Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
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.
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.
|
Also, aren't all extant sources from around 100 years after the death of Jesus? The authors of the synoptic gospels and John (the different one) were a generation or two separated from the events they were documenting. Until then, information in the community (which appeared to be expecting eschatological return within their lifetimes) appears to have been transmitted by word of mouth - you know how well the telephone game works or how things are easily exaggerated when one is trying to convince someone else of something.
Look the divergance here is whether or not you believe the Bible was divinely inspired and divinely guided into the form that we have today and you can take it's word at value (some interpret it literally, others do not) and it is applicable today...or if it's just the collaborative work by commitee of hundreds of thousands of people, put together by by medieval councils who decided what was canon and what was aprocryphal, and simply a haphazard historical document of cultural history.