GM,

I appreciate your opinions, and I know how heartfelt you are in your beliefs. I just cannot get past the scriptures, and what I honestly feel is their lack of veracity. Trust me, if I truly believed that they were the "words of God" and I should live my life according to their pronouncements, I WOULD! :)

I am currently reading "Misquoting Jesus" by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman has had a fascinating religious journey. He had a born again experience in high school and chose to attend Moody Bible Institute, a bastion of fundamentalism. After three years, he went to Billy Graham's alma mater, Wheaton College. Ehrman soon realized that he should learn Greek in order to understand the text in the language it was originally written in. Gradually, Ehrman's scholarship caused to him radically re-think the credibility of the New Testament, and he experienced a radical shift in his beliefs. He currently chairs the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here's a nice example of his discoveries:

page 10: This kind of realization coincided with the problems I was encountering the more closely I studied the surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don't have the originals-so saying they were inspired doesn't help much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. . We don't even have copies of copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later-much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places. As we will see later in the book, these copies differ from one another in so many places that we don't even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Ehrman also brings up the famous story of Jesus forgiving a woman caught in adultery (John 8:3-11). It turns out that this story was not even present in the early versions of the New Testament. Basically, many of the scribes who copied the New Testament made errors, and added or deleted things for probably a whole host of reasons.

I know you no longer read books related to Bible criticism, GM, but I would urge you to make an exception in this case. Ehrman's work breaks new ground in textual analysis. I think everyone would benefit by reading this fascinating 218 page book.

Peter T.