I think the KJV-only movement is largely an American insanity. Elsewhere I see the NIV or NASB being used more. And they’re translated from earliest Greek texts wherever they’re found. Earliest complete texts are about 325ad with fragments earlier
The “10s of thousands of variations” line is disingenuous. Manuscripts overwhelmingly only differ on grammatical and typos type differences. A bit like if everyone was asked to tell the story of Goldilocks. You’d get 1000 variations, but the essentials of the story would be apparent clear as day.
Maybe, but the essentials are still pretty nuts. The NIV doesn’t change things like Jesus saying anyone who doesn’t believe in him is condemned or Paul saying he doesn’t permit a woman to teach or, you know, the entirety of the Old Testament.
Yes. But the graphic is painting the idea that the text can’t have been transmitted accurately. Whereas it’s most likely we have good portions of what Paul actually taught, less so the historical Jesus but some parts more likely than others. The OT is different given it’s largely legendary. But, even so, it’s transmission from the post exile communities that first authored it is surprisingly accurate. The Dead Sea Scrolls found in the late 1940s pushed back the earliest OT texts we have a full thousand years from ~900ad to ~100bc. The level to which they were accurate copies was astonishing showing that textual transmission in the ancient world was more reliable than previously thought.
This isn’t a religious point of view, but rather one of secular scholarship.
God is all powerful, but not powerful enough to preserve his own inspired writings… or talk to anyone plainly because, ugh, why would they create language then stoop so low to use it… I mean they are so busy with those cosmological constants and quantum fields and all. How could they possibly have the time to act like sane reasonable people, or write down any of those ontological and undisputable fundamental building blocks of the universe.
Many of them actually know that, but literally believe God guided the hand of the people doing it.
Which isn’t exactly a large leap if you’re a believer. If you believe God can do all the other stuff, divine inspiration isn’t exactly near the top of “well that’s just hard to believe”
Right, exactly. Not sure how it makes any sense to have those different translations and create one that way, but they just say he “works in mysterious ways.”
Something something my version I believe in is the one true one and the other ones are wrong and tests by God to mislead you. How do I know mine is the correct one? My belief of course.
The Vulgate Bible was the first to unify the old and new testsments under a single language and was, by and large, the basis for the King James Bible.
Example, the Latin in the Vulgate is pretty easy to follow:
1 In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi: et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux. Et facta est lux.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona: et divisit lucem a tenebris.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Wow, I don’t know more than a handful of Latin words and I only speak Drunk Hillbilly fluently and I could still get most of that.
I recommend the NRSV or the NRSVue.
New Jerusalem is my personal favorite. ;)
Based on this description, KJV should be pretty accurate then. You wouldn’t have needed the original texts by the apostles.
You’re saying vast amounts of people copied the apostles’ texts at the time. Any mistakes made would have been like typos if the majority of people copying it were doing so honestly.
After that, King James of England ordered that the Bible be translated into English by a group of collaborating scholars who had gathered as many versions of the text as possible.
Whether stuff in the Bible is true is a whole other question. I’m not a Christian myself but it seems to me like they would have ended up with quite an accurate text for English speakers.
Then there’s also in a sibling desert religion how “40 figs” became “40 virgins” and nobody remembers when or how it happened… or even that the switch happened, at all.
While we’re here, should also point out the fruit Adam and Eve ate in the garden was likely a fig. They do after all immediately after pick up fig leaves to cover themselves. Somehow it turned into an apple in the popular imagination…
I thought it was grapes, not figs?
If it was olives, we might have an explanation…
From a historical lens, it is obviously not the same teachings Jesus taught or even James his successor or Paul who created the first layer of orthodoxy that won out eventually (eg, Christians don’t have to be Jews).
But you can’t argue that it isn’t correct because it’s not historically the same, they’re just arguing that it is religiously true. That’s like arguing that a 3-sided shape isn’t a square because it’s blue, you’re right but not making the right argument.
The pattern I notice in fundamentalism is that you start with the assumption that your beliefs are “religiously true”, then you interpret your scripture in a way that supports those beliefs. Whether the scripture is historically accurate seems to be incidental.
