An author names Cameron Filas 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 make in religious debates is that we shouldn't trust the Bible because it's a 2,000 year old book.
You know, the science is wrong, the morality 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 lends some support to the Christian myth.
Here's why that is. If you say the Bible is a 2,000 year old book,
you're basically saying it was written around, what, the year 15 and a lot of people say Jesus was born in the year 4 BCE
and he died 33 years later.
So basically what you're saying is that the Bible was written sometime during the life of Jesus.
Actually you're saying that the Bible was published before Jesus died. Which doesn't make any sense.
And if you think that the Bible is actually 2,000 years old, there's reason to think that people were writing accurate histories of that time.
All those miracles written in the New Testament; Jesus rising from the dead.
You might actually think you're reading first hand accounts written by people who were there.
That is not the case at all.
The Bible is just a big game of telephone, with people passing down these stories generation after generation.
And not just stories about the Garden of Eden. But about those miracles too.
The gospels, for example, weren't written until 50 years after the death of Jesus.
I mean, that's a lot for history to b re-written.
That's basically like us revisiting the entire JFK assassination.
Minus the video tape, minus the journalists, minus Walter Cronkite.
And with only a handful of witnesses, none of whom were actually writing stuff down as it happened.
OK, so it's not a 2,000 year old book, it's actually, like, a 1,900 year old book.
Does it really make that much of a diference?
Yes, yes it does. Because the oldest surviving copies of those texts date back to the mid 2nd century.
And they weren't much to work off of anyway.
So you're talking about writing and re-writing these stories for about 100 years before they even started to resemble anything like the Bible we have today.
In fact, the oldest complete New Testament manuscript we have dates back to the mid 4th century.
I mean, that's 300 years after Jesus died.
So the Bible is a book that's less than 1,700 years old.
Most of the copies we have, 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, I mean DNA is an amazing replicator and even it makes mistakes.
You mean to tell me that people copying down by hand 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 than that.
There was a lot of time that passed between when Jesus died and we had 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 reliable.
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 to 17 hundred years old that went through a lot of revisions.
And probably has a lot of mistakes when compared to the originals which we don't have.
For those reasons you certainly shouldn't call it a book that's "divinely inspired".
Just call it a book of mythology. That work equally as well.
My name is Hemant Metha and I write at friendlyathiest.com.
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