[snowman1]

I have been a Christian all my life. But the more I read about the early and middle Christian eras the more I find that the bible as we know it has been rewritten how many times and how much has been lost in these rewritings??????

[Battle Hymn of the Republic]

there is lots of info on your question, but check this out... http://www.carm.org/questions/rewritten.htm

[pbear8]

The regional or local Catholic Church Councils of Hippo, 393 A.D., and Carthage, 397 A.D., and later, Carthage 419 A.D. gave us the canon of Sacred Scripture as we know it today.

More information - here

[narby]

the more I read about the early and middle Christian eras the more I find that the bible as we know it has been rewritten how many times and how much has been lost in these rewritings??????

The interesting thing on the National Geographic video was that at one time there were something like 30 gospels. Isn't the DaVinci Code based around studies of the Gospel of Mary Magdeline?

I didn't know that the earliest Gospel, Mathew, wasn't written by Mathew, and wasn't written until decades later. Apparently John wasn't written until 60 or more years later. None of the authors for the for Cannonized Gospels are known.

It was interesting that the Gnostism denomination of Christianity believed in a more "personal" relationship with Christ and with God, just as todays funamentalists believe. But the hierchical Christians which became the Catholics dominated them two centuries later.

One thing in the NG show I remember from my Southern Baptist Sunday School, or perhaps my New Testament history class at Oklahoma Baptist University, was that Judas was particularly favored by Christ. The Gospel of Judas confirms that, and they hadn't even dug it out of the desert when I was taught that.

[BritExPatInFla]

It reminds one of the experiment where you start out a rumor by telling the first person, and let it go down a line of 30 people. By the end the rumor that's passed down is nothing like the way it started.

[UCANSEE2]

"the bible as we know it has been rewritten how many times and how much has been lost in these rewritings??????"

It doesn't matter.

The message in the Bible is in the principles,not in the details.

In many cases the details are there, but we don't understand the context. For instance, the qoute "....than a camel getting through the eye of the needle."

One needed to live back then to understand just what 'the eye of the needle' was. It was a gate to keep camels from entering the front yard (or garden) and tearing it up.

Point is, you still got the message about the ultimate folly of pursuing riches and power.

[TheGunny]

2Tim 3:16-17

[George W. Bush]

I have been a Christian all my life. But the more I read about the early and middle Christian eras the more I find that the bible as we know it has been rewritten how many times and how much has been lost in these rewritings??????

How much has been rewritten or lost? None.

You should find a better church if they have taught you so little about the history of the Bible and how thoroughly we know its contents throughout its history.

There simply is no document of antiquity that remotely compares with the authenticity and accuracy of scriptural preservation. There isn't any competition. This is true of the Old Testament as well as many archeologists finally discovered.

Despite the shortcomings of some modern translations that rely on the Alexandrian texts which tend toward awkward and inferior readings and omit a few passages, there really is no controversy about the basic text of the Bible and the events described. We have it as it was written and as it was known by the ancient churches. What we don't have are the gnostic texts which were rejected explicitly from the Christian canon in the same way that the writings of the Essenes (portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls) were rejected from the Hebrew canon. And among those gnostic texts, many of which originated in heresy-infested Egypt, was this gospel of Judas.