Yes, and a Frenchman's vote goes to France, an Englishman's vote goes to England...

How much experience do you have of living (for years at a time) in different countries? Above all, how are you defining 'best'?

Cheers,

R.

OK I guess I am going to be the only one that points out how wrong this post is/was:

this is open for debate. I live in the US and it is NOT the greatest country in the world, one of but not the greatest.

ummm really? You think everyone in the US has shelter? Have you been downtown to any large city in the US, do you not see the homeless? Not all of them are homelss by choice. Refrigerators and Televisions? WHAT world do you live in? Where is this prefect America? I live in a small, small town and rest assured we have people in our community that do not have these luxury items. I know because I drive my butt to their homes to make sure they are getting at least getting something to eat once a week.

I really want to know where you live? I need to move there.

Actually, your list would include those who haven't studied the bible in enough depth, in it's own cultural context to interpret it correctly and thereby make two statements that are untrue.

the bible and it's interpretations and meanings is the most contested book of its kind - here in the west - in the east that honor probably goes to the koran. Personally, Harry Potter trumps them all in terms of movie making potential

In short, my study of the Greek New Testament, and my investigations into the manuscripts that contain it, led to a radical rethinking of my understanding of what the Bible is. This was a seismic change for me. Before this—starting with my born again experience in high school, through my fundamentalist days at Moody, and on through my evangelical days at Wheaton—my faith had been based completely on a certain view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of God. Now I no longer saw the Bible that way. The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book. Just as human scribes had copied, and changed, the texts of scripture, so too had human authors originally written the texts of scripture. This was a human book from beginning to end. It was written by different human authors at different times and in different places to address different needs. Many of these authors no doubt felt they were inspired by God to say what they did, but they had their own perspectives, their own beliefs, their own views, their own needs, their own desires, their own understandings, their own theologies; and these perspectives, beliefs, views, needs, desires, understandings, and theologies informed everything they said. In all these ways they differed from one another. Among other things, this meant that Mark did not say the same thing that Luke said because he didn't mean the same thing as Luke. John is different from Matthew—not the same. Paul is different from Acts. And James is different from Paul. Each author is a human author and needs to be read for what he (assuming they were all men) has to say, not assuming that what he says is the same, or conformable to, or consistent with what every other author has to say. The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.

n addition to these Greek manuscripts, we know of about ten thousand manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, not to mention the manuscripts of other versions, such as the Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Old Georgian, Church Slavonic, and the like (recall that Mill had access to only a few of the ancient versions, and these he knew only through their Latin translations). In addition, we have the writings of church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius among the Greeks and Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine among the Latins—all of them quoting the texts of the New Testament in places, making it possible to reconstruct what their manuscripts (now lost, for the most part) must have looked like.

With this abundance of evidence, what can we say about the total number of variants known today? Scholars differ significantly in their estimates—some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do not know for sure because, despite impressive developments in computer technology, no one has yet been able to count them all. Perhaps, as I indicated earlier, it is best simply to leave the matter in comparative terms. There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.