Well, that's somewhat a sensational post title, but it's true. The London Times reports on a new teaching document created by the Catholic bishops of England, Scotland, and Wales that denies "total accuracy" to the Bible, especially the first 11 chapters of Genesis and the book of Revelation. Specifically, the Times article quotes the document as saying, "We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision." Hm ... and that coming from the folks who burned Galileo.
As for my own view, I think acknowledging symbolism is OK, but I don't think all Old Testament stories are simply "moral" myths, either.
2 comments:
I completely agree with you. I mean, how exact could the translations be? So over many years the translation keeps getting farther and farther away from the true context. Good post.
Goggalor
The Young Conservatives
goggalor, i think you're talking about transcription, or the copying of a text. in almost every case, the main translations (english, french, etc) we have today are from the original language (greek or hebrew).
i'm not bible scholar, but i know the "lost in transcription" idea was pretty much put to rest with the publication of the dead sea scrolls. they've found significant portions of the book of isaiah which are exactly the same as what we have today, and the dead sea texts were written 2,000 years ago.
the texts might have some other problems, but i don't think it's due to transcription or translation.
thanks for commenting, though.
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