How do theists justify the translations of the scriptures?

[Rev. Rye]

Who said anything about a forgery?  We dont even use that word when we refer to magic book.  We call them interpolations, and there are plenty.  

The point, is that it's not surprising to find that the pauline establishment document of christianity matches the early christian documents we find, that were produced by the pauline liturgical apparatus.  Controlling the flow of that information and establishing a unified theology were exactly what the proto christian authorities were doing at the time.  Document production would explode shortly thereafter, as the christians captured the roman state, and wouldn't you know it..those docs match up too.

It's not a forgery when you faithfully repeat the version of the story your predecessors founded your subcult on, lol.

There is another term that intellectually honest people use.

Provenance. 1900 years of written consistency, out of a possible 1925 years of written history.

Consistency? In all those 25,000 manuscripts, there are thousands of different textual variations. One recent study estimated as many as HALF A MILLION different textual variations. Granted, the vast majority of them are fairly minor, but there’s at least one instance where we can actually see scribes messing with the text to further their own agenda. And that instance in particular is important because it’s the only explicit reference to the Trinity in the Bible. And noticing the textual differences in the Bible isn’t a new phenomenon. Origen actually wrote about the many textual variants floating about when he wrote his commentaries on the Gospels. And that was in the Third Century. Not quite 1925 years of unbroken consistency.