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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Today I Learned
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It was an oral history in one language, written down into another by low quality scribes, then translated a couple more times.
Which is why it's always hilarious people say they have to take any translation literally.
But you don't understand! This translation was divinely inspired! Every other one is an act of heresy and blasphemy!
Catholics go one step further. Both the translation and the tradition of interpreting the translation is divinely inspired. Protestants sometimes vaguely point to something like that but most realize that if they follow the logic train of sacred tradition they should be Catholic or Orthodox.
The book was produced by the tradition. If the tradition is junk, then why would the book not be junk too?
This is one thing that atheists often get wrong about Catholicism. Catholics don't believe sola scriptura, the Protestant principle that all Christian tradition is to be rooted in the text of the Bible. Thus, "Bible contradictions" and the like are not rebuttals to Catholic views the way they are to "fundamentalist" Protestant views.
I'm an atheist ex protestant, but I generally agree with that theological view. I think Protestantism is very inconsistent in that regard and most arguments amount to hand waving. In the end, though, all denominations pick and choose when councils had sufficient authority to be binding tradition. Unless they're gnostics or some other type of anti-pauIine Christian guess.
Talking about protestantism is a singular thing, lol
You could have added nuance to an interesting discussion. But instead you went for snark.
Correct
Evangelicals are all about that inspired, literal, complete, and inerrant word of God stuff. 99% of all evangelical churches have that as a mission statement on their website.
Unless they realize that each new interpretation is Divinely inspired. In which case the most recent one is the truest, Tradition is dead, and also the Divine changes Her mind a lot.
The Jehovah's Witnesses have an update process they call "progressive revelation" so that they can keep retconning their doomsday prophecies.
"This translation was divinely inspired."
"Oh, dope, so you're gonna sell all your stuff and give the money to the poor?"
"Okay, listen..."
It's a two-thousand-year-long multilingual game of Telephone. How much is it even possible is left from what was originally written? (And none of it contemporary to when it supposedly happened.)
Textual critics are fairly confident that a fair amount of the texts of the New Testament were reliably copied until we get to the first extant manuscripts, and for the stuff that is very obviously messed up, they have a decent set of analytical tools that help them retroject the likeliest original wording. Not perfect, but decent.
And now we have even better scientific tools that allow us to retroject all the miracles, incorrect dates, absurdly inaccurate numbers/measurements, and the authenticity (very foundation) of it's stories. Proving that it is all fiction.
Reminder: Until the 1800s no Christian believed that the world was older than about 6000. If you went back in time and spoke to literally any Christian at that time and said you were both Christian and believed that the earth was billions of years old they would definitely say that you're a liar: You're not a Christian. You would be declared a heretic.
There is a difference between saying that one translation is more or less accurate than another and saying that the story that is written is true or not. Don't let your feelings about the subject impact your assessment of the literary work around it.
You're right: As a literary work is absolute garbage. The chapters are all over the place and it constantly repeats itself, telling the same stories in a slightly different way with no added information or useful insights.
It even makes it incredibly difficult to suspend your disbelief by stating impossible things as simple facts with no explanation whatsoever like someone being swallowed by a whale, fitting two of every animal on earth into a single boat, etc.
1 out of 10 ⭐
Exactly how much of this has to do with the history of when various parts were written and how accurately copies were made?
That's not how translation works though. The modern translations come directly from the original Greek and Aramaic.
The texts travelled all over the East and into Europe. So we can compare them. They were very clearly written in their time.
All fakes. The real texts only come in hats.
This gives me the odd realization that, were a method to travel through time ever discovered, there's a chance one use-case for it might be a religious group traveling back to the origin point of their religious texts to correct errors that have made their way in since the original versions were written or spoken.
But then you could just go back and witness the events that the book tries to describe, so the book itself becomes irrelevant outside of just archaeology phd work.
That's a novel right there baby
It's been written. I can't remember the name or author, but the crucifixion was very popular, and in the story may have accounted for the large crowds that day.
As in, changing the history to match their text? 🙃
Imagining the idea of a deeply religious person going back in time over and over again, going further and further back looking for Adam and Eve and finding very modern-looking humans going all the way back 200,000 years...
Nah, they'd probably give up after going back around 50,000 years and accidentally infecting the entire human population with the common cold, nearly killing off the species.
Written down by the Wikipedians of thee day, complete with edit wars.