Is the Bible of today the same as its origin ?

(((There are a number of objections that are raised against the trust worthiness, the reliability and the sufficiency of the scripture of the Bible. It has less to do with the old testament history since continous archeological excavasions and linguistic analysis in vast majority of cases confirms the events, the places and the persons referred to in the old testament. It has more to do with the new testament and the questioning of Jesus Christ as a historical person, his life, his teachings, his death, his resurrection and his 40 days of teaching after his resurrection. This despite Jesus Christ, his future coming, his life and works being richly documented both as prophecy in the old testament and by several historians active when Jesus was alive and forward, like the Roman authorative historian Josephus. In fact, Jesus is probably the most documented and written about person in known history. But that does not help because we still have to explain Jesus resurrection and his seemingly impossible teachings after his death since it belongs to the cathegory of exceptional claims among the Christians.)))

Copies of Copies ?

Do we have today, what the original authors wrote ? Because the oldest book of the Bible, in relation to the many versions we have today, that was written almost 2000 years ago.

- So how do we know that it has not been tampered with ?

- How do we know that it has not been changed ?

- How do we know that objections of various quality are not true ?

American writer & stand up comedian David Cross adressed what many people belive about the Bible in general: "All the things that are supposed to take place in the future are already. How all the prophecies have completely antiqueted they are. When the Bible were written, then re-written and then edited and then re-edited and translated from dead languages and then re-translated and re-edited and then re-re-edited and then translated and then re-translated and then given to Kings for them to take their favourite parts out and then re-edited and re-translated and re-edited and given to the Pope to approve and re-re-translate and rewritten and edite and re-edited, re-translated and then re-edited again....all based on stories that were told orally 30 - 90 years after they happened to people that did not know how to write - the Bible is the oldest game of telephone."

Many of us have heard that objection before. It is a very common objection from celebrities, talk show hosts and others that often wants to give the appearence of intellectual depth and historical know how. What it instead factually reveals are the total opposite, a vast lack of knowledge about the Bible and its historical authenticity.

In Dan Browns book - Da Vinci Code - the falsehood repeats: "The Bible has evolved through countless translations, additions and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book."

This is the narrative that is taken for truth when we talk to people about the Bible and its history, content and textual conformity over time. Upholders of this narrative will deduct the following concept:

1. They will often grant that a person named Jesus in fact existed and that he had some sort of message written down in Aramaic & Hebrew, wich were the languages Jesus spoke most of the time.

2. Jesus immediate followers took the Aramaic & Hebrew texts, translated it and wrote it down in Greek wich is the original copies of what we have today in the new testament, the gospel, the biography of Jesus life written down in Greek,

3. From point 2 and forward it is were it all goes wrong. They argue that as time goes on, people are no longer speaking or reading languages like Greek or Aramaic, they are reading languages like Latin. They take the Greek copies and translate them into Latin and they get rid of the Greek copies, they are old & dusty and nobody is using them anyways. More time passes and people are not speaking Latin anymore, they are speaking languages like old German, So they take those Latin copies and translates them into old German and get rid of the Latin copies. This pattern repeats itself as time goes on for a number of languages, French, modern German and English. The English language has manifested many versions and translations of previous Biblical versions.

4. This ends up in the falacy deduction that we only have many translations after translations after translations actually corrupting the original textual content, conformity and meaning.

The problem with this falacy deduction is that this is NOT have you got your Bible. If you are holding a modern English translation of the Bible, it is NOT a translation of previous languages all the way through history. It is translated directly from the oldest Hebrew & Greek copies. Translation Committees consisting of trained and academic linguists come together to translate the oldest original texts of the Bible to make them more adapted to today's language without losing meaning and content. They also take into account how previous translations rendered specific interpretations. But they do NOT translate from the previous languages and their versions, they translate from the original languages Aramaic, Hebrew & Greek and observe and evaluate how versions, translations and languages have had different interpretations of content and or adhered to the oldest original texts.

This is a confusion of translation vs transmission. Translation is going through one language into another. Transmission is the long history of how we go from texts written in ancient languages 2000 years ago to today. The are confusing these cathegories. What David Cross and others communicate arguing the "broken telephone game" is that it is a single line of transmission & the message can not be repeated twice to the receiver.

Playing the "broken telephone game" it starts with one original source transmitting a short particular message to a listener / receiver ear and that person whispers the message into the ear of another listener / receiver ear and this then repeats for hundreds or thousands of persons until we decide to control the original message with the message that has travelled through a thousand ears and minds. The relaied message is messed up and not the original message, it is broken. This is not what we have with the Bible.

It was written by multiple authors, at multiple times, at multiple locations, to multiple audiences who themselves were in multiple different locations. So it is not a single line of transmission it is multiple lines of transmission injected with steroids. Why ? We have all those scribes who were likewise copying in different locations, writing to different audiences, at different times who were themselves in different locations.

Then there is the history aspect. Between the 1:st century, when the new Testament was written and the 4th century, we have copies of the old & the new Testament being copied and spread around all over the ancient world. By the time we get to the 4th century we have hundreds, if not a few thousand of what we call the books of the Bible. They were independent at that time but were soon therafter gathered under the umbrella of the book of the Bible. Copies of the Gospels, the Pslmas, the Acts, the Prophets floating around the ancient world so that within a few decades and centuries we find copies up into Europe, into Asia and into north Africa. This means that no one person or no one group could have controlled the text in any one point in time. Why ??

If what David Cross argues is correct according to the broken telephone game and you have Popes, Kings and scribes that wanted to insert certain things for their own benefit into the Bible and they are in Turkey, what are they going to do with all the copies that are in north Africa, central & northern Europe or further into Asia ? They have to track them down and alter them as well but that would have been impossible. So because the history of the Bible, what we call multiple lines of transmission, no one person or no one group could have controlled the text at any one point in time.

The objection for the translation to translation to translation etc, does not work when we actually look at how we got the Bible and likewise the objection that people inserted things in the Bible that they wanted to or took things out of it also does not hold water when we look at how we got the history of the Bible.

Some may argue that we now are approximately 2000 years removed from the most recent books, but not only that, we are even a few more thosand years removed from some of the books in the Old Testament. As time goes on we are obviously getting farther away from the original texts, in one sense - of course - but in another sense, as time goes on we are not necessarily getting farther away from the original texts, we are actually getting closer. This could be displayed according to this:

YEAR. NUMBER OF MANUSCRIPTS. EARLIEST MANUSCRIPTS.

1611 31 11th Century (1000 AD).

2023 5000 + 2:nd Century (100 AD).

Ex: The KIng James Bible (KJV) were translated between the years 1604 - 1611, and it was translated, not from manuscripts (handwritten copies), but from printed editions of the Hebrew Old Bible and Greek New Testament. The main printed editions of the New Testament that the King James Version translators used were based on 31 manuscripts. Of the New Testament, the King James translators had 7 printed editions of the Greek New Testament and those were based on approximately 31 manuscripts. We have today, 27 of those 31 manuscripts in our possession, we can go and look at them, but we also have 5000 + more manuscripts. If we skip ahead to 2023 from 1611 when the King James translation was published, we have a much greater body of evidence that leads us back to the New Testament texts and the that also applies for the Old Testament texts. Because the earliest manuscripts of those 31 that the King James translators had as an underline base text, the oldest of wich was from the 11th century.

Today we have copies that go back to the 2nd century. So as time goes on, as we stick shovels in the ground in the name of scinces like Archeology, Anthropology, Geology and History we discover manuscripts, sites and Archeological evidence sealed in time we actually get CLOSER to the time frame of what the Bible actually said. That does not mean that the King James Version is not accurate in that sense. If anything, what we found when we unearthed all those manuscripts is a confirmation that even though the King James translators were using a base text that came from the 11th century it was remarkably similar and accurate.

-12:08-

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References.

1. Is the Bible we have what the original authors even wrote ? Wes Huff - 2024.

https://youtu.be/iaub_Ch0Auo?si=W2rzxfnBvgL7y-4O

2. Exploring the hidden Biblical Locations. The Power of the Word. - 2026.

https://youtu.be/X9nvEEJbQAo?si=tt50TSKN9plFZDCX