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Is There Such A Thing As A Final Cut?
heidi writes "There's an insightful article over at CNN's entertainment section about the tinkering of recent cultural history. Apparently, there is no such thing as a final draft any more, and author Todd Leopold does a great job of showing how this is revisionist history at its, well, oddest. Aside from the many examples he cites, such as the 'new' Capote novel and the changing of Star Wars to show that Greedo shot first, i can think of the 'new' Camus novel that i read a few years ago and the way that The Wizard of Oz had the 'ding dong the witch is dead' song edited out. In an era where our entertainment has come to define us and to fill, however (un)completely, the spiritual void that we inherited from the Boomers, messing with our stories isn't necessarily a positive thing, creative genius aside."
That's a strawman argument. Since most of the books weren't part of the canon in the first place they don't count. That would be tantamount to saying that star wars is different because the fan-fiction doesn't match up to the movies. That's what the apocrypha is, in essence; the fan fiction of the bible.
My challenge is this: translations aside what of the original documents from antiquity is different from the later (medieval onward) copies of the original canonical books.
If you compare any of the canonical books in latin or greek or herbrew can you find discrepencies from the ages?
The original source books have remained unchanged throughout the millienia. I'm not a christian; but even that's a known fact. The jewish and other scholars were insanely anal about copying (partly because of mystical traits which many sects attributed to individual hebrew letters).