In the Bible, it says clearly that no one should make a dare to edit or correct the Bible by any words. But many chapters and contents are extremely censored from the original Bible. How is this acceptable, and how do we know the truth and full story about the entire life?

(Finally, some of the replies and trolls I received made me more confused. But thanks a lot for the reference replies.)

  • Bonifratz@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    What do you mean by censored? Do you have examples of censored “chapters and contents”? And what do you mean by the original Bible?

    • Iapar@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      This one comes to mind:

      “*** ***** **** ******** *** ***** ****** *** ***** **** ***** ****** ** *** ***** ** ******** ** **** *** ***** ** ***** ******”

      Always brings a tear to my eye.

      • Bonifratz@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Yes, of course.

        Both of these things need defining before anybody can answer your question.

        “Censoring”, the way I understand the word, means that there’s some kind of institution charged with overseeing and removing parts of a text. So I wonder at which point in the development of the Bible you believe this has occurred.

        I’ve argued in a different comment that it’s no secret that certain texts were picked and chosen by the early church as part of its canon, but that (in my opinion) is a very different thing than censoring. To give an analogy: If I was an editor and had to choose the “100 greatest novels of the 20th century” for a book, I would not be “censoring” those I didn’t choose. Therefore I’m asking you what exactly you mean by censoring, and if you can give examples of censorship happening in the development of the Biblical texts.

        Secondly, “original Bible” is not at all easy to define. The (Christian) Bible is a collection of texts of diverse genres, by a multitude of authors, in three languages, spanning at least seven or eight centuries in their development. None of the original manuscripts have survived. Instead, for every part of the Bible, there exist different copies which sometimes differ slightly, sometimes starkly. This is the reason textual criticism of the Bible exists as a field of scholarship. Most notably, the (older) Septuagint version of the Book of Jeremiah is about one eighth shorter than the (later) version of the Masoretic text.

        All of this means that if you’re going to talk about the “original Bible”, you have to tell us what you mean by that. Do you mean

        • the original manuscripts of each individual book or passage, all of which are lost?
        • the oldest surviving copies of each passage, respectively?
        • the Septuagint (and if yes, which version of it)?
        • the Masoretic text (and if yes, which version of it)?
        • the current scholarly consensus on the most faithful manuscripts, as collected e. g. in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Novum Testamentum Graece 28?
    • sorghum@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      King James notoriously removed mentions of the word tyrant in his English translations.

      It’s why I like the NET translation as it includes translation notes from the original languages

      • Bonifratz@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        King James notoriously removed mentions of the word tyrant in his English translations.

        AFAIK this is an urban myth. But even if true, it’s hardly a case of “censoring”, but more a (questionable) translation choice. (Because “tyrant” is not a word that appears in the original Hebrew or Greek, so it can’t have been censored in that sense.)

        • sorghum@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          From the translation notes on Job 6:23

          The עָרִיצִים ('aritsim) are tyrants, the people who inspire fear (Job 15:20; 27:13); the root verb עָרַץ ('arats) means “to terrify” (Job 13:25).

          The NET translation

          Or ‘Deliver me from the enemy’s power, and from the hand of tyrants ransom me’?

          It’s exactly why I really like the NET translation. Getting context for why or how the original text gets translated to English is incredibly valuable to me. Here in this context I’m sure aritsim doesn’t literally mean tyrant, but the people became synonymous with the definition like “Shaka, when the walls fell” means failure.