Rewriting the bible

[Aractus]

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.

That just is not true.

Here are the main psychological factors of wellbeing (in peer review literature):

• Geographic location and the physical environment
• Culture
• Social Support
• Religion & Spiritualty
• Wealth
• Life events
• Education
• Employment
• Age (the older the better in this context).

I'll bet no one has ever shown you this list before. Wellbeing across Europe. Would you look at that, Ireland is happier than their closest neighbour.

Now I think what's interesting is that you insist upon holding to an unsupported point of view. You're looking for a whole bunch of negatives which aren't there.

For the NT, the book of acts from chapter 15 on, the epistles of Paul and most of the other epistles are all interesting and provide useful information about the early church. They are all somewhat reliable for that purpose - because they're talking about contemporary events.

Now your little graph might apply to the four gospels and the first half of acts - i.e. "that stuff's in the past, it wasn't contemporary when written". They're still based on a historical account. I mean this is clear just from the Synoptic-John convergences. The authors of Mark and John are unaware of each other's work, yet even by giving very clearly separate accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus they hare a number of similarities. For instance, the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. I think that's a clear example of something we have very little doubt occurred.

The fact that only copies of copies exist is irrelevant - that's all we have for much ancient literature, and in fact for a lot of ancient literature only translations that were made centuries later survived.

But the thing that is interesting, which I didn't see you acknowledge because you didn't bother to mention it, is that by the 4th century AD there are already example of a number of distinctly different textual traditions of the text. This is an excellent thing because it means that they didn't all come from the one line of recessive copying; and it leads to a far far greater accuracy of textual representation of the original works than exists for any other ancient literature. That is, the critical text of the N.T. is around 99.9% accurate to the original autographs (with around 99.5% word-for-word accuracy). You don't get that with any other text.

Stop being irrationally biased. The N.T. text overall is quite good, yes some of it is fables, and some of the letters may be forgeries - even discounting those letters you still have around 15-18 ancient texts written in the first century A.D., that are not "pure works of fiction" or anything of the sort.

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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.

Yes we do, I've pointed this out to you many many times. We have 99.5% word-for-word accuracy of the N.T. though textual criticism, a fact acknowledged by Erhman and to my knowledge every single serious NT biblical scholar.