God arranged to have his Word recorded in written form to preserve its accuracy down through the centuries. An oral method wouldn't work as it would be very prone to mistakes when being passed from one person to the next. Plus there would be no way of checking if the contemporary version of the story is faithful to the original.
The Jews went to extreme lenghts to ensure that each and every word was accurately copied from one Bible copy to the next.
OK, I actually had a class in Rabbinic Literature. Yes, the standards for transcribing the
Torah itself were placed extremely high, but what of the rest of Scripture? BTW, for you religious idiots, the Torah is the first five books of the Old Testatment.
But then your "Bible" includes the "New Testament", which falls outside of the Jewish tradition, so you are completely and utterly screwed when you try to claim Jewish tradition in preserving the alleged integrity of your "New Testatment" passages. Do your continuous attempts to deceive really have no boundaries?
Have you ever studied Greek? That is no non sequitur, because the New Testament was written in Greek, even though some of the source manuscripts were in Aramaic.
I did study Greek, Koine Greek, the Greek of the New Testament. For two semesters. We used the Bruce Metzger New Testament. For each and every passage in the New Testament, all the various variations from the many source manuscripts were presented. And they showed your traditional interpretations to be a lie.
There are many different manuscripts for each verse, very few of which agree with each other. Some differences, like Luke 2:14, completely change the meaning. Even Revelation 22:18-19, which promises great punishment to anyone who would add to, delete from, or change that revelation, has differences in its manuscripts (testimony to how little the early Christians cared about the Scripture they were creating?). So who decided which versions to use? Fallible Man.
Furthermore, some manuscripts are in Aramaic and some in Greek, so the Aramaic manuscripts had to be translated to Greek. And then there was yet another chain of translations before it got into your own hands. Do you have any idea what's involved in translating from one language to another? You read the source language and you then try to express what you think it says in to target language. IOW, at the core of translation is the act of interpretation
by a fallible human. And if that fallible human is biased by his religious beliefs, then there's the chance of even more error slipping in.
Every step of the way we see fallible Man constantly poking his pudgy fingers into the Bible, injecting error at every turn. And then we have the theologians and preachers who take that finished product and twist and interpret it to mean whatever they want it to mean regardless of how far they have to stretch it.
There are many aspects of Christianity that I just simply cannot believe, but the one that I really cannot believe in is their central belief in the infallibility of Man.
True story; even though it's sure to go right over your head, lurkers may even get a laugh out of it. An activist creationist posted it in his newsletter.
Some theologian had tried to explain away the Resurrection by claiming that Jesus had a twin brother -- ridiculous on several levels, including the fact that it's just a story so there's nothing to explain away, plus why would a Christian want to explain away the central foundational myth of his own religion? Anyway, this creationist cited the wisdom of a child who pointed out that the Bible says that Mary was "with child", not "with children." Well, first off, there's no such expression in English as "being with children" and "with child" would indeed be used properly for twins, triplets, etc. Second, that's not what the Bible says. In the Greek, it says that she "had in belly". No explicit mention of any children. Similarly, I've seen "sun" and "son" being conflated (including on Star Trek:TOS, "Bread and Circuses") and an interpretation of "atonement" as meaning "at one-ment", all of which can only possibly work in English and would be completely meaningless in the original language.
From
Mein Bester Feind (2011), Moritz Bleibtreu as an Austrian Jewish art dealer just before the Anschlu showing to his life-long Christian friend a Michelangelo sketch with an oddity due to a misinterpretation of the Bible (translated from memory):
quote:
Christians have no idea how to read the Bible.
How very true.
Edited by dwise1, : "There are many different manuscripts ... "
Edited by dwise1, : Fixed a couple details in the movie reference
Edited by dwise1, : Left out one letter
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