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To: john in springfield; metmom
” Yes, certainly.” And, ”Or didn't you know this?”

Let me be more specific. I realize that the whole Bible added books and subtracted books to what we have today, there were times when men decided which books were inspired and which were not. So let me be more specific; did they ever change the meaning of any individual book (or chapter, verse, or sentence for that matter)? I am not asking about trivial translations either; i.e., the translation from the original Hebrew or Greek, such as the difference between “thee” and “thou.” And I am not asking about a simple sentence change, such as, “As Jesus started on His way…,” vs., “And as He was setting out on the journey…;” THE MEANING IS THE SAME. I am asking if there has been any changes in the meaning of any book of the Bible.

As to the Old Testament books; has the meaning of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and all through Malachi changed? And for those who have the not divinely inspired books (Apocrypha); i.e., the books of Tobit, Judith, Additions to Esther, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, etc, has their meaning been changed? Has the content of the books of the New Testament; i.e., Mathew through Revelation, been changed? If any meaning of these books has changed, what meaning changed?

32 posted on 03/20/2010 9:32:56 AM PDT by celmak
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To: celmak; john in springfield

The *changes* that are asserted that the Bible has undergone, are changes in our understanding of some things. The original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic documents have not changed, even though our understanding of the languages has improved and allowed for more accurate translations.

Improving a translation is not *changing* the meaning of the Scripture and is not *changing* the original documents.

The kinds of *changes* that people like to try to tear down the veracity of Scripture with are insignificant to the kinds of changes anything scientific has undergone.

Scientific theories generally go and have gone major revisions, even to the point of being scrapped. The Genesis account in the Bible has been the same for thousands of years.


33 posted on 03/20/2010 12:14:11 PM PDT by metmom (Welfare was never meant to be a career choice.)
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To: celmak
So let me be more specific; did they ever change the meaning of any individual book (or chapter, verse, or sentence for that matter)?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here.

If you're asking whether the TEXT has been changed, the answer to that is: little if any. The scribes who copied the manuscripts over the centuries were as careful as human beings could possibly be. From all I've seen, there were extremely few transcription errors over the centuries, and of those extremely few transcription errors, only a minuscule portion of those would have any bearing on actual meaning.

However, meaning has been "changed" and sometimes lost in the sense that modern people often do not understand the scriptures in quite the same way they were understood by their original recipients. This is inevitable because of the distances in time, culture and language between the original audience and the audiences of today. One only needs to look at the large number of denominations that disagree on various points of doctrine to realize that most people must misunderstand something about the Bible.

But the question itself isn't very meaningful. It's like asking whether the text of Darwin's Origin of Species has changed over the last 150 years. No, it hasn't. But our understanding of evolution has changed over time. So has our understanding of God. A more meaningful comparison would be to say that our understanding of the development of life is changing over time, just as we've gone through changes in our understanding of theology and the world - including some major revolutions such as the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and so forth.

34 posted on 03/20/2010 12:43:32 PM PDT by john in springfield
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To: celmak; metmom

Moreover, the Bible doesn’t contain any truth or information that’s “new”, rather pretty much was settled centuries ago.

And yet it’s truth stands the test of time and is as relevant today as it was when it was written.


73 posted on 03/22/2010 4:14:32 PM PDT by tpanther (Science was, is and will forever be a small subset of God's creation.)
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