Quote Originally Posted by Dorcus View Post
I'm currently engaged in learning how to read the Hebrew Bible in an attempt to discover the earliest reasoning behind the Scriptures.

I'm at a very early stage indeed and very much a novice but instantly I have become fascinated by the different interpretation of some passages in the Koine Greek translation from the original Aramaic.

As I'm still at an early stage perhaps I could start with Genesis. The original Hebrew word is bereshiyt meaning summit but was translated into beginning by the Greeks. This might sound trivial to the casual observer but as one particular Hebrew Bible scholar has pointed out that because the contemporary Aramaic speakers at that time had an entirely different notion of space and time to ourselves the translation as "beginning' might prove problematic. This particular scholar preferred the translation as "summit" and considers it to denote transcendence rather than first cause.

I only mention this because it's becoming increasingly clear to me how difficult it is to rely upon the word by word accuracy of a series of documents which have been translated into Latin, then English and by now into just about every other language on Earth.

Is there no room for questioning the literal meaning of an admittedly great work which has been subjected to so much human interpretation?
Indeed. Holy books were written by man (or men, to be more precise) collated, compiled, edited and translated by man - and based on little evidence that can be verified and is often contradictory. (Very few believers really look beyond the current version of their holy books).
In many cases, the stories and parables were lifted from previous religions and folklore. Religions are a fascinating subject but the vast majority of aderents to any particular flavour would have believed in another deity or deities had they been born in a different culture/social setting/other point in the history of mankind (and let's not forget that Christianity/Abrahamism is a very recent phenomenon considering that Homo Sapiens have supposedly been around for 300,000 years.
The world's major religions came about when people were mainly illiterate and had very little understanding of science - and yet some people living in an age when we know about atoms, the universe, bacteria, gravity and advanced medical science seem to think that unverified folklore has all the answers. It's a hell of a tribute to childhood indoctrination.