Asklemmy

Lemmy is, like, all atheists. You're going to get a lot of "we can't" answers.

There is no "original Bible." Different sects of Christianity have different canons that they consider "scripture."

Most Protestants adhere to 66 books divided into the "old" & "new" testaments. Roman catholics include several more books commonly called the "apocrypha" or "deuterocanonical" books.

Various traditions in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox sects such as the Syriac Orthodox church or the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church include even more books and depending on the specific tradition, don't even have a closed canon of official scripture. They don't really think of scripture in terms of being officially canonized, it's more of a spectrum from "more authoritative" to "less authoritative."

There was no defined canon for any of the early Christians for several centuries. Early Christians circulated many different epistles, religious poems, stories, legends, sermons, and parables, often just by oral tradition.

Some, like the gospel of Mark, are considered fairly historical by many scholars, others are more fantastical or don't have as solid historical attestation.

There is active debate amongst scholars about authorship of the now canonized Biblical corpus and the level of historicity.

Take the Bible for what it is; an impressive and important historical work, really a small library of ancient literature. It's not a magical text though, it was written by people in very specific sociological and historical contexts and should be studied and examined with those in mind.

If you find it enlightening and inspiring to your life and it helps you be a better person to others, that's great. And if you attach special spiritual or religious meaning to it, that's your call. But that doesn't change the nature of what the Bible is and where it came from.

As religious people most often just pick and choose from scripture to make their point, it doesn't matter to them that their version of scripture is edited/corrected/censored.

You don't.

Better yet, how do you know any modern religion is anything like what it should be like, generations later?

Religions seem very sure about their own teachings, even as they change. Within your own lifetime you've probably noticed that a priest or simply a believer you know has ended up changing their mind on something. Just a generation or two of believers and the current ones won't be thinking and saying the kind of stuff the first ones were, and vice versa.

One pope says nay, next one says yay. If god is speaking through them, did god change his mind? If he is, why didn't he just get it right from the start?

Religion isn't like logic, which states 2+2 will always be 4. The simple passage of time and the broken telephone that is human word of mouth, means religion is incapable of staying consistent for more than about a decade, if that.

What's more, the religions that exist today are the ones that were the best at spreading. If a religion isn't appealing, people don't stick with it. So religions tend to morph and splinter, evolving into whatever is just nice enough that a bunch of people will sign up.

They are the original meme, in the scientific sense. An infectious idea that gets recounted over an over, each person changing it slightly to be more appealing during a re-telling, empowering its spread.

The Bible doesn't say that you shouldn't edit or correct the Bible because the authors of the Bible didn't have the rest of the Bible.

Moses gives some explicit commands to the Israelites to not modify the commands he gives in Deuteronomy, but that doesn't really apply to the other books.

Likewise, some guy named "John" warns against anyone adding or removing from the account of his acid trip in Revelations, but that doesn't really apply to other books.

The "Bible" was constructed over a long process and while what many think of as the "Bible" was finalized by 400AD there are still disagreements today (See Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Pentecostalism, Mormonism, and many other smaller sects).

The original authors wrote disparate works for distinct purposes at distinct points in time. They were not writing with the goal of manufacturing a multi-thousand year story bound as a single volume.

How do we know the full story?

We don't. We use archeology, biology, anthropology, and other scientific disciplines to determine a likely path of the story of humanity as a whole. Some disciplines use the books of the Bible and other contemporary accounts to guide areas of future study, but if you want a single source for the history of the earth, humanity, or even the Israelites the Bible isn't going to offer an honest perspective.

OP is on step two of a really short journey.

There is no original Bible.

The Bible is an assortment of works from a variety of authors arbitrarily selected by the Church, then made into a whole bunch of translations that aren't super consistent with each other and aren't all that faithful to the original works.

Clarification: what original bible? The Bible today isn't even a single version of a thing. Historically, it was a bunch of manuscripts (many of which, conversely, were more different to each other the further back in time you go showing that a number of competing stories got combined into one) written by different people at different times in different places and eventually people more or less agreed on some things. Certain things have been found to be added hundreds or even thousands of years ago and some modern bibles will actually remove them (apparently something in I think John where it seems to skip a verse or two where something was added to make it make more sense with the other synoptic gospels).

TL;DR -- there never was one single bible, it's a bunch of stories that got edited before it got into a bible, and we continue to find texts that show older versions closer to any events differ from what modern texts have.

First of all, as others said, the Bible is a book composed of many books and letters written by many people over an incredibly vast span of time. Consistency is almost impossible. But, for what it's worth, where does the Bible say "that no one should make a dare to edit or correct" it?

I believe you are referring to Revelations which is, arguably, one of the ~~oldest~~ youngest if not the ~~oldest~~ youngest book in the canon (I don't remember for sure but I believe it is) and also not universally appreciated. Luther famously criticized Revelations, and I think rightly so. There was also some contention at the time of canonization in Nicea around Revelations. So, just because one book says it, doesn't mean it's the final word on the issue. There are Christians that don't see much weight or value in Revelations. I certainly don't, I don't believe it's an eschatological text revealed by God. I think the only way Revelations makes sense is to read it as an historical text and critique of Nero that was written post hoc to rationalize and comfort Christians for what they suffered by explaining that they will soon be rewarded for their faith because they are in "end times". Of course, we now know, thousands of years later, that they weren't.

Besides, I'm not entirely sure I know what you mean by "edited" or what "life" you're referring to, although I'm assuming you're talking about Jesus. Have you read the Scriptures in their original languages? I have at least read and translated the Christian Scriptures in and from Greek, and they need editing. It's not possible to have a transliteration of it that reads well, it takes some finesse and art. Even the Scriptures in the Greek are compiled from different manuscripts and codices because there often are errors or damages in manuscripts so you can't just find the one "Gospel of Marx" manuscript, for example, and use it to translate it perfectly. You need to find several to get the whole story of one gospel together and then translate them into a single text, so you're using several sources to put the story together in Greek and then translate into a different language thousands of years later. Naturally, this creates issues and makes it so that the Bible isn't an unaltered text in its final form. Unless you read it in its original language, this is unavoidable—and, as I said, even if you do read it in Greek, you will still have an "edited" text.

Does it matter? I think it creates issues and one should be able to critically examine these textual criticisms in order to form a better picture of the origins of their belief and better parse what and how to believe, but I don't think editing or inconsistencies inherently invalidate Christianity nor Judaism.

Ah you're starting to see the cracks that finally gave me the distrust to leave the church. The church has thrown out entire books of the Bible because they didn't agree with the messaging. How can I go to a church to where they literally threw out gospels just because they didn't like it?

How can we believe and trust ~~censored~~ bibles?

FTFY.

And you can’t. The Bible is a bestselling work of fiction.

For the record, I was raised catholic, though am not one anymore.

How can you believe the bible?

In the Bible, it says clearly that no one should make a dare to edit or correct the Bible by any words.

Not trolling here, but where does it say that?

It would have to be from a time when people were already conscious of this collection of writings being considered "The Bible", so I'm assuming New Testament somewhere? And would any writings added after that not be considered to have flaunted that rule?

I'm not religious at all, but I'm very interested in how the Bible came to be The Bible.

You shouldn't trust any Bible. They are myth books that should not be considered other than as very peculiar literature.

The Lord of the Rings is more believable.

Which bible is censored?

Edit: legit, why downvote this question?

How can you believe an uncensored one?

An answer for this in Muslim's book Quran is that all the previous books god itself sent were edited by humans as time went on.

Though its defence on whether Quran would be edited by humans is that god will not let it happen, there's the argument that which in that case why did God let the previous books get edited in the first place?

How can you believe and trust the bible at all?

The King James Bible was cobbled together using late sources and I don't think the Catholic church was throwing the 'deeper esoteric sources' to the general uneducated masses.

So the bible is essentially a guide for how the masses should behave and doesn't have much capacity to give people revelations and insight into God.

Its just a book