Wednesday, April 06, 2005

 

Bible's Editors' Changes to God's "Literal Words"

Passing largely unnoticed to the "Bible is the literal word of God" crowd is this interesting research project:
World’s oldest Bible goes global:
Historic international digitisation project announced

11 March 2005 :: Posted by Catriona Finlayson

An ambitious international project to reinterpret the oldest Bible in the world, the Codex Sinaiticus, and make it accessible to a global audience using innovative digital technology and drawing on the expertise of leading biblical scholars is officially launched today.
...
It is also highly important for its rich layering of texts. It was written by three scribes and contains important textual corrections and insertions. The digitisation and work on transcription will make it possible for researchers to identify which corrections and additions were made by which scribe at the click of a button, thus enabling them to uncover the different versions of the text that were used at the time.
...
The Codex Sinaiticus is the world's oldest Bible and the most important Biblical manuscript. It was written in Greek by hand in the mid-fourth century around the time of Constantine the Great. Though it originally contained the whole of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, half of the Old Testament has since been lost. The surviving manuscript concludes with two early Christian texts, an epistle ascribed to the Apostle Barnabas and the Shepherd by Hermas.
Source: The British Library (Emphasis added)
In other words, the Bible that KK-Kristians call the "literal word of God" has undergone "important textual corrections and insertions" over the years. This would seem to undercut those claiming that the King James version of the English translation of the Latin version of the Greek edition of the original text is in fact the "literal word of God" and hasn't suffered translation and/or transcription errors.

Call me hopelessly reality-based, but if scholars in 350 AD couldn't agree on exactly what God said, the 1,650 or so years since then probably haven't help clarify matters.

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