Not ones who follow “the Bible”, because it contains a lot of contradictions.
But those contradictions are the inerrant word of G*d, so both must be followed simultaneously.
Nobody said being a religious whackjob* would be easy.
* Comment/description definitely not directed at puzzlegal
And yet, as I understand it, there is still ambiguity, allowing different interpretations of at least some religious strictures. My only conclusion is that Allah wants us to be confused.
As i said recently in another thread:
They have to. The Bible is not univocal. It is a bunch of different books by different authors with different ideas and different goals. Beliefs in God changed as they were written, and many are actually composites, so even different parts of the same book may not agree.
You can’t be a fundamentalist and not pick and choose, and negotiate away the contradictions. All must negotiate with the text to create meaning from a book written to a completely different audience – even those scholars trying to look at the text in a neutral, objective, religiously neutral manner.
Unfortunately for humanity, and christians specifically, the job of “copy editor” did not exist for many centuries. I think it only really took off after the Gutenberg printing press invention.
Apparently the Muslims did better, but I have only read one edition of the Koran, and it was already haraam, because it was written in English, so I can only speculate.
As far as versions of the bible, I kind of like the King James version, but this is because a lot of the choral music I sang at school was composed to the words or at least, style, of that edition. We had the Good News edition as the “official” version - I went to an Anglican school - but KJV is just more fun to read.
Watch what you say! - religion, like sex, is not meant to be a source of fun. /s
If god didn’t want sex & religion to be fun, why did he invent the Anglican church?
(I am nominally catholic anyway, so I am going to hell for apostasy. But the music will be better down below, I never really got into harp. Electric guitar for enternity!!)
There’s a standard Hebrew text of the Bible, just as there’s a standard Arabic text of the Koran. It wasn’t fully standardized until the 10th century CE, but that was probably a matter of which books to include. The actual words are probably older, and the differences in meaning between the Masoretic text of the Bible and the Septuagint (the Greek translation that is dated to the 3rd century BCE and was on common use in Jesus’ time) probably stem from ordinary difficulties in translation.
The wiki article points out that the dead sea scrolls and the Samaritan Torah differ from the Masoretic text, but the Samaritans were considered a heretical sect by the time of Jesus, and the differences between their holy texts and those of mainstream Jews were already established. And the dead sea scrolls have all sorts of stuff, and are also believed to have been written by heretics. I wonder if they weren’t some crazy librarians, because there’s a LOT of contradictory texts that were preserved by the writers if the dead sea scrolls.
Of course, that standard Hebrew text doesn’t include the new testament. I don’t actually know if the Vulgate is considered canonical by Christians, or if there’s a Greek text of the new testament that they used in ancient times. (They were in many cases not Hebrew-speakers, and based their understanding of the Hebrew Bible on the Septuagint, not the Hebrew Bible.) And of course, there are differences between the modern understanding of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible and the modern understanding of the Septuagint in places.
But anyway, the problem of translating the Christian Bible is not that they lacked copy editors, but that they were multi-lingual, and modern Christians need to consider the Masoretic text, the Septuagint, and the Vulgate, which are contradictory in places.
There are also bits and bobs of the Hebrew Bible that aren’t really understood. They use unique words and have other challenges to the modern reader. I think that includes parts of the book of Job, for instance. (There’s a whole lot of it after the main story, and it’s weird.) I’m told the same is true of the Koran, there are parts that nobody truly understands, and that is a chief reason that translations aren’t accepted.
That is the definition of hell.
“Charlie Parker’s private hell”
I don’t believe that aligns with the critical scholarship. I’m far from an expert, reading only stuff made by scholars for general consumption.
However, my understanding is that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain an older version of the Hebrew text, and there are places where this more closely matches the Septuagint than the Masoretic text. There were redactions by the 10th Century CE to harmonize the Bible with the later monotheistic version of Judaism.
I have no knowledge if any extant forms of Judaism use textual criticism to find this earlier version of the text, but I know translations of the Christian Bible do so to a great degree, which is why there is very much no one single official source for any book. The further back we go, the more changes there are, so we use scholarship to determine which was likely in the original.
In fact, one of the big changes in translations of the Old Testament was moving away from the Masoretic text. Such changes will be listed in the footnotes of any modern translation.
While there are versions that are believed to be older than the Masoretic text, and I’m sure it does contain some redactions to align with monotheism and other “modern” innovations in Judaism, I’m pretty sure most of that happened before 0 CE. The major redactions were done around the time of the second temple, iirc, probably by Ezra and Nehemiah. It looks like most of the modern hebrew Bible was finalized around 500 BCE
By the time of Jesus, the Samaritans were already a heretical sect to the dominant Jews. (The Samaritans, of course, hold the Jews to be the heretics.)
Most of the differences between the Masoretic text and the Samaritan text are extremely minor (a different spelling of the same word), and the Christians follow the Jewish text for the only really big difference (whether sacrifices should be made on Mount Gezirim or at the Temple in Jerusalem).
The other substantive differences between the two texts that are called out in the Wikipedia article are pretty uninteresting to modern religious practice. (E.g., did Moses have a single wife who was beautiful, or a second, unnamed wife who was a Cushite. The Samaritan version makes more sense, and it’s easy to explain the Masoretic version as an ancient typo, but who cares? That’s hardly the only case of biblical polygamy or anything like that. The other differences mentioned seemed even less interesting to me.)
Anyway, all of this is irrelevant to “are Muslims luckier in having early copy-editors and thus a single text?”. The answer is no. Jews also have a single canonical text. It’s absolutely the accepted text, even if modern scholarship thinks it contains some minor errors and a few redactions from some earlier text. And the Christians didn’t lack for copy-editors, they just have three versions of the Bible to consider, which are somewhat inconsistent: the Hebrew Bible (Masoretic, with maybe a scholarly nod to other ancient texts), the Greek Bible (Septuagint), and the Latin Bible (Vulgate). Jesus would have been familiar with both the Hebrew Bible (which was probably nearly identical to the modern Masoretic text) and the Septuagint. The Vulgate was written after his death.
And while the Hebrew Bible condemns “lying with a man as with a woman” a friend was able to dig up something that looks very much like a domestic contract between two men, from Talmudic times, and both grooms signed a modern copy of that ancient contract at a Jewish wedding i attended recently. Having awkward religious texts does not force people to be horrible to each other.
There are sections of the Quran that aren’t in the order scholars think they were in at first.
At the risk of perpetuating a digression, back in 2002 two SD Staff members did a five part series on “Who Wrote the Bible?” which I (agnostic/Taoist) found fascinating. I had to track them down individually — the internal links don’t work — but here they are if anyone’s interested:
Really? The pan flute*? (of course)
Bagpipes?
*Zamfir, you freaking reprobate.
Actually, that’s exactly what the author of Luke was doing. And the author of John was just writing fan *fiction. The mistake was in putting the four gospels together in the same book, rather than recognizing them as competing works that by rights should have been viewed as mutually exclusive.
*By contrast, Mark was just straight historical fiction and Matthew was just a riff on Mark (I honestly don’t know why scholars infer a Q source: Occam’s razor tells me that rather than Matthew and Luke drawing from Q, Luke was just riffing off Mark and Matthew both).
I actually recently learned the answer to this.
Both Matthew and Luke follow Mark in the order of events. And when Matthew and Luke have something Mark does not, they tend to follow the same order of events.
But when it comes to Jesus’s sayings, they’re all mixed up and put in different places in teh narrative. If Luke were copying Matthew, it would be expected they’d also keep the sayings in the same order.
A proposed reason is that there was an additional source that Matthew and Luke both had, separately. And that source would be just a list of saying of Jesus, and that each writer chose when to slot them into the story. Hence why the results are so different.
Also, a quibble: fiction means that the author and audience both are aware that the work is not true. I would allege that the Gospels do not contain any fiction. They are most likely oral legends — including John. It’s just John was written with later legends from a different group, without referencing the other gospels.
It is just a quibble, as I’m sure most people just mean “non-factual” when they use the term fiction. But I do think referring to them as legends gives a better idea of how they were believed to have been written.