Bible ,first edition, signed by author.

[Plane]

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/08/12/2355915/in-jerusalem-scholars-trace-bibles.html

For many Jews and Christians, religion dictates that the words of the Bible in the original Hebrew are divine, unaltered and unalterable. For Orthodox Jews, the accuracy is considered so inviolable that if a synagogue's Torah scroll is found to have a minute error in a single letter, the entire scroll is unusable.

But the ongoing work of the academic detectives of the Bible Project, as their undertaking is known, shows that this text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine.

Hmmmmm....

   Gods word is more permanent than the heavens or the earth, keeping the truth true is Gods business.

      So exactly how much revision has turned up and how much change from the earlyest version ?

[Xavier_Onassis]

No one has any first editions of the Bible. Or the Koran either.

The earliest versions may have been written in Hebrew, but all that is available is a Greek translation of much of the Old Testament.

People may WANT an unchanged version, but no such thing exists, as your article states.

Prophesies are ever so much more easy to do accurately after the prophesied event has occurred.

I am all in favor of such projects as this , however. There is nothing wrong with TRYING to get it right.
 

[hnumpah]

Given the inaccuracies that abound in the Bible, I'd say if there ever was an original text, either written or inspired by some ethereal omniscient being, it is long gone.

[Plane]

Given the inaccuracies that abound in the Bible, .......

Got an example?

[Xavier_Onassis]

The Bible claims bats are birds. The Bible claims that there was a Great Flood, and no evidence of such exists. There is not enough water to cover all the land. It is pretty clear that whatever a Messiah was supposed to be, the Son of God was not one of his supposed attributes. Just google "Bible inaccuracies", and you will find hundreds more.

[hnumpah]

Genesis 1:3-5 and 14-19 - there was light ("night and day") before there was a sun. (Note: If there were no sun, there would be no night or day. Also, light from the newly created heavenly bodies seems to have reached the earth instantaneously though it now takes thousands or millions of years.)

Genesis 1:12, 16 - plants began to grow before the re was sunlight.

Genesis 6:15 - the size of Noah's Ark was such that there would be about one and a half cubic feet for each pair of the 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 species to be taken aboard.

Exodus 12:37, Numbers 1:45-46 - the number of men of military age who take part in the Exodus is given as about 600,000. Allowing for women, children, and older men would probably mean that a total of more than 2,000,000 Israelites left Egypt at a time when the whole population of Egypt was less than 2,000,000.

Leviticus 11:20-21 - there are winged creatures (birds or insects) that go around on all fours. (Note: There are no birds that go around on four legs, and all insects have six or eight legs.)

Leviticus 11:16 - states, incorrectly, that the rabbit, or hare, chews its cud.

1 Kings 6:2 and 2 Chronicles 3:3 - Solomon's temple was only about ninety feet long by thirty feet wide, yet:
   1 Kings 5:15-16 - 153,300 persons were employed to build it.
   1 Kings 6:38 - it took seven years to build.
   1 Chronicles 22:14 - approximately 7,500,000 lbs. of gold and 75,000,000 lbs. of silver were used.
   1 Chronicles 23:4 - 24,000 supervisors and 6,000 officials and judges were employed to manage it. (More than ten for each square foot?)

I could go on, but you can look here: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/absurd.html

Enjoy

[Plane]

   Picky, picky, picky.

      More than one language fails to make the distinction between bats and birds, as was English itself before Linnaus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linnaean_taxonomy

        In many languages spoken before 1700 it would not be possible to make this distinction without inventing a few words.

       God himself can produce light , and this explanation really fits any need for a physical impossibility.
        That Noahs ark was seagoing and not spacefaring is perhaps an artifact of linguistic limitation (see earlyer note on bat vs bird). But where indeed is there no evidence of flooding?  Where are there no anchient tales that include a flood?


      I would like to see the results of Ramses census.

       Rabbits do not chew the cud as cows do , but they do the equivelent which serves the same purpose.

        I doubt the entire work crew was on the temple site at any one time.

[Xavier_Onassis]

There are legends of ancient floods, but there is no evidence of the entire planet being all flooded at the same time. There is not enough water to do this, even if the polar ice is melted.

The Biblical flood was most likely the result of an earthquake breaking the barrier between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, allowing the Mediterranean to rush in. It would have seemed to be a great flood to anyone in the neighborhood, and the earthquake could have happened during a rainstorm. There is evidence that the Black Sea was once much smaller, and was augmented by water from the Mediterranean. There were several National geographic articles that have described this.

It is pretty clear that all humans are not related to the handful of individuals that are said to have survived the Flood. Evolution on physical features would have required a greater amount of time to have passed.

[Plane]

       Personally I think that the Noah and Ark story is at least partly allegorical and relates to the Gilgamesh legend that is found in very ancient sources. Flooding all of the world is only subtly diffrent from flooding all of the world that you know about.

       But I could be wrong  , if the tale turns out to be litterally true I would be surprised but less than shocked.

        I have heard before that the flooding of the Black Sea basin could be the origin or perhaps the earlyer and larger flooding of the Mediterranean ,  in the area north of Holland there is a large shallow area where evidence of human habitation has been found, but why anyone on these shores would think of building a boat still requires miraculous  divine intervention.

        Battlestar Galactica, Waterworld and 2012 give good movie alternatives for how this could have happened.  2012 is pretty funny in its physics but if there were something that actually did disturb the Earths rotation a lot or that exerted a strong tide force the existing oceans would indeed slosh over all of the high ground , so the near passage of a large enough rock is all that really need happen.



        By the way, there is an ocean of water locked up in our rocks , hydrates are not likely to break free of the minerals they are bound up in , but if they did they would produce another Ocean. There are several oceans of water in comets , a coupple of oceans worth in the rings of Saturn, no way yet to know how much water is in Asteroids , and last but not least God can make more.


          What if I am right, and the story of Noah is more alligorical and less literally true? Well I think this is allowable , the things that happen to Noah are instructive of human nature and Gods attitude twards it whether it is litteral or not. Gods message to us has to fit through the funnell of what we are able to understand and the language we have to express it in, this is a narrow passage indeed for God to shoehorn a lot of meaning into.

[hnumpah]

God can do anything.

He can make plants grow without light.

He can pack millions of animals into a space smaller than a cruise ship.

He can flood the entire world with water that completely disappears.

He can create a world that is only a bit over 6000 years old but place false evidence for scientists to show it is billions of years older. (That answer was given to me by a Baptist minister trying to explain the vast difference between the Biblical age of the Earth and the age as established by scientific evidence. My next question was, why are you so willing to believe a God who, by this act, has shown he is willing to competely deceive those he created?)

That's why I hate to discuss religion with 'true believers'. Their blanket excuse is 'God can do anything', and they refuse to consider anything else.

[Xavier_Onassis]

what, exactly is the "allegory" in the Noah's Ark story?

God is omniscient, and knows everything. So we must presume that when he made the world, he knew that Eve would take bad culinary advice from a talking serpent, and then that the humans he created would mess up so badly that he would need to destroy all but eight of them and start all over again.

Of course, he didn't need for Noah to run about looking for a pair of platypi, dodos or inaccessible flightless rails, either, he could have  have just created another couple.

The inaccessible flightless rail is a rare bird known to exist only on Inaccessible Island, near Tristan da Cunha, by the way.

I don't see Noah really hunting down all the species that only exist in some small corner of the globe, either.

[Plane]

New Noah's Ark in Ky. aims to prove truth of Bible
By DYLAN T. LOVAN Associated Press
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700171420/New-Noahs-Ark-in-Ky-aims-to-prove-truth-of-Bible.html


Now that is taking it literally.


I wonder where he is going to get that much gopher wood?

[Plane]

  Although God can do anything , no human can possibly understand everything.

     It isn't possible that I will explain every passage of the Bible ,I flatly do not understand them all.

      This has been Gods problem from the first, how much science and mathmatics could God explain to Moses? I think that the limits of the language , the education of the people , the extreme complexity of the whole story restricted what the Bible could possibly be , not because God has any limits , but because we do.

       Noah was obedient in the face of his unworthy neighbors ridicule , that by itself is a pretty good allegory to base a story on , but there is so  much going on that it is easy to find many more .


            http://www.abc.se/~pa/publ/tybrind.htm
       Of course there seems to be more water now than there used to be.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I have wondered what gopher wood actually is. It is clear that gopher wood does not come from gophers, as gophers are made from meat, not wood. No gophers were harmed in the building of the Ark.

No doubt, though that to build an ark, Noah would have had to go for wood many times. But he'd be out of luck at the Home Depot or Leow's.

Perhaps there was an Ark, but I do not accept the premise of a worldwide flood or everyone being descended from Noah and his family.

Tales of remains of an ark on Mt Ararat seem to be bogus.

Wikipedia does not provide a definitive answer about gopher wood.

The Jewish Encyclopedia believes it was most likely a translation of the Babylonian "gushure i÷ erini" (cedar-beams), or the Assyrian "giparu" (reed).[3]

Many modern English translations tend to favour cypress (although otherwise the word for "cypress" in Biblical Hebrew is brosh). This was espoused (among others) by Adam Clarke, a Methodist theologian famous for his commentary on the Bible: Clarke cited the resemblance between Greek word for cypress, kuparisson and the Hebrew word gophar.

Other suggestions include pine, cedar, fir, ebony, wicker, juniper, acacia, boxwood, slimed bulrushes[disambiguation needed] and resinous wood, and even American trees such as Cladrastis kentukea (American yellowwood), although the latter did not exist in the region the ark was supposedly built.

Others, noting the physical similarity between the Hebrew letters g and k, suggest that the word may actually be kopher, the Hebrew word meaning "pitch"; thus kopher wood would be pitched wood. Recent suggestions have included a lamination process (to strengthen the Ark), or a now-lost type of tree, but there is no consensus.[4]

Cypress Pine late 12c., from O.Fr. cipres, from L. cyparissus, from Gk. kyparissos, from an unknown pre-Greek Mediterranean language. Perhaps related to Heb. gopher, name of the tree whose wood was used to make the ark (Gen. vi.14).