quote:
Originally posted by Batwoman:

Wednesday, you said the Bible wasn't translated correctly throughout the years, or whatever your exact words were. Well according to one of the pastors at my church, yes it was. He's basing this on cold hard facts.
Thanks for bringing this up, Amy. In the rush of points raised, this is one I neglected to get back to.

There's a guy named Josh McDowell, who in the early 1970's was an atheist who set out to prove that the Bible has been doctored and re-written to suit the clergy. He set out to write a book that disproves the Bible, as inconsistent and unprovable. He instead found overwhelming evidence that the Bible is the most consistent and proveable ancient document that exists, with roughly 40,000 (updated to 60,000 in a later edition) hand-written manusripts that exist within 200 years of the life of Christ, and many manuscripts before that, including the Dead Sea Scrolls (ancient hand-written copies of the Old Testament that date back to 500-600 B.C)

Josh McDowell ended up becoming a Christian, and he wrote the first of his many books on the subject, Evidence That Demands A Verdict.
The one of his books that I found the most persuasive and readable is He Walked Among Us: Evidence For the Historical Jesus, which looks at what Jesus' enemies had to say about Him, including the text of Roman historians such as Josephus, and Rabbis of various other Jewish sects of the time. It shows that even they acknowledge miracles Jesus performed, however they interpreted Him to have done these things. And regardless, they acknowledge He existed.

Another Christian author/historian I actually prefer to Josh McDowell, is Francis Schaffer.

But regardless, tremendous care has been put into the preservation of the Bible, and its translation into English and other languages.

Read the preface of an NIV English translation, and you will see the tremendous labor for accuracy, confirmation by various scholars of every denomination, and attempt to closely preserve even the style of the original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic(the latter an ancient Syrian dialect) that the Old and New Testaments were written in.

Study Bibles are footnoted, and explain the subtleties and context of ancient words and languages that may have been lost, or less clear, in a modern translation.

But as McDowell points out, the Bible is more verifiable and has far more existing ancient manuscripts, and verifiable accuracy, than The Iliad, or even more modern writings, such as the plays of William Shakespeare.