Writing to the Sydney Morning Herald, someone said the reason fewer people read the Bible now is because it’s ‘a lousy read’ and in its present form is very different from the original. The writer obviously doesn’t know that our modern Bible is the result of a continuing process of literary criticism by thousands of scholars studying thousands of manuscripts dating from very early in the Christian era; and that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain a Hebrew text written two and half centuries before Christ. No other ancient writing compares with this. For example, there are only about nine good manuscripts of Caesar’s Gallic War, and the oldest was made nine hundred years after the original.
As for the Bible being ‘a lousy read,’ maybe, as it says itself, it’s a case that a person who isn’t spiritual can’t accept things that are