Originally posted by Shakyamunison
If Winne the Pooh had been a popular book of the time that had some validity in the early Church, it might have been added. The problem in our discourse is that you are making an assumption that I do not make. That is the idea that there is a divine configuration of the bible that just needed to be logically put together based on early church fathers. To me, it is just a book written and constructed by humans, and at no time in the past or future was it, or is it, divine. I know you will disagree, and I understand why.
I have to reject that, I am not making the assumption that the Holy Spirit guided the formation of the Bible in what I write here. If I did make that assumption I would not have bothered to explain that the scriptures declared canonical by the Council where already held to be so by the vast majority of the Church. That is what the evidence suggests.
Let us assume there is no God, does that invalidate the arguments I have put forward already? Certainly not, for they are not based on Divine intervention, rather they are based on the activities of humans. I propose that the Christian Church was a human community which was founded by a man and his followers, further I propose that the first followers of said man wrote down accounts of his life and letters explaining his teachings- as they understood it- those accounts were spread across the Church as early as 90 AD. There is no need to invoke the Divine for that scenario to seem correct, especially when the evidence shows that leading members of the Christian community where quoting and using the texts as early as the date 90 AD.
Originally posted by Shakyamunison
I simply point this out because of the problem with the idea that the bible has been corrupted. I simply don't believe that because "corrupted" assumes a pristine non-corrupted state, and I don't think that exists.
You're being metaphysical about a very material problem. Let us again assume there is no God. Today we have a collection of books called the New Testament which date from the first to third century. It has been suggested by some posters that these books and letters have been altered over time to help the Church enforce a message. However the evidence suggests this is not the case, for we have very early manuscripts which tie in pretty well with the modern bible. Further we can call such a belief unfounded because it would have to be extended to all other works of antiquity especially those of which there are less original manuscripts than the New Testament...which is pretty much all of them btw.
Another reason to reject the belief that the Bible has been substantially changed in order to reflect a change in the Church's policy is this: The notion of Sola Scriptura, the sole authority of the Bible, is relatively new in the Christian world. Prior to the activity of the Dominican Order in the 1300's the need to "prove" doctrine from the Bible was unheard of. The Catholic Church holds many doctrines and teachings which are not found expressly in the Bible, for example- the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception and Purgatory. By the time of the Protestant Reformation when changing the Bible would be the only way to enforce a new doctrine it would have been impossible to do so- because Bibles from the beginning of the Middle Ages and before existed which would evidently not match up with the changed copies. Indeed, if as some posters suggest the Bible has been changed to fit the Church's policies then why does it not expressly declare the authority of the Papacy? Why didn't the Church put that in? Why didn't the Church insert a section expressly saying God was Triune? Why? Because the didn't need to.
Further, to imply that the Church would just change the Bible as it saw fit (and that would be a mammoth task) suggests that the Christians of the 90AD's up to the Protestant Reformation had no real faith...did they not believe that the Bible was the world of God? It is a huge conspiracy theory that doesn't stand up to the test of historical inquiry.
There is no need to invoke, nor believe in God to reach the conclusion that modern Bibles are pretty much the same as the original texts.
[edit] Oh, and the obvious way to invalidate the "bibles been changed" conspiracy is to just compare...Take the modern RSV, compare it with the Latin Vulgate, the texts of the Church Fathers and the earliest copies of the Gospel texts...they all say the same thing. If they didn't maybe some serious historians would have pointed it out by now and Protestantism would have fallen flat on it's "sola scriptura" face.