RE: My change to Atheism from Christianity (I'm 14)
July 1, 2011 at 8:48 am
(This post was last modified: July 1, 2011 at 8:49 am by Justtristo.)
(June 30, 2011 at 8:55 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: Oh I get ya. Well using multiple translations is to improve my understanding of the scripture, not to minimize error. There are a couple errors in the KJV and I believe one or two in the NIV but we are well aware of them. Some translations like the NASB and ESV are literal translations they translate everything exactly how it was written in the manuscript. Some translations like the NIV are translated in a way that better suits the English language, they are great for picking up and getting a quick knowledge of what the text meant. It's good to use several versions for this reason. As to your other question, science is never based on consensus but biblical scholarship is far more based on it, although not completely. So it's not really a double standard, just different areas of scholarship. Good discussion.
The thing about the Old and New Testaments is that we have now thousands of manuscripts of both dating back to 150 BCE, which makes the Holy Bible the most well preserved of ancient texts. So the reliability of the Holy Bible in my opinion is a non-issue.
My main issue with particularly the New Testament is that of deliberate editing of the text, which Bart D Ehrman outlined very well in his latest book Forged. Although the alterations of the text Bart D Ehrman outlined are actually quite minor and would not affect the interpretation of the New Testament by Christians. As Ehrman outlined in Forged, these alterations were made by what Ehrman termed the "proto-orthodox" to combat "heretics".
The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) which is the bible I have on my bookshelf is such an excellent translation, because there are footnotes talking about passages which have been either added in or altered.
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