^
That's something of a difficulty with translated, ancient books. I've seen English translations of the same stuff from a book in Latin by Marcus Aurelius, and they're pretty different. I did Latin at school and I know from that experience that it's not always possible to create a 100% faithful, literal translation, because some words have no exact counterparts and some phrases become misleading if they're literally translated. There's a certain degree of subjectivity and guesswork involved in the interpretation, and with a politically-charged subject such as religion, it may be hard to find a translator who wouldn't be tempted to bias the result towards some agenda of their own. You might learn Aramaic, Greek and Latin yourself and then try to read the originals, but you might die of old age before you figured out what it all meant. Especially in the "light" of the idea that a lot of the numbers and apparently material descriptions of things may have been purely symbolic or code. Even the scholars don't always agree very well on what it all means.
But it looks fairly clear that, for example, Paul didn't write everything that's in the New Testament under his name. Whether or not that was deliberate fraud or just a different way of doing things where exact authorship wasn't seen as important in those days, I don't know.
02 May 2023, 8:13 pm
