listen folks, there's a lot going on here, in this book called the bible. to throw it out the window as "fairy tales" is pretty silly. we're talking about 66 books by some 40 authors, with different styles, different histories, different lives, spanning a period of thousands of years.

the reason we have all these books retained throughout the millenia is that they were highly prised as the word of God by the jews, copied with incredible standards, and prized above all else. this is why copies have survived from long ago, in excelent form.


a few things you should know:

1. what books should be in or out of "the bible" is the subject of some debate. for instance, the catholic church uses an extra section of books between the "old" and the "new" testament usually known as the "apocrypha". modern jewish believers do not accept the "new" testament as the word of god, nor jesus to be the meshiac (messiah). the old testament is known as the "tanach". it contains the torah (books of moses, 5), nevviiim (prohets), and the ketuviim (writings); they are also in a different order than used in the protestant or catholic bibles

2. the old testament (i hate the terms "new" and "old", and jews certainly don't consider their tanach to be the "old" testament, but you'll bear with me for consistancy) was written mostly in hebrew. there is also some aramaic. the new testament was written in koine greek, or "common" greek. it was the language of the roman empire and required to be learned by all. this facilitated it's availability as most people knew koine greek as well as their own language. much of th new tetament are letters written to various churches by apostles and other folk

3. ok, so what do we have today? do we have any original manuscripts? the answer is no, we don't. anything written that long ago on papyrus or reeds, or whatever, is long since disintegrated. what we do have is COPIES of the originals, or more likely copies of copies of copies. not translations, copies. there are a number of different texts. for instance, i have two hebrew bibles. one is the biblia hebraice strutgardensia (commonly used version). another is the biblia hebraica leningradensia. that copy was found in leningrad russia, i forget when, but not terribly long ago. you also have something like the dead sea scrolls which was an unbelievable discovery. something to note is that these copies are not identical. what this means, is that one, or more, have errors in them, errors from the original. different bible translations use different texts to translate from, and they also use different styles of translation, from very literal (say NASB, or KJV), to very .........well...flowing and figurative, such as the NIV. and i'm just talking english here. however, it's important to note that thought the copies we have are not identical, they are very close, and the differences generally do not change the meanings of the text, but are very minor. so, either some of these manuscripts have errors, and some do not. there have been folks for example that believe the textus receptus (used for the king james bible) is the accurate one, and the others, such as westcot-and-hort are errorful. people differ


even if you handedly throw out all the miracles and stuff like it, you still have lots of important history in the "bible". these are some incredibly old documents, and there is much that can be learned from them. whether you believe them to accurately show who God is, is up to you.