Are Sacred Texts Sacred? the Challenge for Atheists

Are Sacred Texts Sacred? the Challenge for Atheists -- The Chronicle Review

"Those who call the King James Version of the Bible the unerring word of God," writes reviewer Doug Brown, "have a slight problem. The New Testament of the KJV (as the King James Version is usually referred) was translated into English from a version of the Greek New Testament that had been collected from 12th-century copies by Erasmus. Where Erasmus couldn't find Greek manuscripts, he translated to Greek from the Latin Vulgate (which itself had been translated from Greek back in the fourth century). Here the problem splits into two problems. First, Jesus spoke Aramaic -- his actual words, never recorded, were only rendered in Greek in the original gospels. Thus, the KJV consists of Jesus's words twice refracted through the prism of translation. Second, Erasmus's Greek New Testament was based on handwritten copies of copies of copies of copies, etc., going back over a millennium, and today is considered one of the poorer Greek New Testaments."