From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:tektronix!tekid!davido
Newsgroups: net.followup
Title: Re: Have you read your Bible?
Article-I.D.: tekid.765
Posted: Mon Jan 24 16:08:22 1983
Received: Thu Jan 27 19:55:41 1983

I submit that even those people who *think* they have read the Bible
haven't.  What we do read is a translation.  After all, the Old
Testatment was written in biblical Hebrew and Aramaic and the New in
Greek.  Orthodox and Conservative Jews have portions of the Torah and
Haftorah read to them each Saturday in the original Hebrew; however
even here, very few Jews today have seriously studied *biblical*
Hebrew.  (I know almost no Hebrew, so read the translation in the
prayer book which is different than the King James version which is
different than the Revised Standard version which is different than the
Reader's Digest Condensed version, etc., etc.)

My brother-in-law, who is a rabbi, has been studying the New Testament
using a book which prints a few words of Greek (he reads Greek) and
then any where from a word to a paragraph in English discussing how
that word or phrase could be translated.

Also remember that the Bible was "written" by men over thousands of
years and even given that God was directly involved in the writing,
it was still necessary for the ideas and metaphors used to make
sense culturally.  The Bible was written during a time of frequent
wars among male dominated societies.  Concepts such as sexual equality
would make as much sense to these people as LR(k) parsers.
Even the conceptual change from "Our god is the most powerful of the
gods" to "Our God is the only God" took a long time.

Another point to consider is the long time between when events in the
Bible took place and when they were recored on paper.  According to
Jewish tradition, Abraham became the first Jew about 2000 years BCE.
The books of the New Testament were begun about 100 ACE.  Prior to
the actual writing, the stories of the Bible were carried as an oral
tradition.  I probably needn't remind people of the game of Gossip
to suggest what could happen when stories are passed orally through
several generations.  Even today, in Jewish temples where the copy
of the Torah is hand transcribed on scrolls, there are professional
scribes who travel from congregation to congregation repairing and
checking the scrolls.  Typically they find an error or two in the
transcription which has to be corrected.

Summary: No, you probably haven't *read* the Bible.