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.