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Friday 30 October 2009

If you were to travel back into time and spend time with second century Christians, you would quickly discover that their Bible consisted of an Old Testament, but not a New Testament, and the version of the OT they would have been using would have been the Septuagint. As for the emerging New Testament, decisions on what was sacred and what was not had yet to be made. Christians were just as likely to consult 1 Clement or the Shepherd of Hermas as they would Paul’s letters or one of our canonical gospels. And if we were to travel back to the fifteenth century we would find the church using books that the Reformers would be rejecting in the sixteenth century. Of course, canonical issues are one thing, and translation issues are another. Which one is the right one? Consider for a moment that furor caused by the translators of the Revised Standard Version in the 1950s, when they followed the logic of the Hebrew text and rendered Isaiah 7:14 with a young woman rather than a virgin bearing the promised child. Although there was much angst, the issues aren’t new. Origen wrestled with translation issues back in the 3rd century, wondering which translation was the right one. Of course, sophisticated Fundamentalists (as opposed to the KJV only crowd) know that no translation is perfect. Thus, they generally fall back on the original Greek and Hebrew. But alas, no such original documents are currently known to exist. Thus, they must take it by faith – but faith based on something without evidence. At best we must rely on copies of copies, some of which lack sections of texts that have long appeared in our Bibles. Which Bible do the Bible Believers Believe?

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