Editing of the Bible

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It has been said that the Bible has been edited a number of times. Are all Catholics using the same version? Who was responsible for the editing, and how did they change it?
 
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Advanced said:
Who was responsible for the editing, and how did they change it?
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It depends what you mean by “editing”. There was Origen’s Hexapla, which was an elaborate edition of the OT in the original Hebrew side by side with four different Greek translations. A couple of centuries later Jerome produced the Vulgate, which was adopted as the official Catholic edition of the whole Bible, OT and NT together, in Latin. Stephen Langton, an English theologian at the Sorbonne, was the editor who split all the books of the Bible into chapters for the first time. That was in the 1190s, I think.
 
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Advanced said:
It has been said that the Bible has been edited a number of times.
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Yes, this had been said. As others have ably pointed out, you really need to be more specific if you want a meaningful answer.
Advanced said:
Are all Catholics using the same version?
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Again, this really depends on what exactly you mean. In general, the answer is no. The overwhelming majority of Catholics can only read the Bible in their native language, so that would be a couple of hundred different versions right there.
Advanced said:
Who was responsible for the editing, and how did they change it?
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Thousands of individuals, perhaps tens of thousands, were involved in writing the originals, redacting them, compiling them, then translating them. Each one of these people could be considered an “editor” to some extent.
 
Has the main content remained the same, or has it been edited, that is what I was trying to ask. Do Catholics read the same things as other Christian religions?
 
That’s a very broad question. Content like what? Read things like what? Not even Protestants agree on everything regarding the Bible.
 
Wait what?

As I recall, there are several editions of the Bible that are used by Protestants. Do they read the ‘same things as other Christian religions?”

Are you asking if Catholics have some sort of Bible which is incomplete according to Protestant Bibles?

Are you asking if they have ‘more books’ (the answer is usually yes if one understands that the ‘added’ books predate the Protestant editions by about 1000 years or more, and that the Orthodox have even more), but even those ‘others’ are found in Protestant Bibles which contain the deuterocanonicals including the first King James Bible?

Or are you asking if Catholics deliberately ‘added things’ to their Bibles by CHANGING words. You know, like adding in things like Trinity or adding in ‘the Vatican” or other things to ‘justify’ practices which differ from Protestant ones?

Why don’t you tell us what you THINK we ‘might have edited’?
 
With the exception of those “edited out” Deuterocanonical books…
That is certainly some editing.
 
What do you mean “edited”???
  1. Books “added”?
  2. Books deleted?
    What? Be precise, please.
Catholics have Old Testament books which Protestant bibles generally do not. The content of Catholic scripture (there were no printed and bound bibles until the Gutenberg press in 1400s Germany) has remained the same since the late 300s, when the canon of the New Testament was set by Pope and Council.

The Old Testament was not set in concrete until the Council of Trent in the 1500s. This was a response to the heresy of the reformation, which declared certain books found in the Septuagint collection (which Jesus is written of as having quoted from) as not inspired by God. Those books were segregated in a form of literary apartheid, then removed altogether.
 
Let me guess…you attend a Catholic school and this is your COVID-19 homework assignment?
 
Advanced said:
Has the main content remained the same, or has it been edited, that is what I was trying to ask. Do Catholics read the same things as other Christian religions?
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Your question is quite complicated. There is a lot of work and editing involved in turning manuscripts such as the Codex Sinaiticus at the British Library and the Codex Vaticanus at the Vatican library into an English translation that a 21st century Christian can read.

Firstly, there are differences in the Old Testament canon between the major Christian communities. Catholics have some books that Protestants do not, and Eastern Orthodox have some books that neither Catholics nor Protestants have. That being said, all Christians share in common the 24 protocanonical books of the OT, from Genesis to Malachi. The books that we don’t have in common are referred to as the deuterocanonical books.

Secondly, we don’t have original manuscripts of the OT and NT books. Instead we have a large number of copies dating much later than when the books were first written. For example, Catholics and Protestants use the Masoretic text for the OT, which is a Hebrew language copy of the OT compiled by the Masoretes, a community of Jewish scribes, between the 6th to 10th centuries AD.

Secondly, the available manuscripts have many differences between them. Some of these differences involve minor spelling errors, some of them involve completely different verses and sections. There are scholars known as textual critics whose job is to reconcile these differences and create a text that is theorised to be similar to the (now lost) original.

Thirdly, translations being what they are, translators must make editorial decisions about formatting (e.g. OT poetry generally isn’t written in separate lines), about major variations in the text (e.g. the narrative about the adulteress in John’s Gospel) and about difficult translations choices (e.g. the numerous instances in the OT where the Hebrew is close to gibberish).
 
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