Based on this description, KJV should be pretty accurate then. You wouldn’t have needed the original texts by the apostles.
You’re saying vast amounts of people copied the apostles’ texts at the time. Any mistakes made would have been like typos if the majority of people copying it were doing so honestly.
After that, King James of England ordered that the Bible be translated into English by a group of collaborating scholars who had gathered as many versions of the text as possible.
Whether stuff in the Bible is true is a whole other question. I’m not a Christian myself but it seems to me like they would have ended up with quite an accurate text for English speakers.
From a historical lens, it is obviously not the same teachings Jesus taught or even James his successor or Paul who created the first layer of orthodoxy that won out eventually (eg, Christians don’t have to be Jews).
But you can’t argue that it isn’t correct because it’s not historically the same, they’re just arguing that it is religiously true. That’s like arguing that a 3-sided shape isn’t a square because it’s blue, you’re right but not making the right argument.
The pattern I notice in fundamentalism is that you start with the assumption that your beliefs are “religiously true”, then you interpret your scripture in a way that supports those beliefs. Whether the scripture is historically accurate seems to be incidental.
I think the KJV-only movement is largely an American insanity. Elsewhere I see the NIV or NASB being used more. And they’re translated from earliest Greek texts wherever they’re found. Earliest complete texts are about 325ad with fragments earlier
The “10s of thousands of variations” line is disingenuous. Manuscripts overwhelmingly only differ on grammatical and typos type differences. A bit like if everyone was asked to tell the story of Goldilocks. You’d get 1000 variations, but the essentials of the story would be apparent clear as day.
Maybe, but the essentials are still pretty nuts. The NIV doesn’t change things like Jesus saying anyone who doesn’t believe in him is condemned or Paul saying he doesn’t permit a woman to teach or, you know, the entirety of the Old Testament.
Yes. But the graphic is painting the idea that the text can’t have been transmitted accurately. Whereas it’s most likely we have good portions of what Paul actually taught, less so the historical Jesus but some parts more likely than others. The OT is different given it’s largely legendary. But, even so, it’s transmission from the post exile communities that first authored it is surprisingly accurate. The Dead Sea Scrolls found in the late 1940s pushed back the earliest OT texts we have a full thousand years from ~900ad to ~100bc. The level to which they were accurate copies was astonishing showing that textual transmission in the ancient world was more reliable than previously thought.
This isn’t a religious point of view, but rather one of secular scholarship.
