Christians: Do you believe the Bible was revised to support the Trinity?

Question

The Vulgate (/ˈvʌlɡeɪt, -ɡɪt/) is a late fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible that became, during the 16th century, the Catholic Church's officially promulgated Latin version of the Bible.

The translation was largely the work of St. Jerome, who, in 382, was commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Vetus Latina ("Old Latin") collection of biblical texts in Latin then in use by the Church. Once published, it was widely adopted and eventually eclipsed the Vetus Latina and, by the 13th century, was known as the "versio vulgata" [1] (the "version commonly-used") or, more simply, in Latin as vulgata or in Greek as βουλγάτα ("Vulgate").

Anonymous · Answer

The Johanine comma was likely the work of an over enthusiastic copyist or someone taking marginalia as part in of the original text and including it in line.  Neither requires conspiracy.

That we can find and correct things like the johannine comma speaks well for source criticism.  If this was conspiratorial as you suggest and that, somehow, earlier copies could be stolen from their owners and destroyed--I still think that the defense that it would have been a much better forgery than what we have to testify to the existence of God in Trinity.

There were too many copies of scripture and the writings of the anti-Trinity people to do that.  What is in New Testamemt likely is the final version before the end of the 1st century, or at most 20 years later.

UPDATE.  If you wish to list the gimme deficiencies of the Vulgate, there is a more recent Latin translation commission by the Church.  It think it can be referenced as the Neo Vulgate. Not sure about spelling, one word or hyphenated.

User · Answer

1)  Christians: Do you believe the Bible was revised to support the Trinity?

It's over-simple (and imprecise) to claim that the Bible was revised to support the trinity.
One, instead, should argue that particular copies of particular Biblical documents were revised in particular ways to support the trinity doctrine.

For example:  you can point to the Johannine Comma and say, "that appears to have been added to a particular copy of a particular book of the Bible to support the doctrine of trinity"...but of course not all Bibles in history included that passage, either before *or* after it was added to a particular copy of 1 John.

The problem with your question is this:  the Bible does not exist as a single document.
If the Bible existed as a single document, and if that single document were revised and then the original destroyed, then what you pose would be **possible**.
However:  the Bible does NOT exist as a single document, and so if you revise one Biblical document
- that has no effect on all of the other Biblical documents
- that has no effect on all of the other extant copies of that same Biblical document
- - excepting the copies that are afterward made using that revised document as the source

So:  if I were to revise a Bible today to support "the Quadernity", that would not affect any existing Bibles and would not affect any existing copies of the Biblical documents.  That would ONLY affect
#1 - my revised Bible
#2 - any future Bibles that used my revised Bible as their primary source

Moondoggy · Answer

Are you asking if the Vulgate was revised to support the Trinity? I mean, we have Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic manuscripts that predate the Vulgate (sometimes by centuries), and we can trace the manuscript traditions that lead to the Vulgate and those that were independent of the Vulgate and its sources. And while the Vulgate was important to medieval Christianity in Western Europe, no modern English translations are based on the Vulgate.

So it would be a stretch to claim that the Bible, in a broad sense, was revised to support the Trinity. You could make that claim for the Vulgate, but aside from one minor verse in the New Testament, the Vulgate accords with the wider manuscript tradition as far as references to the Trinity are concerned.

So, no. Not really.

www · Answer

The New Encyclopaedie Britannica says: Neither the word Trinit, nor the explicit doctrine as such, appears in the New Testament, nor did Jesus and his followers intend to contradict the Shema in the Old Testament. Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord ( Deut. 6 :4 ) The doctrine develped gradually over several centries and through many controversies.... By the end of 4th century... the doctrine of the Trinity took substantially the form it has maintained ever since .- Micropaedie,. Vol. X p. 126

Anonymous · Answer

I believe the Watchtower revised The New World Translation of the bible to discount the triune nature of God in order to support the Watchtower doctrines

? · Answer

Of course not! Jerome was engaged in translation.

He DID make the somewhat daring choice to translate what was available in Hebrew from that language, rather than from the Septuagint.

The most significant change in the Biblical texts from the fourth century is the introduction or restoration of the "pericope adulterae," the passage in John 7:53-8:11. Personally, I think of it as a restoration (though probably not to its original position) of a story which had been suppressed because Church leaders were afraid of being accused of too lenient a view of adultery.

It is true that a version of this story likely appeared in the now-lost Hebrew Gospel, which Jerome claimed to have read and to have translated into both Greek and Latin. And it's tempting to speculate he might have been behind its restoration. But that would not have been part of his work on the Vulgate, because it was restored to Greek versions--placed variously in its present spot, or at the end of the book, or somewhere in Luke--and not just introduced in Latin.

Ghost Of Christmas Past · Answer

Jerome's work was a translation from Koine Greek.  There were a lot of translation errors, but we have the Koine Greek version.  We also have the original Hebrew text from which much of the Old Testament was translated into Koine.  We have the Greek source material for the synoptic Gospels and we have fragments of the Syriac works from which this was compiled.  We have the original manuscripts of the Epistles.  If Jerome or someone else had tinkered with the text, we'd have noticed by now.

Anonymous · Answer

Trinity is a LIE that was invented by Christians later. Trinity is NOT found anywhere in the oldest discovered manuscripts of the new testament. Therefore, bible is a book full of interpolations, fabrications, and man made lies. Christianity is a false religion based on lies ,errors, and contradictions.

imacatholic2 · Answer

No.

We have second and third century manuscripts of all the New Testament writings to which we can check our modern Bibles. Many believe that some of the bits of manuscripts are from the first century (between 50 and 100 C.E.).

Try:
Are the Biblical Documents Reliable? http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/bib-docu.html
New Testament Manuscripts: The Basic Facts: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/new_testament_manuscripts_the.html
Josh McDowell Answers Questions about the New Testament: http://www.leaderu.com/theology/mcdowell_davinci.html
How many copes of the original New Testament documents are there? http://www.facingthechallenge.org/copies.php
Is the New Testament Text Reliable? http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6068
And:
http://home.att.net/~kmpope/FirstCenturyMSS.html
http://greek-language.com/greek.manuscripts.gateway/
http://www.carm.org/evidence/textualevidence.htm

With love in Christ.

Olive Garden · Answer

69 AD St Polycarp disciple of St John already believe in Holy Trinity God
400 AD Catholic bible was canonized
So, there is NO bible revision as the bible came in 400AD.

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Christians: Do you believe the Bible was revised to support the Trinity?

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