Oy ... there could be many doctoral dissertations on the evolution of the Talmud and what the Jews call the Greek Testament. The Talmud itself was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. The Apochrypha was written in Greek and Latin. The New Testament was written in Greek. All of this was translated into Latin by the Church. (Not an agenda-free agency.) From the "Latin Vulgate" and the Hebrew and Greek texts came the various English versions, which omitted the Apochrypha. Not only are there all the linguistic decisions via the matters of translation, but the progression takes on the politics of the eras. What was considered heresy? Omissions abound. Nuances of language are lost. Long story short, after considering all of this, it's difficult to view "The Bible" as some unquestionable text, standing firm throughout the ages. And that's not even taking the matter of whether or not it was "divinely inspired" under deliberation.
Then there are the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Pseudepigrapha... The subject of Biblical scholarship can take a lifetime.
Say you take a group of people, one whispers something in one ear, and each individual whispers what they have heard in that other persons ear. By the time you get to the end, and the end person blurts out what they heard, normally it is quite different, from what the original person said in the group.
Much ado from the experiment, which has been done numerous times (and I once did this in a class myself), shows when one thing is said, and over and over, whispered so, much gets lost in translation. I see the Bible the same way. Countless upon countless revisions, then others who had a vested interest in what it would say to the masses. To think human beings of power would not tamper with the contents is outrageous. Course they would!
