In the Beginning...

Jesus never owned a Bible. In fact, he never saw a Bible at any point in his lifetime because there was no such thing as a Bible while he was alive. When I say "Bible" I'm talking about the fixed canonical writings bound and presented as a uniform holy scripture that we're familiar with today.

Before books came scrolls and codices. Since Gutenberg's printing press was a long ways away any scrolls or codices of scripture a household/church would own would be a handwritten copy. You can logically assume that there wasn’t just one universal scroll shared by the masses. They weren’t even just rote copies of an original. People had different versions of the various stories that had been passed down to them through many generations.

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One scroll could contain different translations or accounts than another when they supposedly originated from the same source. Errors or liberal translations from scribes could have caused these discrepancies. Different households had different collections of scripture, with their own biased emphasis on what was important. They had no uniform Old Testament. No standard or original edition of any of our modern day "books of the bible" were circulating during these ancient times. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls helped bring to light the fact that, the farther back in time you go, the less uniform scripture is.

Jerome's Magnum Opus

Pope Damasus commissioned St. Jerome (a theologian and grammarian of the time) to go through all the different versions of scripture in circulation and to compile a single definitive Latin edition. He was charged with sorting through all the different versions of all the biblical stories and determining which of them had merit. His work became known as the Vulgate, and began circulating around the 4th century. It still wasn't the dominant biblical text of the time though and was added to over the years by many people after Jerome's death.

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The Vulgate eventually resulted in the Codex Amiatinus: the earliest complete "Bible" discovered dating back to the 8th century. Even then the text was not fixed. Books were still being added, subtracted, and altered.

Different Authors, Different Endings

With so much alteration and so many different opinions on what is and is not important to include, it's not surprising that in many incidences the modern day Bible contradicts itself. A good example of Biblical contradiction is the death of Judas. In the book of Matthew he returns the silver he received for betraying Jesus and hangs himself from a tree out of guilt. Contrarily, in Acts he uses the silver to buy a farm, then falls and is disemboweled. Could these have been just two out of many different tellings of his death? We may never know.

The Bible As We Know It

The book The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book by Timothy Beal (a professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University) served as an excellent source for this information. In his book he states, "...the texts that we now have from this period are but the tip of an iceberg of early Christian writings that were important to a tremendous variety of Christianities." What began as a diverse collection of scripture has been simplified down into a single entity: the modern day Bible.

This is the main reason why I can't and don't take the Bible as the literal Word of God. It is also why I refrain from using the Bible as a means to condone my own actions. The Bible may have origins as divinely inspired testimony, but it has undergone too many revisions, translations, and interpretations to be used as a book of laws. Even any original writing from a prophet is created by man, and no man is by any means perfect.