Alan Minchin #fundie disqus.com

(=More on human tampering, mistranslations or errors in the Bible - It's a pretty long discussion=)

Reverend Bill Carey: If I were, for a minute, to believe that God was guiding the translators, I'd have to believe He was totally incompetent, since the translations frequently disagree with each other, all contain deliberate errors of translation, and many contain a verse the translators KNEW was not part of the original text. Does that sound like the work of God or the guidance of the Holy Spirit to you?
Interpretation is scripture is not at issue here. Translation is. You can "interpret" an incorrectly translated verse any way you want, and you are still going to get the wrong understanding.
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The importance of the Johannine Comma? Are you kidding? There is not even a shadow of doubt that John never wrote that verse. CENTURIES after John wrote it, some anonymous monk in Europe, charged with copying over the epistle by hand, inserted HIS OWN words into the text. They break the sense of the passage, as they are not pertinent to John's immediate topic. They DO NOT BELONG THERE. Whether one believes the statement or not is irrelevant. Those words are not the word of God, but the word of man, and do not belong in ANY Bible. And the translators ALL knew that.

Alan Minchin: In preparation for either sermons, church magazine articles or notes for a Bible reading discussion group I consult more than one translation of the Bible.
I currently use nine whole Bible translations, of which three are study Bibles. Eight are the work of teams of biblical scholars and one is a "solo" translation.
I also use three "solo" translations of the New Testament alone, alongside various commentaries and dictionaries.
It is noteworthy that all scholars - teams as well as solo academics - have submitted their work to the scrutiny of panels and groups of other biblical scholars, (and involved churches of most denominations), all to guarantee accuracy in what they have produced and which can be seen in today's rich offering of Bibles. We also have the results, since the seventeenth century, of textural criticism the fruits of which can be readily witnessed, not only in modern study bibles and commentaries but on the various Internet Web Sites now available.
In this light, your claims of intentional dishonesty and fraud by scholars over many decades, and that we have today a dishonest and unreliable Bible, such claims are unsustainable. Today's Bibles are more accurate and reliable than at any other time in history. Any discerning reader today can, for themselves, be aware of mistranslations, scribal errors, interpolations as well as cultural influences and practices that came into play in earlier times.
Not only do I see God's "guiding hand" upon the original forty or so biblical authors but it is clearly to be seen in the scholarship that has guided and corrected to where we are today.

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Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

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