Humans Invented Writing. That Gave Us God.

As archaeologists find more evidence about ancient humans, we are discovering how humans developed the written word. It is now believed writing started independently in four different parts of the world. This may change, of course, as new discoveries come along.

There are written records of business transactions from about 5,000 years ago. Pictures in caves, perhaps the first forms of communication by writing, are dated back to 40,000 years ago. Remember that creatures similar to humans were thought to exist between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago.

The theory is that pictures kept evolving and came to represent the spoken word. Even as late at the founding of our country the writing passed down did not use standardized spelling but reflected how the word sounded to the writer.

Which leads us to the problems of translating ancient writing in several languages into today's sphere of ideas. The Bible was written in different countries in different languages at different times. All the writing was meant to reflect what was spoken at the time. There, of course, is no recorded sound to use as a benchmark to check how carefully what was spoken was recorded in the writing.

It is from this haphazard recording of what was supposed to have been said in an ancient time we came to have one god and the Jesus character of the Bible. The assumption is they were spoken about. But we cannot be certain the spoken word is what actually made it into the Bible.

Comments

  1. tsmDecember 23, 2018 at 9:57 AM

    No, I suppose that we "cannot be certain (that) the spoken word is what actually made it into the Bible." Nor, for that matter, into the works of Plato, Aristotle or any other ancient writer. Nor even some medieval writers who, inter alia, got confused by highly inflected languages like Latin and Greek. That does not imply, as you seem to suggest, that all translations of old historical documents are flawed to the point of being worthless. That we are, in effect, cut off from any reliable knowledge of the past, the ancient past especially. It does mean, however, that we must be careful and thoughtful when translating old documents. And remembering that, in many instances, we do not even have the complete works of, say, Aristotle, Heraclitus and many other ancient writers. BTW do you celebrate Christmas or the feast of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus)?

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