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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: john in springfield; metmom
"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."

So in comparison to Darwin’s book on his theory, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"; would you say that the same kind of textual changes that would have to be made in Darwin’s book to meet the understanding we have today of his theory would have to be made in the Bible to meet our understanding of God?

In other words; Darwin’s book would go through a radical change to meet our understanding of evolution; do you think the Bible needs to go through the same change to meet today’s understanding of God?

40 posted on 03/20/2010 3:38:18 PM PDT by celmak
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