Was the Bible the world's first Wikipedia entry?

[allybalder]

Will Crawley's latest post is worth a look and the comments probably even more so!

Bart Ehrman's new book, Misquoting Jesus, defends something like that claim. It's not exactly an original idea, but it is a novel repackaging of an old one -- namely, that the authors of the Bible, some of them "barely literate", edited and re-edited one another's documents to produce the texts now regarded as "canonical" (i.e., authoritative). The task of the textual critic is, in part, to examine the history of that editing in order to uncover the ealiest versions of well-known texts.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ni/2007/07/w ... first.html

[Alan H]

I disagree. Although there are similarities and I see the comparison, wikipedia has rules about entries and their editing.

The most obvious one (and one that many user of wikipedia may well be unaware) is that Wikipedia has a neutral point of view (NPOV). There may be times when a particular article isn't neutral, but they are quickly flagged as such and generally elicits editing to make them more neutral.

See Wikipedia:Five pillars for more details.

This cannot be said for the bible!

[Titanium Wheels]

Ally, interesting piece and something for laypeople to ponder over. Most people looking at the Bible have no idea where the texts come from and, really, have no idea who wrote them. Of course the church claims that by inspiration they all agree, Huh! Have done an MTheol degree I can certainly say that there was a lot of editing done (we call it redacting) over the various documents that made the Bible

A key thing is that, when writing originally, the writers, should think, never thought they were writing for anything more than the actual document they were writing. I am absolutely sure Paul never imagined people would keep his letters longer than solving the problem for which they were written. Those documents that made it into the Bible were of course selected from a much larger number so there was a sort of lottery even after the documents were written.

Wikipaedia is chalk and cheese different. For one thing, writers know wht they are doing; trying to create an online encyclopaedia. They know that they may well be edited and that they may have to correct things in line with new knowledge.

Sorry, but the idae from the article is silly.