Atheist Memes

Based on this description, KJV should be pretty accurate then. You wouldn't have needed the original texts by the apostles.

You're saying vast amounts of people copied the apostles' texts at the time. Any mistakes made would have been like typos if the majority of people copying it were doing so honestly.

After that, King James of England ordered that the Bible be translated into English by a group of collaborating scholars who had gathered as many versions of the text as possible.

Whether stuff in the Bible is true is a whole other question. I'm not a Christian myself but it seems to me like they would have ended up with quite an accurate text for English speakers.

I think the KJV-only movement is largely an American insanity. Elsewhere I see the NIV or NASB being used more. And they're translated from earliest Greek texts wherever they're found. Earliest complete texts are about 325ad with fragments earlier

The "10s of thousands of variations" line is disingenuous. Manuscripts overwhelmingly only differ on grammatical and typos type differences. A bit like if everyone was asked to tell the story of Goldilocks. You'd get 1000 variations, but the essentials of the story would be apparent clear as day.

Well technically that's not quite right, there was no definitive (christian) compiled source material before King James bible and the translators translated directly from latin using the oldest texts they had available. Collecting all of the manuscripts and scrolls they studied before compilation was an incredible effort that I actually commend them for.

But yes, Faith at its core is a belief without evidence. By mere definition it is ignorance in the modern world. It's what turned me away from the church from a young age despite my catholic upbringing.

The game of telephone has been played long before telephones were invented.

Nah just gullibility. Plenty of seemingly intelligent people also believe it

Actually that is 100% faith since faith requires the absence of evidence. No stronger faith that when you fully believe in some bullshit some assholes vomited up.

From a historical lens, it is obviously not the same teachings Jesus taught or even James his successor or Paul who created the first layer of orthodoxy that won out eventually (eg, Christians don't have to be Jews).

But you can't argue that it isn't correct because it's not historically the same, they're just arguing that it is religiously true. That's like arguing that a 3-sided shape isn't a square because it's blue, you're right but not making the right argument.

But it's really well written!

What was it again, the new testament was written in the 3rd century after christ, while the old testament has lore from the Gilgamesh/Atrahasis epos?

Faith is insanity.

Then there's also in a sibling desert religion how "40 figs" became "40 virgins" and nobody remembers when or how it happened... or even that the switch happened, at all.

God is all powerful, but not powerful enough to preserve his own inspired writings... or talk to anyone plainly because, ugh, why would they create language then stoop so low to use it... I mean they are so busy with those cosmological constants and quantum fields and all. How could they possibly have the time to act like sane reasonable people, or write down any of those ontological and undisputable fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Bring back the Septuagint! It has a cool name.

The Vulgate Bible was the first to unify the old and new testsments under a single language and was, by and large, the basis for the King James Bible.

Example, the Latin in the Vulgate is pretty easy to follow:

1 In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi: et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux. Et facta est lux.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona: et divisit lucem a tenebris.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Many of them actually know that, but literally believe God guided the hand of the people doing it.

How do the Jewish Torah and Talmud fare? Are there much more authoritative texts for those and the Quran?