>>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.
>
>Well, the Bible asserts that it was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Then you've proved Len's point - "inspire" and "dictate" are slightly different :).

>I fail to see why there needs to be only one definitive version though? Did you read the link that I gave to Jim? A careful reading of that would perhaps help you. Still, it is a little funny to see you attempt to impose your dictates on what God should or should not do or how He should do it - as though He needs to answer to you... <g>

Nope - it's you who is trying to write an answer here, but somehow you get sidetracked :)

>>>>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.
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>>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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>*chuckle*
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>So.. How does that make it hard? Or are the experts who have spent their entire lives in these kinds of studies now suddenly devoid of knowledge because you're ignorant of what they know? You're either really smart Len or you think others are really stupid or you're just lazy in that you think that because you haven't researched something then it cannot possibly be true.

This doesn't pass the QA test, Doug. I don't know how will this phrase pass the translation (sic!), but this sounds as "proof by authority instead of authority of proof". (The word "authority" doesn't mean any body of power in Serbian, it's rather a person whose judgement is trusted because of knowledge or academic position).

Accidentally I've just shown how hard it can be. I should be expert enough for both languages involved here - I speak one for 46 years and the other for 35, and they're both alive around me every day, and yet I'm having trouble translating because of the shifting meanings of the words. And yet you say that anyone who thinks that experts on dead languages have similar trouble may think that's because they're stupid? C'mon, you can do better.

>I guess the studies and research of the thousands over the last 2000 years or so means nothing to you since you are unaware of it.

Most of those studies were under political pressure - any change in the dogma may cause significant tectonic movements in the structure of power within any church, so I'm doubting the open and generous communication betwen researchers.

Compare with history of non-Euclidean geometries. Gauss and Bólyai probably found those things before Lobachevsky, but he got all the laurels because they didn't dare to publish - this geometry seemingly opposes the Euclidean geometry, which was the only one for about 19 centuries before that. Now if this could happen in mathematics, which is the last place to have the power of authority greater than the power of proof, why should I expect free and open-minded publishing of findings in such a closed-circle area as the Christian dogma is? AFAIK, the main formal difference between Catholic and Orthodox churches is the interpretation of a few sentences (apart from the actual underlying politics).

>I guess that settles that! < BG >

Guess again...

>But again, what does that have to do with anything? Are you again suggesting that because it would be hard for you that it must be hard for everyone else? Or are you suggesting that because it's quite a bit of work (as in hard work) that it's not worth doing and as such there's no value or meaning to be derived from the labors of those who undertake such tasks?

Nope - but it's also hard for the experts, and I'm sure they have some doubts to the precision of their results.

Once on an interpreters' congress, they passed a message down the table, and each one had to translate it into his neighbor's language (they were sitting so that any two neighbors shared at least one language). The initial sentence "the history of beer is as old as the history of mankind" became, after being translated few dozen times, "if there was no beer, there would have been no mankind".

>I certainly am not an expert in translating languages but that doesn't cause me to disbelieve those whose judgements I have studied and watched for over 30 years.

Your choice.

>>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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>Of course we don't know with 100% certainty. Does that mean we discard what we do know then? Does mankind know 100% about gravity? I hardly think we do.

One thing I know is that gravity is a free public service. It's never switched off, workday or weekends.

>>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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>Oh for crying out loud. I supopose then that once again you're asserting that because we do not know 100% we therefore know nothing.

Oh for crying out loud. It's the other way round: since we do not know 100%, we should give it a benefit of doubt. Just keep in mind that what we think are facts may not be exactly facts; they may hold as facts until we get to know better. That's not "nothing", that's just "we can't be 100% sure which one is right".

>I know that in Great Britain that there is something around 1% or less of the population that regularly attends church. Of those maybe 1/2 to less than 1/2 of one percent are those who would fall into the category of Bible believing Christians.

Mmmmm... now if they could do something about the weather and begin driving right side, I may rethink some arrangements. And they have beer.