Doesn't common sense tell you that the accuracy of the bible should not be trusted?

Question

Having studied two other languages other than English, there are words and phrases that simply do not exist when translated from one language to another. For example, in the Spanish language there is the subjunctive form of the verb which can indirectly demonstrate the person's feeling or frame of mind when used which does not exist in English. Furthermore, the bible has been translated into dozens of different languages. Why didn't Christians learn whatever language the bible was originally written in in order to recite it similar to that which the Jews and Muslims do? I'm not saying that the Torah or Qu'ran is authentic but maybe a little less diluted than the bible. Please note that I am not asking about what your religious beliefs are but simply interested in why people belive that the bibe is gospel!

I am not disputing that there is a God only that the bible is diluted!

Answer 1

A lot of people do learn the original languages of the Bible. There are also books you can buy that give all the alternate meanings in English of the original texts and one Bible format, the Amplified Bible, that does that. Any possibly ambiguous words or phrases have all of the possible translations right there in parentheses.

Answer 2

First off, I declared war on common sense a long time ago. Secondly, where in the bible does it say that the bible is infallible? Revelations says some bit about nothing being taken away from this account, but that only applies to Revelations, not the entire Bible. And Revelations is the most suspect of all the bible - the Church Fathers only put it in with great reluctance, and the Orthodox Church doesn't read from it during mass. Biblical literalists should be denounced as bibliolaters (says an athesit).

At any rate, to answer your question: The Bible (the NT) may have been translated into many languages, but not consecutively. Most of the NT was written in Latin, and all of the various translations are taken from that. Of course, the Latin version we have isn't the orginal manuscript, but a copy of a copy of a... The consensus among secular scholars seems to be that the version of Matthew (written in Latin) we have is based on an older gospel called the "Gospel of the Hebrews," with some bits of Mark thrown in. (Mark is believed to be the oldest of the gospels, at least by the secular scholars.) According to tradition Gospel of the Hebrews was originally written in Hebrew by the apostle who was a tax collector. All of the other books of the NT were written in Latin.

As for the OT, which is basically the same as the Torah, we have the Torah (still being copied in the original Hebrew) and a Greek version. Incidently, it is thought that the whole prophecy about the Messiah being born of a virgin arises from a mistranslation in the Greek version. The original Hebrew used a word that meant "young woman," with no indiciation that she was virgin. The Greek word meant "maiden," which did indicate that she was a virgin. God was so through in fullfilling the prophecies with Jesus that he fullfilled even the prophecies that didn't get made!

Mistakes may have gotten into the Bible through mistranslation and miscopying. Also, many of the stories were oral traditions some time before the got written down. Take Genesis for example - according to fundamentalists, it was written by Moses, and by secular scholars, a century or two after Moses. Either way, it was written centuries after the events it described. What are the chances they got something wrong?

Answer 3

Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to determine the lion's share of Christian beliefs from documents other than the bible.

Put those documents together with most any version of the bible and things clear up pretty fast.

Also, Christians have handed down the authentic faith through the ages by tradition, as well as scripture. One supplements and enhances the other.

Furthermore, some of the best bible translations were done early in the history of the church, while original source documents existed, and the language scholars familiar with those documents were plentiful.

St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate version of the bible was translated from the original languages into Latin, around the year 400 AD, using many source documents that are no longer in existence. Properly translated, Latin easily makes the jump to English, and many of the other languages you mentioned . The Vulgate translation still holds up very well today.

Since the Catholic faith is truly a world-wide universal faith, and since the common man was illiterate, and generally not capable of reading much, if anything at all, until comparatively modern times, the idea of everyone learning Greek or Hebrew just to be able to read the bible was out of the question.

I doubt many people would do it today, even if it was truly necessary.

Answer 4

It is true that languages do not translate exact, however, the translations for the Bible have been scrutinized over to make sure proper interpretations are made. My many scholars speaking multiple languages.

The reason the Bible has been translated into many languages is so that all will hear. If someone doesn't know anything about God or the Bible, what would make them think to learn the appropriate language? For what? That is why those spreading the Gospel take it upon themselves to make it accessible to them. As far as Jews and Muslims and reading the Torah and the Qu'ran, God doesn't want ritual practices, it means nothing. If you do not understand what you are reading, you've learned nothing. The Old Testament, in my opinion is truth, otherwise Jesus would have said so, and would not have quoted it. Jesus quotes many times in the New Testament, laws and commandments and events, from the Old Testament. Also, if you read the entire Bible and really understand it, you will see that the Old and New tie in together perfectly.

Answer 5

no matter what language any text is, a person will automatically translate it into their own language as they read to understand it. The content is the same for the bible, no matter what language it is in.... the meaning is the same...example, a "house" is still a "house" in any language, no matter what the expression. The bible was translated into the language of the people so everyone could find out what it said....there is no use reading something when it is in another language, and you don't know what it says..... they are many people out there who have limited education, and they should not be denied the wisdom of the bible just because they do not know hebrew or greek. No matter what the language, the message is the same for all people. Truth is truth in any language. And just because something like the quran is in the original arabic language, does not make it truth. God makes truth true, not man using a particular language. We can have fiction in a original language, but it is still fiction.

By the way, you can find the Torah and the Quran in english as well as the original language.

Answer 6

The Bible is a compilation of many people's stories. If they ever find the truth about where all the stories originated they will probably determine that they all point to the theory of evolution and that the earth is the one "SPIRIT" which is the center of all the stories.
Deception has been the practice for centuries which allow the "followers" to give in and pay large portions of their income to the "Church" where as if they are taxed other wise the people get angry and want to fight. If they are deceived then they don't know that they are just paying the same taxes to the same entity just a different branch.

All religions are of the same scenario, they all have the same purpose, which is to unify people to the way of the originating few.
The translations were done by so many different people and since there is no absolute direct translation of all languages the stories have had new influence each and every time they are translated causing gross differences and many similarities between all Religious Bibles.


Therefore by definition they are all "CULT" based.

Answer 7

its just a book about an idea



While we have none of the autographs of the Bible, the early manuscripts we do have and that are known to be genuine, by the most conservative estimates, have 200,000 differences between the wording in them, and while many are not meaningful, some completely change the doctrine of the church. (Ehrman, Bart, Ph.D.; Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the Bible and Why; Harper Collins, 2006 -- p. 89). less conservative estimates range up to about 400,000 -- and there are programmers now endeavoring to write a program that will be able to count the exact number of variances.

And that's only the start of the difficulties for the Bible. If you only use the Textus Receptus (Received Text) as it is printed in modern Bibles then you are looking at enormous problems anyway -- in fact insurmountable ones. The World does not have corners (Isaiah 11:12), nor does it sit on pillars (I Samuel 2:8), nor water (Psalms 24:1-2). God did not establish a solid dome over the earth (that's what firmament literally means) and he does not have a palace on top of it from which angels can come and go up Jacob's ladder -- which might be reached by the tower of babel -- and where he keeps "treasuries" of hail and snow (Job 38: 22-23). For the sake of all that is decent, you can't even harmonize the 1st and 2nd chapters of Genesis with each other, say nothing of being able to defend the Biblical creation as scientifically factual. That's no surprise though, as the Bible tells us that beetles have four legs (Leviticus 11: 21-23) and that rabbits chew their cuds (Deuteronomy 14:7). It says that pi is 3, not 3.14 (I Kings 7:23 and 2 Chronicles 4:2) and that the mustard seed is the smallest seed in the world and grows into a tree [neither of which are true] (Matthew 13: 31-32). It is hardly a font of rational thought or scientific accuracy. Furthermore these errors only scratch the surface. Try harmonizing accounts in Joshua and the telling of the same tales in timeline in Judges sometime. If you can you are more proficient than any theologian I've ever met, and I've met a few.

Late bronze age men created the OT and early iron age ones the NT. It is not surprising therefore that God cannot lead Israel to defeat Iron chariots after promising he would (Judges 1:19), and it is not surprising that the flight of Israel from the god Chemosh, after the king of a city the Jews were beseiging and that God had promised them they would overthrow The King of the city offered his own son to Chemosh as a human sacrifice, resulting in Chemosh driving the Israelites away (2 Kings 3: 19-27) -- further it is not surprising that no punishment is mentioned -- the Israelites were still sacrificing their own children, as is evidenced in several places, but most graphically in Judges 11:30-39

The long and short of it is, the Bible is a mythic book, written by bronze and iron age men who were recording primarily oral legends in written form. In any realistic sense it is drivel. You can see, just in the passages I noted above from 2 Kings -- the last vestiges of polytheism fading away. Chemosh was supposed to get power from human sacrifice, just as Jehovah did -- and that power allowed him to turn the table against Israel, despite the fact that God was with Israel.

Read the verses, read the context -- to all the things I've suggested, calm your breathing and thinking and ask yourself if this is really the God of the Universe you are reading about -- or a tribal deity, which has now evolved into the one we worship. I think you will find biblegod sadly lacking -- something the liturgical churches have been saying for hundreds of years. If you find yourself unwilling to even look -- ask yourself why? Are you willing to sacrifice the truth, in order to maintain a comfortable myth for yourself?

And if you want a chuckle, read the second, and theoretically final version of the ten commandments. They are in Exodus 34: 10-26. That is the covenant Yahweh actually made with Israel. No seething here.

Seriously, you are feeling conflicted because you have been told things that are not true -- the biggest one being that the Bible is the Word of God. The Bible is a bronze age book written by bronze age men -- except for some parts of the NT that were written by early Iron age men. It is not divine, and what is says about human sexuality is greatly dependent on the sexual morales of a single culture in the 1st to 4th century CE -- 1st to 4th century I say because the root copies that we have are from the 1st to 4th centuries. Anything older may well have been -- as we can see from Dr. Ehrman's work -- changed.

Answer 8

Yes, common sense dictates that one should take the bible with a grain (handful) of salt. The version that most of us English speaking people grew up with is the King James version, even that has contradictory passages on the same page and version after version of the same short verses fill page after page. I believe that is a fault of the translators working from various previous translations of Hebrew, Greek and Latin texts. Also given that the general populace had always been illiterate the translations of the book have been altered by the personal beliefs of those translating. You are right to note that the Torah has remained virtually unchanged for several thousand years, each writing of it comes directly from the previous writing and nothing can be altered for any reason.

Just because there is a compendium does not prove the word of god...it just proves that the writers want you to know what they think that word meant.

Answer 9

Mitch
3 minutes ago


Report Abuse
Nope! The King James translators used italic words when translating words that didn't quite fit with the Hebrew and Greek. The Bible is the Gospel truth.

Source(s):

Holy Bible KJV
Written by Mitch and I agree.

Answer 10

I have studied the different writings and while I will agree with you in principle the main thought and message is still there.
If Christians would study, or at least the Pastors, the Aramaic and Hebrew languages they would come to a much deeper understanding.
Study of the Greek is needed for the New Testament.