The apostle Paul wrote several books in the Bible including Romans and Corinthians. Now picture him wearing a suit and tie, sitting behind a CNN news desk delivering fake news on a daily basis. Weird, huh? Outlandish for sure!
Not for Teen Vogue magazine columnist Lauren Duca. She should have learned from President Trump’s example that Tweets are not always a good thing, but alas, she did not. Duca was trying to state on Twitter that the fake news perpetuated by her fellow journalists was not that big of a deal, so she compared it to the Bible: “Folks, if you think there are too many mistakes in modern journalism, let me tell you about inaccuracies in this one book called ‘The Bible.’”
Duca writes the Thigh-High Politics column for Teen Vogue, and prior to that was an entertainment reporter at The Huffington Post. (Not exactly a hard core journalism background.)
Duca fairly quickly found herself thigh-high in a barrel of Tweets condemning her for disrespecting the Bible.
As the holy book of Christianity, the Bible is considered by most followers to be the flawless word of God. The Bible has many authors, but the belief is that they were filled with the spirit of God when they wrote the books.
Criticizing the Bible as outdated or inaccurate is a time-honored tradition for non-believers. Most people who make these claims have not studied the Bible for themselves, rather they rely on a third-party’s opinion. (Think of it as a retweet–of sorts).
There is definitely a lot of misinformation about the Bible. Statements like “cleanliness is next to Godliness” or “the Bible teaches that the Earth is flat” are patently untrue. They are not in the Bible, but are often attributed to it.
But how much misinformation is in the Bible?
In an interesting C.S. Lewis Institute article by Dr. Brian Boa entitled “How Accurate Is the Bible?” Boa outlines several tests to prove the Bible is indeed legit.
Boa discusses the old standbys—quality and quantity—of the books that comprise the Bible. There are very few original Old Testament Hebrew manuscripts because Jewish custom was to ceremonially destroy imperfect or worn books. Other manuscripts were lost during Israel’s war-torn history. In 6 A.D., the Masoretic Jews standardized the Old Testament text, and eliminated any manuscript that deviated from that. Additionally, there are rich sources that supplement the remaining original Hebrew texts, including the Talmud, the Septuagint (an ancient Greek Old Testament translation), the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the ancient Old Testament paraphrases called the Targums.
Furthermore, thousands of Greek, Latin and Coptic New Testament manuscripts exist today, as do thousands of citations created about passages of the New Testament by patriarchs of the early church. In terms of quantity of ancient literature, the fact that this many early manuscripts even exist today is unparalleled in history.
Jews held the Old Testament in high esteem, so Jewish scribes took extreme care when creating new copies of the Hebrew version. If fellow scribes found even a single mistake, the entire manuscript was destroyed. Because of this rigor, the Hebrew Old Testament Bible far surpasses all other ancient manuscripts in terms of quality of content. Think about that for a minute—ALL other ANCIENT manuscripts.
Luckily, in 1947, historians got the gift of a free fact check when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. The ancient original Hebrew scrolls and the Masoretic translations have a span of 1,000 years between them, but the number of variations between the original Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic text is extremely small.
The problem with Duca’s Tweet is that she seems to infer that the Bible contains outright lies, just as journalism does. The Bible’s text is accurate. Whether you believe in that message is another thing entirely. Second, comparing the Bible to a media script is crazy.
For decades, the American people have criticized the media for biased and dishonest reporting. With today’s 24/7 news cycle, cable channels, and Internet social media, the issue has reached a fever pitch. The battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as Trump’s eventual victory, both added jet-grade fuel to the fire. The president himself is the ringleader for criticism of the mainstream media, who make no secret about their feelings about him. Trump recently made the claim that “no politician in history has been treated worse or more unfairly by the media.
He’s right, and he’s got a study from Harvard to prove it. A new standard for negativity was set during Trump’s first 100 days. On average, 80 percent of the media coverage was negative, it peaked at 90 percent, and was lowest at 70 percent when Trump ordered the Syrian missile strike. It never went below 70 percent, much higher than the four prior presidents.
~ Christian Patriot Daily
