>Len,
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>>>God’s word is the Bible. The problem is having mankind interpreting His word and meaning.
>>
>>No, the Bible is just one of mankind's interpretations of God's word.
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>What do you base this assertion on if I may ask?

Seems a reasonable assertion, as the Bible was written by man, so it is man's interpretation of God's word. Unless, of course, the Bible was dictated to a person by God himself, in which case there would be 1 definitive version of the Bible & all others would be mankind's interpretations.

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>>In addition to the problems mankind has in interpreting His word & meaning, it comes from a variety of sources & a variety of languages,
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>Not true. There are three source languages of the Bible; Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek.

How not true ? Do Aramaic, Hebrew & Greek not constitute a variety of languages, albeit small ? You admit below to a large variety of sources (40-50,000).

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>>so it also suffers the problems mankind has in translating from one language to another,
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>Not true. There are so many more copies of extant documents (something like 40-50,000) of various passages of the Bible vs the next best runner-up (The Illiad by Homer with ~950 etant documents) that it's not even close. We can construct something like 98.5% of the entire New Testament without even looking at copies of it - from the various personal letters between people who quoted passages and so forth.

Have you ever tried translating from one language to another ? Although you may know the individual meaning of each of the words, reconstituting the words into a passage of text that has the same meaning is not trivial, even in modern day languages. I have enough of a background in Latin & Ancient Greek to know that we do not know the exact meaning of all of the words in all of the contexts, I think it may be reasonable to assume that the same problem holds for Hebrew & Aramaic, of which I know nothing.

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>>including the subtleties of meanings of words from a different culture.
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>Most of the ignorance here is because we've dumbed ourselves down. <s> There are plenty of great Greek lexicons out there. A.T. Robertson comes to mind. I have several myself. I think the problem is not a lack of information but the dissemination of that knowledge.

It's not a matter of lexicons, it's a matter of culture. There have been discussions here on the differences between American English & British English, we may use the same words, but the meaning of phrases is completely different between our two cultures. What is a common everyday phrase in your language may be totally offensive in my language & vice versa.

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>>I would suggest that most versions of the Bible in existence today bear very little resemblence to God's word & his meaning.
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>Some do not. Some do.

My turn - on what do you base that assertion. Are you, personally, in direct communication with God, if so, then let us know which versions of the Bible are the correct ones, so the others can be discarded.

>You may recall that in 1948 or so a young Bedouin goat herding boy who found what are called the Dead Sea Scrolls?? Well, prior to that find the earliest (extant) copy of the Book of Isiah was, oh, somewhere around 700 AD. They found a copy in one of the jars that matched almost perfectly (minor marks differences) with the AD 300 copy. What you most likely do not know is how Jewish scholars made copies of scrolls. It's quite interesting but I'll leave you to dig that one out. <s>

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. Throughout history, people have been employed in making exact copies of "important" texts, very often those in charge tried to ensure that those doing the copying were uneducated & could not understand what they were copying. Partly to ensure that they (those in charge) were the only ones with the knowledge of the text, but partly to ensure a true copy was made, if you don't understand what you are copying there is less likelihood that you will correct any perceived mistakes.

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>You really need to educate yourself a little better here IMO. <s>

Maybe you could educate me then, please tell me which version of the Bible is God's word, rather than mankind's interpretation of it ?