Welcome to Gaia! ::

I know there are a lot of Christians and Catholics in this guild, and from reading a few other threads that have been started here I can't help but want to state my opinion of the bible.

The bible is corrupted. And by corrupted I mean changed from the original, not specifically by any evil force. What you read in the bible today is NOT what was originally written.

For one thing, the bible started as an oral tradition among the Jews. Eventually it got written down, but eventually that scroll was destroyed, and someone else had to write it down as they remembered it.
You cannot tell me that generation after generation is going to tell the stories EXACTLY the same way. After time, the words change meanings. Some words aren't even used anymore. Some may become illegible, written on a scroll in ink that may bleed and run when wet.

The same with the new testament. It was told in stories, then written down. Then copied, then the copies were destroyed, then written again. And then what? The conversion of other peoples. Other peoples mean other languages. So, find people who know both languages to translate.

If anyone here has studied a foreign language for a length of time, you know: there are words that do not translate. What /was/ the ancient hebrew word for homosexual? What did it /really/ imply?

Truth be told, Moses was never married. In the old Old Testament, there was no such thing as marriage. Written down, it read, "Moses knew Sarah." There was no ceremony, there was no ring, you just...got to know a person. (There's a bit of sarcasm there, sorry. No offense meant to marriage, just the difference in translation.)

I'm just saying that, logically, you cannot take the bible word for word. The words are not the same.

And the big argument for this is that "God would not allow for His word to be corrupted by man." But that still doesn't explain the lost undertones of the old languages.

Watch the history channel's documentaries on the bible for more info.

My problem is people following it so dogmaticly and priests saying "this is the word of our lord". New flash, god did not write the bible. People seem to forget this fact. PEOPLE wrote the bible, a few different people wrote it. And as you said it has changed over time and such. I also heard from a show about it that stories were taken out of the bible over time. It's true people change things, twist stories, make mistakes and just plain lie.

I want to say that I'm pleased with the responses that I got from this, actually. I was a bit worried about it after I hit submit, that people might take it that I'm against the bible altogether, which is not the case.

The stories in the bible are good. The stories, taken as stories, as I heard them every sunday in church, about people's faith leading to great miracles of healing and enlightenment, are wonderful. In my church we never read revelations, and the old testament was only read on certain occasions. All I ever knew of were the stories that were read to me, and I do like those stories. I'm not saying they did happen, and I'm not saying they didn't. I wasn't there, I can't say. I believe it is possible that they did, and I will always believe that miracles are possible.



That's actually what I meant, that marriage in itself was not a sacrament to begin with. There was a strong bond between people, and to know someone would mean to love them. To know someone, to truly know someone, to know their every motivation and fear and hope, I think that is to love them and be bonded forever. That's the context that I take it in, anyway. In a society where sex is considered a bit more sacred to what it is today, "getting to know a person" through intimacy and sex is to share a bond forever.

The whole sex thing's kind of a tangent, though. I'm personally happy to dwell in that mindset at this time because I'm in a happy fluffy place with my man, and happy to sit and sigh and talk about love. *sigh* But, that's not what this conversation is about, and I apologize to anyone who may be offended by my gushing. redface

Your points are easily defeated by my statement that the bible was divinely inspired by god. That means that god placed the story into the authors head exactly how the author would write it. Remember working with the judeo-christian definition of god, god knew which authors would write the bible the best. If you factor in that the bible was divinely inspired as it was written down, then it follows that, at the time the bible was written, there were no errors in it.

The question is, was the bible truely divinely inspired?

I believe that the Bible contains much Truth and covers the vast expanse of the Kingdom of God, but in order to protect the "pearl from the swine" I believe that Jesus and others like Him hid Spiritual Knowledge in mysterious ways including in "Apocryphal" Lights where the common/less-religious people consider the hard to understand experiences of Prophets to be "Heresy." It was commonly understood that the masses probably would NOT understand the esoteric meaning behind the hard to understand Truths unless certain spiritual events were experienced first hand or Gnostically.

One should also understand the Scriptures in the context of the original Hebrew and Greek languages, and take into knowing ancient Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic metaphors, symbology, idioms, etc. Some portions of Scripture may have been corrupted or forged or are missing, but the whole of it I believe remains, although it is still highly misinterpreted. Many ancient Jewish/Christian Apocrypha Scriptures were also rejected from the officially compiled "Canon" of Scripture. I'd say go to the oldest known manuscripts and read Hebrew and Greek to better understand the Holy Bible, also extensively reading Early Christian and Early Gnostic Christian commentary on the Scriptures, and Jewish/Christian Apocrypha Scriptures that were rejected from the man-compiled "Canon".

I highly recommend the Early Valentinian Gnostic Christian commentary, and Origen's commentary. Elaine Pagels' book "The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis on the Pauline Letters" is also wonderful, it opened my eyes alot.

I'm a Valentinian Gnostic Christian and a Student of Jewish Kabbalah and Jewish/Christian Mysticism and Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, by the way.

The bible has lot of faults and errors in it. It was written by man, man is prone to error. Even the pope, supposedly the most holy men around, has to go to confession once a week. So how could man NOT mess the bible up some way or another? That's why the bible can't be taken literally. Its more of a large scale parable to how we should live our lives.

Kinda like the parables Jesus told people in the temples. They weren't meant to be taken literally, they were just told in a simple context so people could relate them to thier lives and clean up their act. Same with the bible. Its just more or less a guide book of what an ideal world would be like. We don't have to follow it any more than we have to follow the Korran, but its there and available for people. Mabey after reading it, those people will realize that mabey it would be nice to be nice to one another for a change instead of going around killing each other, like we're so prone to do.

Again, if the bible were divinely inspired, that would mean that god told the author at that time, exactly what to put in, and how to write it, etc.
Again, the question is, was it divinely inspired?

i tottaly agree with you that the current translantions of the Bible are probalby not as they were originally...but to say corupt, me thinks that's a little to far, there is still solace in passages if they are not taken too literally, but instead taken for their overall message that they are trying to convey.

Anyways a few years ago i met this guy who's a PH.D in theological and liguistic studies at my university, he does work re-translating passages from the Bible for his job, his work is pretty interesting,

for example, in Genesis, Eve din't come from Adam's rib, cuz rib was mis-translated and that the world for rib in ancient aramaic actually meant "sleep", and that Adam meant "humanity" and Eve really means "consious life", so the re-translated version goes something like this "God put Humanity (Adam) to sleep and created its Consious Life (Eve)"....this then of course breaks down the idea that women were just created second to men and can therefore justify (for some ppl) inequality of women....just a tid bit of info that i felt like passing along...i'll look over my notes from him and post them later if anyone is interested