Why is there no such thing as the Bible.
I believe there is a Bible. The Bible is God’s holy words. I was brought up as a child believing the words of the Bible. I read the Bible in Sunday school and studied it all through my academic life. Some may call it just a book, but I believe people who do, do not believe in Jesus would say such a thing. The Bible is Gods holy words and guidance for us to live by. The Bible is what this country was built upon. In God we trust is on our money. Our laws are based on the laws in the Bible, for instance, crime and punishment. Of course these days the punishment, publicly are not as cruel, but we do punish people for committing crimes. We have judges to direct us in disputes just as they had in the Bible. For many centuries people have been trying to stamp out the Bible but the Bible lives on. With out God’s holy word we have no standards to live by. We would not know what is right or what is wrong or what is the truth or a lie. I can go to just about any bookstore or department store and purchase this holy book.
The King James Bible was inspired by James I. He had a great impact on English literature. King James participated in the translation of the Bible into English (1611). His translation is considered the best, and the Bible bears his name, the King James Bible.
The materials in the Bible were composed by forty-seven scholars of the highest qualifications. They were men of great faith, dedication, and intelligence.
The doctrines of the apostles had been handed down by the succession of bishops being guarded and preserved, without any forging of the Scriptures, allowing neither additions nor curtailment.” But scholarship is not everything. A translation of the Bible is always affected by the spiritual character and faith of the translators. An unbeliever does not translate the Bible as does a believer. Martin Luther wrote, “Translating is not an art that everyone can practice, as the mad saints think; it requires a right pious, faithful, diligent, God-fearing, experienced heart. Therefore, I hold that no false Christian, or sectarian can be a faithful translator. No false Christian, no sectarian”that is, no unbeliever can be a good translator of the Bible. This is the problem with many modern versions. Some of the translators were not qualified spiritually for the work, even though they might have been intellectually. (Rev. Steven Houck, Minister in the Protestant Reformed Churches Internet source.)
Some negatives aspects of students reading the King James Bible is that some Protestant translators sometimes did not have access to all of the Received Greek Official Text, and being familiar with the Vulgate, they sometimes put words into their translations based upon the Latin which were never there in the original Greek. Schaff points out that in about 80 places in the New Testament, the KJV adopts Latin readings not found in the Greek. Erasmus had a corrupt, incomplete text of Revelation to work from, and hence this book has many errors in the King James Version (Richard Nickels, Internet source.)
But there are many positive reasons a student should read the Bible. The Bible directs us in our every day lives and serves as a guide. The Bible is thought provoking and a learning tool. One can learn about the way of life others had back in the BCE period. A student can also learn about how people looked at themselves and the way they lived.
Biblical studies is related to Theology by way of learning. The Bible teaches us the way to live and Theology explores what the Bible teaches.
I think Bible scholars should be dedicated men of honor, heartfelt, faithful believers. Right now I can’t in vision my self as a Bible scholar. I think it would be an awesome profession but I am not ready to take on such a huge challenge. I believe in Jesus and want to do his work. I know in my mind that this is the time, I just keeping hoping I have more time to makeup my mind and find out who I am.
Even before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, theories about the Biblical text in the Second Temple period abounded. These theories drew inspiration from two texts whose roots lie in the same period: the Septuagint and the Samaritan version of the Bible. The Septuagint Vorlage (the presumed underlying Hebrew text) differs from the Masoretic Text,the received Hebrew text, the Authorized Text, the Jewish Bible, abbreviated MT, in many aspects, several of them of great significance. We cannot determine the exact Vorlage of the Septuagint, but it appears to have contained thousands of differences from the received text, some minor (conjunctions, prepositions, etc.) and some quite significant, including words, sentences, and even whole sections. An outstanding example is The Book of Jeremiah, which in the Septuagint is almost one eighth shorter than in the Masoretic Text. (www.mediahistory.umn.edu/indextext/BibleWriting.html). I believe the Bible scholars used what they truly believed to be accurate information to move forward with the writings of the scripture.

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