Aloha! New with a big question!

[WackyWicky]

"Those idiots"......
If you would be good enough to show how we are incorrect in what we said Danny that would be great.

Certainly mate.

There is no such thing as the original bible.
All extant versions are copies, mistranslations or plagiarisms of other copies, mistranslations or plagiarisms and so on and so forth.

Well you're categorized that incorrectly.

We have copies, yes, and translations also. We also do have mistranslations.

But not all in the one place. We have 5,800+ manuscripts in Greek, and over 20,000 in Latin - and more still in other languages. Even without any of those, if you were to lock them all in a very large vault, we'd still have almost the entire Bible preserved in the quotations of church fathers, and other early historical figures, in Greek, Latin and other languages. So yes, we has lots and lots of copies, quotations even and translations too (starting with Latin, Cyrillic, etc).

Mistranslations - let's assume we're talking about the Vulgate, for instance, yes there are mistranslations eg Rev 22:19 where it says " God shall take away his part out of the book of life", I illustrate this error because it was copied by Erasmus, and that's because he didn't have the last leaf of Revelations in the 7 Greek manuscripts that he borrowed, and thus he copied it from the Vulgate and translated it back to Greek. And thus because it appeared in the Novum Instrumentum omne (as did the Comma Johanneum), it appears in the Geneva Bible, and subsequently the KJV. Note that it wasn't the translators of the Geneva Bible or the KJV who "mistranslated" it, they translated it from the Novum Instrumentum omne (3rd Edition), and it was either Jerome who made the error back in the 4th century - or it was the person who made the first copy we have.

The idea that this process is a cycling one is wrong. With each new critical Greek editions, less and less errors are reproduced in the original texts, and almost all modern translators no longer use the critical texts as the sole underlying textual basis for the NT; they consider all relevant early manuscripts alongside the science of textual criticism where they feel necessary to avoid copying mistakes found in the text.

Aractus

Are you suggesting the "bible" is the absolute word of God? If not which one is?

As a past Christian I was taught that the King James Version (what's this version thing?), was the actual word of God , (suggesting that all other bibles [that weren't word for word the same] were false), therefore un-questionable. hock:

There are some other things in the King James Version that bother me but are not germane to this post which, if any one is interested I will be happy to address in another thread.

BTW I am an a-theist as opposed to atheist. (Perhaps a rather fine distinction).

Robert