THERE is no Original Bible

We don’t have “the original Bible” because there isn’t one. It doesn’t exist and never did.A few key points here….First, the Bible was compiled, not written as a book. And several of the books themselves (most notably the first two) are compilations.Second, there is no passage in the Hebrew or Christian Bibles which does not exist in variant forms. Pick any passage you like, there’s more than one version of it. And I don’t just mean in modern translations, but in ancient manuscripts. Most of these are scribal errors, but not all of them, and some of the variations are deeply significant.Third, there has never been just one official version of the Bible. There has never been a single canon to which all Jewish or Christian sects adhere and upon which they agree.Fourth, no original manuscripts of any of the writings which appear in the Bible have ever been found. So there is no way to compare any passage in any version of the Bible to any original manuscript.The Bible (or Bibles, more accurately) as we know it arose from a broad set of scriptures used by various Jewish and later Christian communities in different places, who did not all agree with each other about what was scriptural and what was not. And they still don’t.                                                  *Ugooterian #updates #2023goals