Originally Posted by palefrost

Yes but not from front to back. If you do that it really makes no sense at all.

The bible is collection of short stories. There are tons and tons of other religious documents about Jesus and such that were not included in the bible that you read today. Throughout history it’s been edited time and again. By the time you get to the King James Version, it’s probably gone through tons of editing already. Not by unbiased people either, but mostly by the church itself.

So here we have a church that gets paid by its followers. They're mostly the only literate people around so they can pretty much rewrite or leave out small portions of text that don't properly suit their own personal beliefs.

Translations change the meaning of things as well. Heck even changing the punctuation in each sentence can dramatically change the meaning, as we hear time and again if you ever watch televangelists do their thing. In Greece, there are many words to express the different kinds of love for example, yet translate that to English and there is only one.. Love. So instantly you lose meaning in the translations.

So, in the end what you have is a bunch of short stories which are probably translated to better suit the translator's belief of what it should say. Then these stories are edited by a bunch of other people with a vested interest in making the reader believe the stories are true whether they are or not, who get to select exactly which stories they deem to be true (and included) and those they deem not to be true (and don't add)? Plus, if you say that many of the "authors" were illiterate, which is fact, then obviously someone else wrote their passages for them.. Another translation along the way between the "author's" speech and what the writer actually wrote down.