Quote Originally Posted by TheShadow. View Post
if you examine all of the evidence you might find that that book has been proven to have existed essentially unchanged from a much earlier time than most believe, and is actually pretty reliable as far as things that can be checked.
I have heard many different opinions about that, and I'm fairly well convinced that there is not all that much of the Bible which has remained unchanged. In the first place, the Old Testament is a conglomeration of morality tales, primarily, based on old oral histories and then the Torah. But there have been numerous revisions and translations and revisions of translations. The basic stories are the same, but many of the phrases, which may have meant one thing in Aramaic, meant something slightly different in Hebrew, and more different in Greek, then in Latin and then in English. It's like playing that old children's game of telephone, where each person has to pass on a message to the next person, with each person translating from what he was told by the previous person.
Even the New Testament has been revised since the first writings, with the leaders of the Catholic Church picking and choosing among the various gospels in existence at the time, then tossing the one's they didn't like. That doesn't mean that the one's they selected were accurate, just that they sold the message the Church leaders wanted to sell.
And, while there may be some archeological evidence to corroborate some portions of the Bible, there is an awful lot of blank space, things which one would suspect should have left traces, but for which no tangible evidence has been found.
So we cannot say that the Bible is unchanged; we cannot show that many, if not most, of the happenings in the Bible, including most of the New Testament, ever took place; we cannot even prove that some of the most important characters in the Bible actually existed. How, then can we say it has remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years?
And all that aside, when so many people who profess to believe in the Bible can interpret it in so many different ways, how are we expected, rationally, to accept it as gospel? No, I think I'll have to pass on the Bible as an historical artifact and interpret it more as a morality play, a teaching tool for the rules of society.