OK, so there was this Baptist priest that came on Sunday morning at my door. Had a long chat with him, very nice guy but knew very little (and mostly myths and negatives) about Islam or prophecies of Islam. You can imagine we discussed a lot of things from original sin to Trinity and sacrifce by Jesus :as: etc etc. I put forward the status of Jesus in Islam and our beliefs of saza o jaza etc.
What I wanted to ask you (Christian, Jews and unbiased Muslim brothers) is that how many original Bible versions in the world today? The priest claimed that although there are many English and other languages translation floating around, but the original Hebrew version is still same and unchanged. How true is that claim?
Please do not start any kind of fighting in this thread. Thanks.
Re: How many Bible versions (Hebrew) in the world?
Which testament of the bible? Old or New? The New testament was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew. A couple of book have been written about how the current version of the New testament differ in places from the scraps of the original discovered so far.
Re: How many Bible versions (Hebrew) in the world?
short answer is there is no existing hebrew bible. it was written down in Greek (which means that the only written down bible is a translation) and the “original” of that has been lost, the oldest copies are vastly different (quoting the author of the book im linking) from each other without any way to determine which is “more original” than the other.
Re: How many Bible versions (Hebrew) in the world?
No "original" Bible exist. The Bible is actually a compendium of about 66 books written over a very long period which Jews (Old Testament) and Christians accept as being divine inspired.
Some of the oldest complete manuscripts are the Septuagint in Greek translated by Rabbi's about 150AD, the Masoretic text (between 500 and 1000AD) of which some copies still exist today. The oldest surviving Masoretic text in Hebrew is the Codex Cairensis dated 895AD containing most of the OT.
The Dead Sea Scrolls pushed the date of the Masoretic Texts back to ±100BC and are invaluable in proving that there were basically no changes to the text. Every book of OT is present exept Esther.
Almost all Bible translators when stating that they used the original manuscripts, use the Masoretic text and what is available from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Copies of the original texts are called Manuscripts. Translations of these copies are called Versions.
Interesting enough, Jesus freely used and quoted from the text available to him at the time without pointing to it containing any serious errors. Jesus accepted the text that existed as being a fair representative of what the original writers intended it to be.
Re: How many Bible versions (Hebrew) in the world?
First, let get this correct. What happened to the other 7 books of Catholics Last time I checked, Catholics had 73 books in the Bible… Who is right… Kings James Version? The Revised standard version, Gospel of Barnabas, Gospel of Judah… :S
Re: How many Bible versions (Hebrew) in the world?
Your right the Catholics have 73 books
Protestants have 66 books.
Other mistakes from old man he mentions that translation = versions. Which is totally wrong.
I dont want to call out names but every new version has some additions and deleted ones. I remember one debate with Aneesh Shorrosh, Ahmed Deedat referred to a verse from the Bible. The christians scholars looked for this very verse in the bible and Ahmed Deedat quipped this verse is found in the previous version of the bible.Not the one which exists.
In other debate to in the q/a round, there was a question to Anees shorrosh, he initially got the wrong version of the bible and later realized his mistake and had to exchange it to the other version. Versions as per the Christian scholars is a procedure carried on meticulously, trying to get the Bible closer to the Hebrew language and the language spoken by Jesus Christ thats Aramaic.
Because the only objective is only to be as precise as possible.
Re: How many Bible versions (Hebrew) in the world?
I said “about 66”. The Septuagint (Greek Bible) has some additional books, called Pseudo-Deutero or OT Apocrypha, more than the Hebrew Masoretic Text. These additional books were not viewed by Jews as of the same divinic inspiration as the 66. The Roman Catholic church kept them in their translation BUT denote them as being Apocryphic. The Protestant churches only included the original Jewish divine inspired books as their OT although you will find some Bibles include them as a separate section.
Gospel of Judah and Barnabas are not part of these OT Apocryphic books.
Re: How many Bible versions (Hebrew) in the world?
Translation = Version. Each version might differ according to which original manuscripts they used, how freely the translator did his work, or is the version a “paraphrase”.
Re: How many Bible versions (Hebrew) in the world?
According to this expert there are “hundreds of thousands of differences” in the different manuscripts, each scribe added his own interpretation to the text, and in some places its not clear what was there to begin with. Also the popularly quoted story about Jesus and the prostitute “let he without sin cast the first stone” wasnt in the original either.
I can see if you were saying basically zero and he saying basically 5 but one of you is seriously wrong here. hes written a best selling book, you could probably make a lot of money disproving him!
Last time I checked, Catholics had 73 books in the Bible… Who is right… Kings James Version? The Revised standard version, Gospel of Barnabas, Gospel of Judah… :S