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Antagonistic Tyrannosaur
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Join Date: Aug 2000
Location: The Abstruse Caboose
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Jul 10th, 2005, 12:22 PM
That's pretty fucking stupid. Ooooh, the "Vatican", they speak Italian and have marble floors, there must be a conspiracy somewhere in there.
There is no "original" copy of the bible. The OT was passed down by oral tradition for centuries leading up to their final transcription in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE, and towards the end of the first century CE they were revised by the Jewish people in Jerusalem (though it's an ongoing argument in Christianity whether the modern torah or the LXX has more relevance).
As far as the New Testament goes, there was no original copy since every composite work within it was written centuries before St. Athanasius began the process of labelling them as canonical. By that time they had been circulating along with various apocryphal texts for centuries, and had been written down by countless scribes who liked them for whatever personal reason.
The concept of having a united bible comprising the Old and New Testaments in their entirety didn't even invent itself until the early High Middle Ages, as prior the book-making process was so rediculously expensive that you'd have to be retarded to undertake such a project, since those wealthy enough to own that many pages of scripture had the patience and intelligence to deal with them in serial.
As far as the idea of "hidden" books of the Bible go, most Christian theologies entail some primitive notion of metaphysical consequence (though not always so cogent) that basically says that God gave us the Bible in such a way that if some part were missing from it, it would de facto not really be scripture. You could have a book written in blood whose DNA matches that of Christ, and it wouldn't be part of the bible since had it been meant to be canon then God would have revealed it to us by now. It's contrary to common sense to posit a God as existing who inspired scripture yet was foiled by some cloak and dagger bullshit.
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