Interesting how much people hang onto the nuances of every word from a current English version of the new testament. Don’t get me wrong it’s an amazing book filled with meaning, insight, and many truths. Given that this gospel was written roughly 60-80 years after the time of Christ in Greek (thought the Jews argue, of course that it was Hebrew based on some medieval manuscripts from what is now Spain that are in the Vatican archives), and was originally circulated as a hand written tract of which there are many copies that are not identical, and later translated to Latin. Other NT book were written over the next couple hundred years and first rolled up as a full New Testament around 400 AD. All this was run through the meat grinder of a highly political Catholic Church which was considered a higher authority than the nascent “bible”. Then came the schisms starting in the 11th century over (surprise!) translation of a few words that couldn’t fairly be translated clearly. Books were discarded by various groups (read them!) though they predated many books of the NT, gnostics (an early Christian church) were murdered by the Catholics and manuscripts burned much for political expediency. We didn’t event get to English (from Latin) until Wycliffe in the 14th century and that Middle English language is quite unlike the much more modern English of the KJV which is where the Bible as an English manuscript we recognize today finally came along in the early 17th century. Along the way various manuscripts were translated earlier (including John in the 8th century as I recall) than all this but the remaining manuscript make it clear its way a long way from a nice neatly packaged. The book we in the US know as the Bible is about a 415 year old book (with a rich, fascinating, and treacherous history!)
I value faith and respect people’s beliefs but too many people leading churches are clueless on how we got here and better at spewing dogma as an absolute. …and they have a temple or sanctuary full of trainable parrots in front of them every Sunday ready to help dumb it down. They are not educated enough and find it easier to criticize knowledge as “lack of faith” than a better understanding of meaning. Otherwise well-meaning believers still swear it’s 2,000 years old and exactly the same all along. That’s not faith - it’s intentional ignorance.
Don’t get me started on dumbing the Bible down to little more than anther Chicken Soup for the Soul books in recent decades…
100% called this. 
www.catholicnewsagency.com
