This is the most demonstrably false thesis that can be
made against Christianity. As a medievalist, I could not be taken seriously by my colleagues if I asked them to believe that the Bible had been changed. Most of the historians/graduate students/professors I meet are not Christians but they know the historical place of the Bible.Here are some quick points. I could write an entire series on each of them so I won't go into much detail but these are some of the most important talking points for this discussion:
- If a monk or state ruler had changed the Bible we would be able to observe these changes by comparing newer texts to older manuscripts. Currently, all of our manuscripts match so no changes could have been made. (Unless King so-and-so traveled back in time and changed all of the old manuscripts, too.)
- The early church writers quoted scripture so much that we can reconstruct the Bible from their quotes - and these quotes match the Bible as we know it today.
- The Dead Sea scrolls are hundreds of years older than any other copy of the Old Testament. The fact that they are consistent with our previous manuscripts tells us that the Old Testament has also been copied accurately.
- The copying process - far from being a simple monk with a candle - was so rigid and micro-managed that changing the Bible would have nearly been impossible. (And, as we have seen, if it had happened we would be able to tell by comparing documents.)
4 comments:
Enough of this "reason." Away with you! When am I going to start hearing some unreasoned, fanatical zealotry?!
I think the basic flaw in your argument is that you do not define what you mean by "the" bible, and you do not define what you mean by "changed". There is no one bible, that used by most English-speaking Christians is based on the King James, but this has frequently been re-written (e.g. the New English to make it easier to understand by modern English speakers, that used by Jehovah's Witnesses to fit better with that sect's views, etc.). All of these are changes, and all create different bibles. One particular example I can come up with (and I am not going to get into the differences between Chapters 1 & 2 of Genesis or the differences in the Gospel stories) is Joseph's "coat of many colours". An alternative translation (that actually makes more sense in the context of what we know of the culture of the time) is "coat with sleeves", in other words, a coat that you do not wear to work. Is that a significant difference? Not really, in the context of the story, but, if not a change, it is certainly an alternative, and probably equally valid, interpretation.
Should it actually matter if the different versions are, well, different? Probably not, in fact it is more suspicious and smacks of collusion if they all concur. Think of eye-witness statements "It was a green Honda" "It was a blue Toyota".
Keith, the problem with your argument is that you are discussing discrepancies between different _translations_, particularly those in separate linguistic eras. I'll help you out: Adam is defining the Bible as it was written in its original languages.
Your second paragraph is being woefully misapplied to the topic manuscript evidence. I'm rather fearful that here, too, you are discussing translations, as if King James wrote down his interpretation of the events and Ngu N. Ternashunal has done the same.
This is not the first time I've seen this sort of misconception, though, Adam, so maybe you would have done well to have included a bullet point explaining out different translations != different Bibles. Sadly, this misconception can be common even among Christian circles; I cringe every time someone emphasizes the particular phraseology within their translation and then postulate what God might have meant by using those _particular English words_.
You're right, Jared, this post might have been improved if I had done that. I originally planned to include some discussion on this but I thought the post was getting to be too long. I can't win.
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