, and the use of the format in letters means that people extracting the information did not need to be associated with the people writing it down (although we have some examples of sending a letter reader to ensure the text was properly understood).

Given that it was once possible to freely read the bible if you could read Greek, all that remains is to learn Greek, and then work with the manuscript. However, experts can get even more help from a number of sources:

1. Multiplicity. Many manuscripts are Lacugnose, meaning they have holes in the physical parchment, or are missing whole sections or pages. When this is the case, other copies of the manuscript can fill in the gaps.
   
   
2. Translations. If they are unsure what a phrase in Greek might mean, an early translation into Syriac, Aramaic or Latin may clear things up.
   
   
3. Committees. Translators usually work in teams of scholars, who pore over manuscripts. This provides insight and reduces the tendency to make mistakes.
   
   
4. Retention of significant variants. Scholarly Greek and Hebrew additions of the Old and New Testament, like the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Novum Testamentum Graece have something called a critical apparatus at the bottom, just like critical additions of Homer this apparatus takes up about half of every page and lists all the major variations in the Greek Text, and where they can be found (which manuscript). Also, commentaries from the committee exist that allow you to see why they chose one variant for the main text and left another in the footnotes. Based on this, experts are free to agree or disagree on their own without anyone forcing one particular reading upon them.
   
   The end result is that I cannot think of any issue of doctrine based on the New Testament which is not clearly understood from the Greek Text. As tricky as it is, scholars have risen to the challenge, and gotten to the bottom of it, just as you may have gotten to the bottom of the English text blob I started this with and recognized a line about Queequeg from Moby Dick. The second part of your question is pretty involved. I've gotta go now, but I'll come back later today and try and give you an extremely shortened version.