I've had my feet in and out over the years of really starting my journey into the words of Jesus Christ, but haven't fully accepted it. I finished watching [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ4NTdSK5ac] and my mind is blown. Especially the part he says towards the end that "why should god show himself to me if I won't continue banging on the door over and over?"
It's like I've been waiting for proof, but if I knock once or twice, don't get proof and give up, why should god present himself?
I encourage you all to watch this video. For those of us who were on Voat, it says a lot of what we already knew, but he provided sources, citations, photos. It's quite remarkable the work he put into this video.
Anyways, I would like to get myself a bible and I am curious what the most accurate version is?
I am also curious if the words of the bible today can be trusted? Who is to say the satanists didn't take over publication and tweak words, remove verses, etc? This is a legitimate concern of mine.
This is the most serious post I've ever made and I am genuinely looking forward to responses so I can proceed to the next step of this journey.
There is no canon of "the Greek texts that our Lord and the apostles used": with Wikipedia's help, I cite Edward Ellis: "No two Septuagint codices contain the same apocrypha .... The Septuagint codices appear to have been originally intended more as service books than as a defined and normative canon of scripture."
So the set of texts available to the early church is not defined. It turns out that, beside most all of the 39 books (24 scrolls) of the OT, they did use Epimenides and Enoch and the like, but oddly not any of the deuterocanonicals even once. This suggests the vast body of literature used semi-authoritatively by the Jews, in Greek and other languages, was held by them as a secondary canon just as much as the Catholics held their own secondary canon, and what I said about their secondary level of inspiration applied to the Jews as well. Except it could be said the Catholics "removed" useful books from those that the Jews found secondary inspiration from, when the LXX variety was standardized. I don't know if the Orthodox did or not.
TLDR: I don't remove any books from readability. I only add books to protocanonicity when the whole body of believers did so. But the deuterocanonicals were never "good enough" for the Lord to quote them or the church to elevate them as it did the 66 books.
u/Secretyrussianspy: To the OP question of what Bible for beginners, it won't hurt you if you get a DR version with the extra books, just keep in mind that official Catholic doctrine places them on a secondary level, and use of DR confuses Protestants.
Here are the words of one protestant scholar "(The Septuagint) was translated from a Hebrew Old Testament text-type that is older than the Masoretic text, from which most Old Testaments are translated today. This is sad, for the apostles had access to both the Septuagint and to the proto-Masoretic text that was in existence in their time. And they chose to quote from the Septuagint, not the proto-Masoretic text."(sauce)
While this protestant concludes this historical fact to be sad, a better conclusion would be to acknowledge the Septuagint as a legitimate sacred text.
The word Septuagint means 70, it is derived from the 72 Hebrew scholars, 6 from each tribe of Israel, who were each isolated during translation, and by miraculous act of God, all 72 returned with the same translation. This ancient letter) is the evidence of the legitimacy of that story.
Another possible reason the apostles and our Lord used the Septuagint instead of the older text "that existed in their time"(ibid) was that it contained the deutorocanicals that all Bible reading Christians ascended to for the first 1600 years of Christiandom.
It was the first century AD Jews who were the first to remove those books, probably because many of their prophesies were fulfilled by our Lord. Read Wisdom 2:12-22 as one example.
That being said, the full bible was not formed until the 4th century, primarily by St Jerome, while in a cave in Bethlehem, utilizing the Septuagint, the ancient Hebrew texts, and other Hebrew scholars. (Sauce)
That original formal bibleography was then the "common" text amongst the church fathers to Christianity today (or 1960's Vatican 2), for the word vulgate means common. Those texts were all hand copied so they were primarily only in the hands of the apostolic successors (I.e bishops).
Ironically, soon after The invention of printing press, formal protesters arose based on their own interpretations of their personal copies that they were reading in their local tongues. Now there are 30,000 different groups of Protestants who all interpret scripture differently. That is not WWG1WGA