A cursory glance of Wikipedia indicates that there was robust debate about the King James translation as far back as the 1600's :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version
I think it's a bit rich to claim that any version of a text is "literally the same" for 2-3000 years.... Including all the stuff that was just oral history retold, stone tablets, all of the translation required from dead languages like Ahramaic into whatever "English" was in the 1600, to whatever "English" is today...
it's hard enough to know what the kids these days are talking about with "6-7", and we have a global fiber optic network... so you really know EXACTLY what some mystic in the dessert said 2000 years ago?
Jesus wasn't a mystic in the dessert.
And it's in some ways easier to know what was written 2k years ago because of how much time and effort people put into getting those things correct.
Look at the cuneiform tablets that get uncovered. A whack load of them are just tax transactions. No one questions their authenticity because of their antiquity.
Hardly anyone questions if Plato or Aristotle and the like exist, even though some of their missives only survive in parts of a single document, not the literal thousands of exact (or near exact) copies of various parts of the canonical Bible.
It's more than a bit silly to critique the historicity of the documents that comprise the Bible.
I always go back to the cathedrals. Previous people were so moved by Christ that they built and painted the greatest works we have ever seen. I agree on the legitimacy of the Bible but just be following Christ and it’s mind blowing.
Meh.
I have a complex relationship with them. I don't think that they are a net good for the church. They are beautiful, though. But... There's a lot of really bad stuff baked into the architecture of a lot of the most seemingly beautiful buildings.
We are the Church. Not the buildings. Too many people forget that.
I'm not talking about the KJV. I'm talking about what's commonly known as The Dead Sea Scrolls. The parts of the Bible (and other texts not included in the Bible and other other texts not at all related directly to Judaism or Christianity) that have been found preserved there do corroborate EXACTLY with other copies of texts hundreds or thousands of years apart.
So, you can argue about translations of those texts, but not that the texts themselves are different.
Sure, there are some books and letters that may possibly should have been included in cannon, but, they aren't necessary to the cohesive narrative of the while Bible. The one that I would have included is the first and second book of Enoch, since they are quoted by Jesus and others. (The 3rd and 4th books are later additions from what I understand from linguistic studies and are not cohesive to the narrative of the Bible as the first two parts are.)
None of this matters much, IMO, other than proving that the stories told in the Bible were preserved exactly for thousands of years.
You can reject the Bible as Truth or not, but, it is the most well preserved collection of books that I know of, though some argue that honor should go to various Hindu or Zoroastrian documents. It's an interesting question to ponder.
