The bible is what it has become.
The information in the Old Testament was passed down verbally through many generations before it was finally written down in Hebrew and Aramaic, not exactly the most precise way to transmit information. Then, four hundred years after the Old Testament the New Testament began and it was written is Koine Greek. Until the invention of the printing press, each written copy had to be transcribed by hand, which is a very inaccurate process. For the oldest books of the Bible this went on for over 3,000 years, every single copy was transcribed by hand for generations and generations, started with information that had been handed down through the generations verbally.
So yes, the Bible is what it has become, but that is no basis upon which to reject it as a valuable spiritual resource that speaks to the historical development of a people in whom profound metaphysical truths were emerging over time
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Who knows if it is an accurate reinterpretation, transcription, translation of historical fact, folklore or fanciful hypothesis.
The Bible is a book that includes history and prophecy, poetry and love songs, allegories and parables, none of which is conducive to any kind of literal translation.
Constantine and his cadre of translators were 300 years too late.
Words are socially derived and they have to be put into a certain context in order to be understood. They are very inexact, ambiguous and equivocal and they can have multiple meanings or different meanings to different people.
All language requires the individual to translate the words into something meaningful.
So context is unachievable unless the Big Guy does a fly by and puts the record straight.
And I was simply pointing out that modern Christianity and Trinity are clearly of much later European production.
Thank you, Captain, Obvious, but isn’t modern anything of later production, isn’t that what makes anything modern? Modern science is not the same as ancient science either, can you explain what your point about Christianity is supposed to be?
The Bible was written over a period of about 1,500 years by around 40 different authors, in three different languages, on three different continents. The authors lived in different times, in different cultures, in different contexts, and all of them they were seeking to convey an experience, literalism in that regard is uninformed and meaningless, the value of this evolving story can only come from going beneath the words, to discover the experience that made the words necessary, and seek the meaning to which the words point.
Your insistence on a static literalism may serve an agenda, it may be useful if your goal is to sharpen doctrinal debate and attain divisiveness, but it does not foster religious awareness, and it betrays a complete lack of understanding of the subject matter.
If true intelligence is mental expansion, which is to say, it involves the ability to view and understanding widely different things from multiple different perspectives, an aptitude for grasping a wide range of truths, relationships, and meanings, and the capacity for abstract and symbolic thought, then it follows logically that the contention that one can reduce reality to only one of its modes, to know it in only one of its forms, to represent it in a static, literalist, surface level manner, is an unintelligent claim.
Science and religion both concur that reality cannot be reduced to a single ontological level, on the contrary, science asserts that reality is in fact, multileveled, it asserts that the four dimensions of existence that we call reality, are contingent and relative to a greater reality of more dimensions, of which we cannot have certain knowledge, and which can only be expressed metaphorically. Access to transcendent understanding is clearly a function of abstract and symbolic thought, and simply cannot be grasped by surface level, simplistic, and literal thought processes.
