Stop Saying the Bible is a 2,000-Year-Old Book

Stop Saying the Bible is a 2000-Year-Old Book

Hemant Mehta (http://www.friendlyatheist.com, http://www.patreon.com/Hemant , https://www.facebook.com/friendlyatheist)
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/10/30/stop-calling-the-bible-a-2000-year-old-book/

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An author named Nicolas Frame recently wrote an article for my website and he gave me permission to use that material for this video, so credit where it's due.

One of the arguments that atheists often use in religious debates is that we shouldn't trust what the Bible says because it's a 2,000-year-old book: The idea being that the morality is wrong, the science is bad, and we've progressed so much since then!

Now, that's all very true. But it's still a bad argument because it actually lends some support to the Christian myth.

Here's what that means: If the Bible is 2,000 years old, then it must have been written when? Around the year 15. And if you consider that a lot of people think Jesus was born around 4 BCE and died about 33 years later, you're basically admitting the Bible was written during Jesus' lifetime.

Actually, you're saying it was written before he died, which doesn't make *any* sense.

But if it's true that the Bible is 2,000 years old, there's reason to think people were giving an accurate account of the history of that time. All those miracles in the New Testament? Jesus rising from the dead? You think you're reading first-hand accounts written by people who were there!

That's not the case at all.

The Bible is a big game of telephone, with people passing down stories throughout the generations. Not just Old Testament stories about the Garden of Eden, but also stories about those miracles.

The Gospels, for example, weren't written down until at least 50 years after the death of Jesus. That's a lot of time for history to be rewritten. I mean, that's basically like us revisiting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, minus the videotape, minus the journalists, minus Walter Cronkite, and with only a handful of witnesses, none of whom are the ones writing these stories down.

Okay. So it's not a 2,000-year-old book. It's a 1,900-year-old book. Is that really such a big difference? Yes!

Because the oldest surviving copies of those texts date back to about the mid-2nd century. And those copies aren't even much to work off of, anyway. So you're talking about writing and rewriting these stories, for about a hundred years before we have anything resembling the Bible we have today.

In fact, the oldest complete New Testament manuscript we have dates back to the mid-4th century, more than 300 years after Jesus died.

So the Bible is a book that's less than 1,700 years old. Most of the old manuscripts we have come from the Middle Ages and it wasn't until the 17th century that we finally got the King James Version of the Bible.

So forget taking the Bible literally. Our DNA is an amazing replicator and it still makes mistakes. You think the people copying down the Bible got it perfectly right every time?

Whenever the Bible was written, I can tell you this: It wasn't 2,000 years ago. It's much younger. And there was a lot of time that passed between the death of Jesus and the very first accounts of his life.

And remember: We're just talking about the nonsense in the New Testament. The Old Testament is even less believable.

So don't grant Christians the luxury of having a 2,000-year-old book. They don't have one of those.

They have a book that's maybe 16-1700 years old... which went through a lot of revisions and probably contains a lot of mistakes when compared to the originals.

For those reasons, don't call it a book that's "divinely inspired."

Just call it a book of mythology. That works just as well.
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