gin lemon senza lemon

Ancora una volta mi ritrovo a rubare un post al blog di Scott Adams, l’autore di Dilbert

Uh-Oh

I’m reading a fascinating new book called Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. The author is an expert at looking at ancient documents, especially biblical stuff, and figuring out what’s original work and what got altered by subsequent scribes. Apparently there are a lot of experts in that field.

I never knew that there are about a zillion different versions of the Bible because (and I am summarizing Ehrman’s entire book here) it was copied and recopied by hand, by semi-literate, opinionated morons for hundreds of years. Sometimes the copiers left stuff out, sometimes they added their own explanations where things didn’t seem to make sense, and other times they simply made errors. Each time a new semi-literate opinionated moron made a copy of the copy, most of the errors were preserved while new ones were added.

After a few hundred years, professional copiers started doing the copying, so the error rate went down. But among the document experts, no one has a clue what the original books of the bible said. The first copies no longer exist.

Just to give you a flavor of the magnitude of the problem, according to Ehrman, there are more changes (both intentional and unintentional) in the Bible than there are words in the New Testament. The estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000.

Yesterday I read that half of the people who voted for President Bush believe that the popular King James version of the Bible is the literal word of God. How does one reconcile that belief with the fact that experts know the Bible is riddled with human additions and errors? Here are the only arguments I can think of:

1. You infidel! 200,000 changes isn’t that many.
2. Those document experts are Satan’s helpers. There are no changes.
3. I never knew about those 200,000 changes. I renounce my faith!
4. God works in mysterious ways. In this case he used thousands of semi-literate, opinionated morons to edit the Bible until now it’s perfect.
5. Let me freshen your drink.

I’ve noticed from the comments here that a number of you are believers. Let me know if I left anything off the list. Seriously. I kid, but I have no idea what the real argument is.