Beastly wrote:2. Prove that it has been written and re-written and I will say you are right. It has been changed in language, but look at dictionaries for foreigners, the words do become a little different, because of the language barrier, but they still mean the same thing. And IF you want to find out what it really means, you have to go and find out the author the language, and then check out the original words and what they mean. Language interpretation doesn't mean the bible has been changed. Just put into other languages, Just like all the Foreign Dictionaries, the words don't change no matter how many times they are written in other languages. The bible has been carefully guarded by the Catholic Church, and other religions, They are not going to allow something so precious to be altered. Plus the books still exist. and they found more, the dead sea scrolls.
Answer me this question, then.... When was the Bible as we read it today (lets take the King James as our baseline) actually decided in its current form?
Actually, I'll answer it for you. For the Roman Catholic Church it was at the Council of Trent in 1563... Thats a millennia and a half after Jesus' birth. Thats one and a half THOUSAND years after the events of the New Testement, and up to THREE MILLENNIA after the events of the Old Testement. Indeed, we've had a canon Bible for less time than we haven't since the birth of Christ.
Do you think the Bible plopped out of the sky fully formed the moment Jesus jogged up to Heaven? No. It was collected and compiled from the work of many. The church didn't necessarily have to alter specific texts of the Bible because they chose what made up the Bible itself. The Roman Church compiled the texts which agreed with its doctrine. If we'd had a monophystic church compile the Bible we'd have had a different set of books promoting a fundamentally different message. The texts which promoted the message the church fathers wanted to spread were included and others dismissed. The dead sea scrolls, for one, show us the greater breadth of religious texts available. A good example of this could be the Book of Enoch. Jude, a canon book, refers to the book of Enoch which is non-canon, almost word for word in 1:14-15. It was rejected as canon, however, because of references to apocryphal works which the church fathers saw as going against the message they were trying to promote.
And as for differences in translation, yes that fundamentally changes the Bible. The argument over homosexuality is one of the major grey areas. If we do in fact go back to the original greek the writings on homosexuality are much more ambiguous than the English translations. The words DO change the more they are written down.
I can give you three examples of the translation of the famous Leviticus 18:22.
The New International Version reads. "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable." So no homosexual sex among males, then.
The New Living Translation reads: "Do not practice homosexuality; it is a detestable sin." So, for this translation, homosexuality itself is wrong. Lesbians are added into the sin where they weren't above.
An equally valid translation made to support the homosexual viewpoint could be: "Two men must not engage in sexual activity on a woman's bed; it is ritually unclean." That is just as literal a translation as the above. it doesn't prohibit homosexuality anywhere but in a woman's bed.
One further point that I'm not going to bother expanding upon here is that of the many passages based on others, obviously re-written by other authors and suchlike... If we apply the same analytical techniques to the Bible as we would to any similar document we can see evidence of multiple authors in single books, vast swathes of books based upon the work of others etc. etc. Writing in antiquity more often than not either described something you had experienced yourself or else copied the work of somone who had andwhilst adding your own interpretation. You think it has remained unchanged? In potentially nearly four thousand years? When only the last seven or eight hundred of those saw an even reasonably powerful church evolve the ability to control translation and compilation... Nice one...
