Wow...i've been gone for a while and this is an interesting discussion.Originally Posted by geoff
First off, I have not read everything...there is too much on here, but i have seen some serious inaccuracies.
First of the KJV does have errors (and some are intentional, but you need to look at the history of King James and the Anglican church to understand why). You should also remember that the only reason we know there are errors in his translation is because we have original manuscripts to go by...in fact we know that many of our versions have translations errors. Think about the nature of the Judeo-Christian faith...it is historically based. Just like you would read about the Egyptians, the Sumerians, etc etc...we have to always go back and check our understanding of what happened.
The Bible is written as a collection of writings by different authors through time. This being that case, there are tons of real history there, and we are always discovering new things to help us understand the history and the language better. Because the Bible is made from physical manuscripts you can expect two things to always happen.
1. we will always be making leaps in our understandings of past cultures and language. Therefore we will always have to go back and cross reference our newly found understandings with our translations.
2. we should always expect our understandings of what the text says to be pretty close to accurate. Remember, the Bible is not translated on a whim. Its translated with reference and historical information that validates what we understand to have happened. This means that even though we get a few words wrong here or there, the fundamental basis of the accounts written in scripture are still accurate.
Imagine if you will ten people telling of an event that they witness...maybe a bank robbery. One of these people is an american and the other is arabic and so on with varied cultures. They will be speaking in different languages and the root of the words they use will have subtle differences in translated meaning, however the accounts of what they all saw should tell the same story. "A man walked into the bank with a gun and demanded the money and ran out. He was wearing....he was this tall...etc etc"
Now even in this scenario we still are going to be less accurate than the translations of the Bible because everyone doing the translating has access to the original manuscripts and other accounts that are not written as biblical scriptures to verify what is there.
Lastly,
Some of the people on here are commenting based off of wikipedia searches and google. You need to be careful with that because whether or not you believe in the meaning of what is written in the Bible, it is a completely separate thing than saying the Bible is erratic because men wrote it.
The simple facts are:
The men in scripture were real.
They authored their texts.
They told their accounts to the best of their ability in their language and culture.
A very strong majority of their accounts are verified through non-biblical secular texts.
The physical texts are there for referencing ALL new translations.
Just as if you were listening to a persons testimony in the courtroom you can and should scrutinize the texts as its presented. The Bible invites it. But the thing to remember is that you should be asking if the specific individual account is accurate and you should be able to dig and really define those things you believe to be inaccurate. Because we are talking about 3000 year old manuscripts, in some cases we can't verify every little detail, but we should expect to be able to verify some.
Its easy to sit back and play games making claims against the Bible, but the information is out their for you to really look and validate things that are in it. If you are arguing against it and haven't moved past google, and a few atheistic sites then shame on you, you are a fool arguing with wisdom that is thousands of years old and only increasing in its influence and grounding.
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