Re: The "I Can't Believe There's No Abortion Thread" Abortion Thread
All because some dudes 2,000 years ago may or may not have experienced divine providence. Yet, somehow, after being transcribed and translated hundreds and maybe thousands of times, the Bible is still considered perfect and unquestionable. The word and intent of God's language has somehow been "telephoned" for 2,000 years and we don't expect a purple monkey dishwasher?
This is why I've had a falling out with mainstream Christianity. It's not that I don't have faith in a god or blessed ball of veal, beef, and pork. It's that I don't trust 2,000 years of man. I don't trust the last week of man.
To be fair, there has been a lot of serious work done trying to reconstruct the "original" text of the Bible. The art/sciences of textual criticism and philology got their start from Biblical exigesis. There have been plenty of believers who were concerned with exactly the "telephone" problem you point out and who have done an honest job or trying to track down the original version of God's Word. I mean, if you believe that this is
The Manual you want to make sure you've got the correct revision.
This isn't really possible for a number of reasons. There is no extant "original" text. The folkloric traditions which were eventually written down themselves go back into the mists of human history. Instances in which multiple authors seem to agree on events are typically just the residue of them copying off each other. And, well, the little problem that there's no such thing as gods, demons, and the supernatural.
IINM the best we have for the New Testament is source material from the 2nd century -- the problem there is it's already too late and the telelphone game has already infected the text. Decades of the nasty, petty, highly
personal formative political battles of proto-Christianity are lost to us, because the winners destroyed everything that contradicted their version.
For the Old Testament the problem is the opposite -- you can go back before the "events" described and they turn up again and again in other cultures' literature that has nothing to do with Biblical sources. It's really embarrassing that by the time the Jews got around to writing down "their" history, every "event" they reported had already been "happened" over and over again in hundreds if not thousands of prior sources. It's as if the story that Washington could not tell a lie was ripped off from a story about Oliver Cromwell from a story about King Arthur.
Sumerian (just to pick one) stories prefigure much of the OT and the "historical" events reported by the Jewish scholars have an infinitude of precursors in the rhetorical devices of early man. Basically, whatever is going to be deemed important is (1) foretold in prophesy, (2) accompanied by miraculous signs, (3) involves a virgin birth, (4) involves a cataclysmic sacrifice, (5) is legitimized by a resurrection. These are the 5 basic plot points in all of our human stories for as far back as we have records. Everybody who has come along since has just hijacked them, like Pharaohs sandblasting the faces of the statues of predecessors and chiseling in their own.
They're mankind's first memes.
