Rewriting the bible

[robvalue]

Yeah it's all very confusing. I have to come down on the side of agreeing with Ehrman (and everyone else) that the NT is at best filled with mistakes and at worst complete fiction. But I don't agree with him about HJ. (Unlike in religion, we don't have to accept everything or nothing.) I don't find his arguments convincing when it comes to HJ. I think Carrier has his number on this. But I'm only starting to dig into this, so that's subject to further understanding on my part.

I never actually thought about the whole "reproducing by hand" thing. It not only causes huge amounts of errors, but there's nothing to stop people just making stuff up or removing stuff as well. For all we know huge sections got added, got spread around and became popular, while others got lost because people didn't like them. The NT is about the worst kind of evidence I can imagine, even our earliest actual copies of it. At the very best case we have:

Events happen -> Eye witnesses die -> Hearsay is recorded -> Hearsay is copied huge amounts of times

And that's assuming the whole thing isn't just a fiction, which is utterly impossible to know. But even given that best scenario above, it's full of shit. Would a court admit it? They wouldn't even let you in the court room holding something like that. They'd bring back hanging and stoning just for you. And this is before it gets translated into other language.... man. We're talking about unreliable copies of a possible fiction with virtually nothing else to back it up. There's nothing magical about these stories. People are quite capable of making stuff up.

I know first hand how chinese whispers can play out. I told my wife a story and I heard her relaying it to someone else, and she had misheard one part and played up another part. I'm not criticizing her, this kind of thing is to be expected. So that's the first whisper, and already it has mistakes and exaggerations.

And no, I didn't get buggered by a priest. I know I don't have to be involved in religion. I'm trying to do my bit to reduce the harm it does to the world, and hopefully someone out there reading what I say will pause for thought and just maybe question their beliefs. If so, that is worthwhile. (Of course that applies to all discussion on here, I'm not trying to say I'm special or something. But each perspective, and "out" atheist helps the cause.) I did get metaphysically buggered, but it's very hard to prove that in court.

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Anyhow... although interesting, the HJ debate isn't actually of much importance. The best it can accomplish is that there was some guy, called Jesus, who did or said maybe a handful of things in the bible. The kind of things anyone could do or say. Either way, I feel my original post holds in that editing the bible at this point is not a big deal as we don't even have the original "accounts" recorded in any kind of accuracy anyhow.