This debate began in another thread but I would like the opinion of others. I have a problem believing our current Bible is completely accurate and every word is inspired by God. I want to take a look at how inspired our current Bible is, now Im speaking of the protestant Bible, be it King James, NIV, NAS. The books of the New Testament were written in Koine Greek, the language of the earliest extant manuscripts, even though some authors often included translations from Hebrew and Aramaic texts. Certainly the Pauline Epistles were written in Greek for Greek-speaking audiences. The study of the Greek New Testament has given undergraduates "a more demanding set of interlocking intellectual challenges than any other subject in the university. Anybody have any idea why?
When ancient scribes copied earlier books, they wrote notes on the margins of the page to correct their text, you see they didnt have microsoft wordespecially if a scribe accidentally omitted a word or lineand to comment about the text. When later scribes were copying the copy, they were sometimes uncertain if a note was intended to be included as part of the text. Now was a scribe human and without error, I think not. Over time, different regions evolved different versions, each with its own assemblage of
Ancient scribes made errors or alterations when copying manuscripts by hand.[1] Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic seeks to reconstruct the original text (the archetype or autograph) as closely as possible. The same processes can be used to attempt to reconstruct intermediate editions, or recessions, of a document's transcription history.The ultimate objective of the textual critic's work is the production of a "critical edition" containing a text most closely approximating the original. That implies that there is room for error. Not deliberate error but human error.
The Old Testament consists of a collection of works composed at various times from the twelfth to the second century B.C. It was written in classical Hebrew, except some brief portions (Ezra 4:86:18 and 7:1226, Jeremiah 10:11, Daniel 2:47:28) which are in the Aramaic language. ]Much of it, such as genealogies, poems and stories, are thought to have been handed down by word of mouth for many generations. Dont you think there is a little room for error there.
The Old Testament is accepted by us Christians as scripture. Broadly speaking, it is the same as the Hebrew Bible. However, the order of the books is not entirely the same as that found in Hebrew manuscripts and in the ancient versions varies from Judaism in interpretation and emphasis (see for example Isaiah 7:14). Several Christian denominations also incorporate additional books into their canons of the Old Testament. A few groups consider particular translations to be divinely inspired, notably the Greek Septuagint, the Aramaic Peshitta, and the English King James Version.
The Septuagint (Greek translation, from Alexandria in Egypt under the Ptolemies) was generally abandoned in favor of the Masoretic text as the basis for translations of the Old Testament into Western languages from St. Jerome's Bible (the Vulgate) to the present day. In Eastern Christianity, translations based on the Septuagint still prevail. A number of books which are part of the Peshitta or Greek Septuagint but are not found in the Hebrew Bible are often referred to as deuterocanonical books by Roman Catholics referring to a later secondary canon. Most Protestants term these books as apocrypha. Evangelicals and those of the Modern Protestant traditions do not accept the deuterocanonical books as canonical, although Protestant Bibles included them in Apocrypha sections until around the 1820s. However, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches include these books as part of their Old Testament. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes: Tobit, Judith, 1 & 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach also called Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, The Letter of Jeremiah, Greek Additions to Esther, The Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Holy Children, Susanna, Bel and the DragonIn addition to those, the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches recognize the following, 3 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151
Some other Eastern Orthodox Churches include 2 Esdras i.e., Latin Esdras in the Russian and Georgian BiblesThere is also 4 Maccabees which is only accepted as canonical in the Georgian Church, but was included by St. Jerome in an appendix to the Vulgate, and is an appendix to the Greek Orthodox Bible, and it therefore sometimes included in collections of the Apocrypha.
This does list does not include the Gnostic books such as Thomas, Peter, Mary, and a few others.
So with all that confusion as to what should and shouldnt be in the cannon, along with translation errors, and copying errors by scribes you want to say that our current Bible is 100 percent accurate.
