skiing on that slippery slope.........

The Bible is one of my favorite books. You might know that. However, I fall short of holding it up in the air as many a TV preacher would have me do, and recite, "This is mah Bahbal...Ah am what it says ah am....."
Why? Because the only way I can do that is to hold the original scriptures up and recite, "This is the Word. I don't know exactly what it says, but I'm pretty darn sure that I am what THESE scriptures say I am."
Yep. I think that there are many scripture translation errors. Many of you will scoff and tell me that the Bible has been translated by expert scholars throughout the years; they certainly know more than I could possibly know.
And, you'd be right.
However, in recent years, new papyri that are contemporary to NT times have been discovered, shedding new light on words already translated, and revealing the meanings of the high percentage of words that were merely guessed. And, we must remember, that most translations today are translations from translations, etc. Bart D. Ehrmann covers a lot of the scriptural translation history in some of his books, which are academic rather than theologic in nature. Ehrmann is a dean or professor emeritus or some such stuff of religious studies at a major university here in the States. I appreciate his scholarship, and his dissertations on the historical Jesus, despite the fact that I think he no longer believes in Jesus as the son of God; rather he sees him (as a real person that walked the earth) as an apocalyptic prophet. Anyway, many hands have made copies of the originals, which we don't have, and many errors have been borne because of human error, human intent, and such. Dr. Ann Nyland, a third generation scholar of ancient languages, Greek being one of them, has used these new discoveries to release new meanings into the scriptures....shedding light and making sense of some of the more difficult passages; some of which pertain to women in the Bible. Notice I said "some," Dr Nyland's intent is not to change scriptrure to meet particular needs. Some of the most astounding re-translations have nothing to do with women. Her translation, The Source, is gender accurate, rather than gender inclusive, the latter of which is hurled as a criticism of newer translations such as the NIV and the TNIV.

Given all that, the reason for this post is because of Jesus and Paul. So much going on these days about women's roles, God's views on homosexuality, rules and regulations about "church."
Most of the NT scriptures we read are written, or attributed to Paul, the father of Christianity. Were it not for Paul we would be seeing a much different Christianity, if one at all. Imagine taking all the books that are attibuted to Paul, out of the NT. I won't go into it here, but some of the books that you think are Paul's may not be. There also were 3 letters to the Corinthians, but I'm not going into that right now, either. So, anyway, we can both thank --and blame--Paul for Christianity today. I've been thinking about this for the last few days, and last night sat bolt upright to the words in my head saying, "Who do you follow? Jesus or Paul?"
Paul's message about Jesus might differ from Jesus' own message. Every time I broach this subject with some Christians, I get a stern reproach that I'm heading for that "slippery slope" that everyone likes to avoid. Well, too bad. This is my blog. I'm comfy enough with our Big Dad to broach this subject. But first, I'm going to pose the question to YOU. What differences, if any, do you see between Jesus, and Paul's teachings about who Jesus was and what the church should be?