Originally posted by Shelbert Lemon
personally i think at one time it may have been fact but over the many years it has been rewritten to what man wants you to believe is Gods word..........now at this point its a collection of fiction of stories put together by man .
***Hasn't the Bible been rewritten so many times that we can't trust it anymore?
This is a common misconception. Some people think that the Bible was written in one language, translated to another language, then translated into yet another and so on until it was finally translated into the English. The complaint is that since it was rewritten so many times in different languages throughout history, it must have become corrupted . The
"telephone" analogy is often used as an illustration. It goes like this. One person tells another person a sentence who then tells another person, who tells yet another, and so on and so on until the last person hears a sentence that has little or nothing to do with the original one. The
only problem with this analogy is that it doesn't fit the Bible at all.
The fact is that the Bible has not been rewritten. Take the New Testament, for example. The disciples of Jesus wrote the New Testament in Greek and though we do not have the original documents, we do have around 6,000 copies of the Greek manuscripts that were made very close to the time of the originals. These various manuscripts, or copies, agree with each other to almost 100 percent accuracy. Statistically, the New Testament is 99.5% textually pure. That means that there is only 1/2 of 1% of of all the copies that do not agree with each other perfectly. But, if you take that 1/2 of 1% and examine it, you find that the majority of the "problems" are nothing more than spelling errors and very minor word alterations. For example, instead of saying Jesus, a variation might be "Jesus Christ." So the actual amount of
textual variation of any concern is extremely low. Therefore, we can say that we have a remarkably accurate compilation of the original documents.
So when that we translate the Bible, we do not translate from a translation of a translation of a translation. We translate from the original language into our language. It is a one step process and not a series of steps that can lead to corruption. It is one translation step from the original to the English or to whatever language a person needs to read it in. So we translate into Spanish from the same Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. Likewise we translate into the German from those same Greek and Hebrew manuscripts as well. This is how it is done for
each and every language we translate the Bible into. We do not translate from the original languages to the English, to the Spanish, and then to the German. It is from the original languages to the English, or into the Spanish, or into the German. Therefore, the translations are very accurate and trustworthy in regards to what the Bible originally said.
The New Testament manuscripts were completed in the 1st century A.D. (50-100 A.D.) and the earliest copy became available in 130 A.D. The approximate time span between the original and the copy was less than 1000 years. There are 5,600 copies of the copy of the original and the accuracy of these copies is 99.5%.
As you can see, the New Testament documents are very accurate. Therefore, when the scholars translate from the Greek into English (or any other language), we can trust that what is translated is accurate and reliable.---Carm.
Marchello