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Originally Posted by Wiggum_PI
In your opinion what makes the bible so inaccurate?
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I guess that depends on what you mean by inaccurate.. the Bible (or rather the NT anyway) looks like a collection of books written by people who had various goals and messages for their writings. There's enough differences among the manuscripts and enough differences between the various books and authors that I think it discounts the position that the Bible is inerrant (i.e. every word is 100% accurate and free of error). As a history book it's inaccurate. As a book on theology though, that's a different question.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wiggum_PI
There are thousands of manuscripts, more than any other book known to man.
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Sure, over 5700 of the NT in Greek. And no two match. Even the smallest fragments the size of a credit card differ from every other manuscript. There's more differences than there are words in the entire NT.
To be sure a lot of those differences are incidental, punctuation, differences in abbreviations (it was common to abbreviate Jesus or Lord or God) etc, but not all are.. some are entire portions that only appear in later manuscripts (the story of Jesus drawing in the dirt while they bring him the woman who had committed adultery for example).
Even though we have that many manuscripts, what we don't have are the autographs. Trying to derive the originals is no easy task, a whole area of scholarship has arisen around it. So even if you could get everyone to agree on what the earliest version of Mark was, we still wouldn't know what the original was.
And I am not trying to say that the textual issues or differences among the books of the NT refutes Christianity, otherwise there would be no Christian Biblical scholars. But it does make some kinds of Christianity more difficult.