God's messengers, or their followers, often wrote their teachings down. These teachings, often combined with a bit of contemporary history, some songs and poems, become the scriptures of the religion, each one a treasure box in its own right.
The world has never seen an infallible human, nor will it ever see one. Therefore, every scripture which these messengers left behind them can contain mistakes or untruths. I know that this will not go down well with some people. Most Christians for example believe that Jesus was God in person, so he and his teachings were perfect. However even these have to accept that Jesus did not himself write the material found in today's editions of the Bible.
In the film "Gandhi", the Mahatma describes to his friend how, as a child, the priest used to read from the scriptures of different religions interchangeably, as if it didn't matter which book was being read from as long as God was being worshipped.
"The words may be God's, but ears are only human"
When you stop to think about it, even if you accept that the Bible is based on the word of God, for many generations it depended on the memory of man and the understanding of man, before it was committed to paper. Once there, it was edited by man, copied by man, and translated by man. Man formed committees to decide which books are to form a part of the 'official' Bible and which books are to be excluded, and finally man reads and interprets it. A single mistake by anyone along this line and the message which you receive in the end is no longer an infallible, perfect message from God. Of course you are also assuming that all the prophets, saints and so on were truly receiving their messages from God in the first place, and that none of them added to or subtracted from the message. And you must be just as sure that the authors are truly who they say they are (there are doubts about whether some epistles are authentic). Finally, one must be careful to separate the metaphors, examples and parables from the literal instructions and stories. My own belief is that the Bible is not infallible, nor always literal.
Let us take this "Bible process" in more detail. For many generations, the stories which form part of the Bible were passed from generation to generation verbally. Changes could take place in any one of these generations. A similar phenomenon is often seen when you compare a popular folk tale from different regions. In studies of folklore, one will often find the same story in many different regions, but with different "local" variations. Even in the gospels, which were written within one century of the actual events (up to 115CE), we already find significant variations between the different gospels available to us. Being committed to paper, however, did not mean that the gospels were now unchangeable. One example of a change to the gospels is when the Acts of the Apostles mention the death of a man named Theudas in the trial of Peter (Acts 5:36). Theudas was still alive and relatively unknown at the time of the trial, but had been executed by the time Acts was written. It is probable that the name of some unknown insurrectionist was replaced by the name "Theudas" which was much better known. It is believed that the New Testament writings were edited to be more Roman-friendly in order to avoid censorship and even retribution by the Roman empire, while placing more of the blame on the Jews, who had rejected Paul's teachings anyway.
After this and for a long time, the gospels were duplicated by copyists, who would copy the text onto new manuscripts. Occasionally these would add their own comments as they copied. These are similar to modern-day footnotes, except that they were embedded within the text as it was being copied. This might be a simple process, such as further identifying a person (for example, a vague reference to "Mary" in the original might become "Mary the Magdalene" in the copy, because that's who the copyist assumed it was). This is known to have happened in other, non-religious texts. The next "generation" of copyists will simply copy over this annotation together with the rest of the text. Another problem in the New Testament is that all gospels seem to be influenced by the teachings of St. Paul – teachings which conflicted with those of the apostles, as can be seen in Acts, and were also influenced by a strong anti-Pharisee feeling, which may have come from Paul himself.
After this process of copying comes the translation, and this causes a whole new set of problems. First of all, the connotations of a word in one language are rarely mirrored exactly in another language. Sometimes there is no word which has exactly the same meaning. Often, a phrase or sentence can be translated in two or more different ways, and the translators have to choose one particular translation and hope it's the right one. Another major problem is that, in many translations of the Bible, the translation was done in a pretty roundabout way – from Aramaic into Greek, into Latin, into German and finally into English. One frequently-quoted difference between translations is Isaiah 7:14. The Douay translation has "Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son and his name shall be called Emmanuel." The Basic English version, as well as the original Hebrew, has "a young woman is now with child..." Since this is the prophecy which is normally referred to as having been fulfilled with the virgin birth, one can see how important the translation can be. The final composition of the Bible did not come down unaltered, neither in the Jewish Tanakh nor in the Christian Bibles. Thus there are a couple of books in the Christian "Old Testament" which are not found in the Jewish Tanakh. And there are many gospels which were excluded from the New Testament, including the gospels of St. Peter, St. Thomas, and Mary of Magdala (incidentally, why isn't she St. Mary of Magdala?), as well as gospels describing the childhood of Jesus.
The composition of the final Bible was decided at different stages by individuals and committees, especially the Nicean Council, setting some gospels to be the Bible and others to be the apocrypha or pseudopigrapha. Finally, the finished version is read by different persons each of whom gives a different interpretation to the same words.
However this does not stop people from treating it as the ultimate truth, making "the word of God" responsible for anything from small fights, large wars, religious persecution, holding back education and many other things which, I am sure, God never intended to happen, especially in His name.
Copyright © 2000, Ramon A. Casha. Conditions of use.