Why is there so many versions of the bible? while the Quran has only One?

Question

does that mean that muslims preserve thier holy scriptures better that the cristians?

because I know that muslims memorize the Quran from the beggining to the end and some of them might not make a single mistake. and I also know that the person who memorizes the quran perfectly will be given a licen of teaching it to others, and his name will be put in a chain of men extending from him through his teacher untill it reaches the prophet Mohammad, and from him to God.

so, is there any similar methodology with preserving the Bible?

Answer 1

For 99% of questions, the answer eventually comes down to money.

This is no exception.

Answer 2

I don't see how it matters when the Qu'ran was inspired from the Bible.

Answer 3

For starters it is spelled koran. and we have so many versions for clarity so people can find the bible they can understand the most.

Answer 4

Because the caliph Uthman Ibn Affan destroyed all the other versions of it and commanded that no other version should be made. He feared religious dissention as there were originally different version, he had a commitee make up a definative version. The Yemenis do have a copy of koran that was found bricked up in an old mosque which does not seem to be the same as the modern version

Answer 5

A) why is there so many versions of the bible?

1) Language - modern language keeps changing.  Some words still in use today have very different meanings than they did in the time of the King James Version (KJV), for example.  Witness how, in the KJV Old Testament (OT), the word "meat" is used to refer to bread and the word "bread" is used to refer to meat.  This is just one of the most obvious of a multitude of such changes in meaning.  Modern translations ensure comprehension by modern speakers.

2) Source texts - archaeologists are continually making discoveries of more ancient, and more authentic, source texts.  There is *still* no version that takes full advantage of the texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, and they were first discovered over 50 years ago.  Modern, scholarly translations take advantage of the most recent and most authoritative source texts available.

3) Scholarship - the knowledge of translating the ancient source manuscripts increases with time.  Thus, a modern, scholarly translation is bound to be more consistently accurate than a scholarly translation of 400 years ago, or even 100 years ago.

4) Translation methodology is important.  Style ranges from a word-for-word literal translation (which tends to inaccuracies but is useful in study), to a thought-for-thought translation (which tends to be accurate but often displays over-interpretation as well as translation).  There is a world of "gray area" between these two extremes.

5) Content - though some versions strive for an "inclusive" canon, i.e. a bible that contains all books used by all major Christian sects, most display a very strong religious bias by including only a more restrictive canon.  This can be seen by comparing the contents of the New American Standard Bible (restrictive canon) with the Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version (inclusive canon).

6) $ - this is the most significant contributor to the many versions available today.  Any publisher that produces a modern, scholarly translation can expect to earn a profit from publishing that work.  Thus, publishers are continually producing such works in an effort to fill a niche in one of the above areas or simply in offering an improved (modernized) bible to replace a currently-filled niche.  If producing a new version were a money-losing proposition, only a very few well-funded religious or university organizations would be making the financial effort to produce such works.  We would likely have no more than 4 new translations every century under such cost-prohibitive conditions.

B) while the Quran has only One?

The Qur'an has the following manuscriptural (is that a word?) practical advantages over the bible

1) it is a single document in a single language - roughly equivalent to the book of Genesis in length - while the bible is a collection of dozens of books written in 3 separate very ancient languages over a period of at least 600 years (and more likely 1200 years).

2) it is written in Arabic, and it was written at least 600 years after the final book of the bible, which means that the language used is much better understood and much better known.

3) Nearly all alternate versions of the Qur'an were destroyed, though several have been uncovered by archaeologists recently.

These 3 "advantages" allow for Muslims to require that the Qur'an only be used for doctrine when read in the original language, Arabic.  This is impossible for the bible for the reasons given - there are few, if any, accredited experts in all 3 ancient languages of the bible, especially if you consider that they would need to be accredited experts of each of those 3 languages over the entire duration of their use.  In other words, to be an expert at Qur'an original language, you need to be an expert in 7th or 8th century Arabic.  To be an expert in Bible original language, you need to be expert in at least 400 years of ancient Hebrew, at least 600 years in ancient Aramaic and at least 300 years in ancient Greek.  If you are an expert in all of these things, you can get a superior understanding of the bible from reading the original languages than from reading the modern scholarly translations produced by several scholars, each of whom has expertise in individual areas and periods of these languages.  For the Qur'an, you need merely become fluent (or expert, if you prefer) in a not-nearly-so-ancient form of Arabic.

B) does that mean that muslims preserve thier holy scriptures better that the cristians?

What it means is that the Qur'an has

1) not required the degree of preservation that the bible has (multiple books over several more centuries in several much more ancient languages)

2) has had variant versions eradicated - which greatly simplifies the process of preservation

SO, it is better to say that the Muslims have preserved a single manuscript carefully over a much shorter period of time than any of the much more ancient Christian manuscripts, many, many versions of each of those having been preserved independently of the other.  I would say that Christians have done *too thorough* a job of preserving their scriptures in comparison to the Muslims.

C) because I know that muslims memorize the Quran from the beggining to the end and some of them might not make a single mistake.

This is known among Christians as well - Noah Webster perhaps being the most famous example.  And remember:  he memorized a scripture far, far lengthier than the Qur'an.

D) About the "chain" - no, memorization of the bible is not held to be extremely important among most Christian sects.

Why?

Because bibles are available.  We don't *need* to memorize them.  We can look it up...

I guess what I'm trying to say is this:  memorization of a scripture does *not* imply understanding or grant the ability to explain it or teach others regarding its meaning.

I'm not saying that the Muslim practice is a bad thing - it's not.  However, as you describe it, it does not seem a very responsible way of determining who is a capable teacher of the Qur'an.

I once had a elementary school history teacher who memorized every word on every page of our text book.  You could give him a page number, and he could recited the entire page word for word.  Does that make him a good teacher of history, or just someone with a good memory?

As it turned out, he *was* an excellent history teacher - but a few others that had never managed to memorize the text books that they used were equally excellent, and at least one or two were superior as a teacher of history.

As for scriptural preservation (a different thing altogether), Christians (and Jews!) have managed to preserve a great many variants over the great many centuries that these scriptures have been in existence - something the divisive Muslims failed to do because, at one time or another, one sect or another had authority over the entire Muslim population and could make successful unilateral decisions regarding acceptable scriptures.  We have seen *some* of this among Christianity - the Nag Hammadhi library is a case in point - but by and large, for several centuries each "diocese" of the early Christian church was answerable only to local authority (the bishop or, later, archbishop).  As a result, many variants of many scriptures arose and were preserved.  There are so many that scholars have been able to use the many variants to weed out unauthentic additions made to some of the (formerly) most well-used...

This topic is *very* involved.  I think the best conclusion is this:  if all that Christians had to preserve was the book of Genesis, and if it had been written more than 1000 years later than it actually was, and if at that time all Christians were under the authoritarian rule of a single government, then we would be in much the same position regarding ease of scriptural preservation as are the Muslims today.

More simply:  the Christian equivalent would be the book of Genesis preserved in Latin of the 8th century.  If that is all we had, we Christians would likely all be required to learn Latin and memorize the text.  It would be a relatively simple matter compared to what we Christians have.

Jim, http://www.bible-reviews.com/

Answer 6

The Quran has only one version?

Yeah right.

Check again.

Answer 7

You know, I don't believe in god. But this is a smart question!

Congrats on being in the small percentage of intelligence at y.answers.

Answer 8

There are different versions of the bible because the original transcripts were written in Hebrew which is very difficult to translate. The Quran changes daily, go to Google and search Fatwa. The Islamics issue Fatwas frequently to alter the verses in the Quran.

Answer 9

Maybe Muslims have less of an imagination?

Answer 10

A major reason is that the OT is very ancient and uses tricky Hebrew sentences in places. Even the NT Greek which is much easier to translate than the OT predates the Koran by some hundreds of years.

Answer 11

Islam put an emphasis on memorizing the Koran instead of learning the Koran. That means it also puts more emphasis on wrote memorization instead of literacy.

ADD: As several other posters have pointed out, there ARE many, many different versions of the Koran.

Not only that but there are entire wars in the Middle East over which extra-Koranical traditions and interpretations are to be followed.

Just because you are ignorant of thousands of years of Muslim history does not mean that you get to make sweeping statements about their culture.

Answer 12

How many translations are there?? those are "versions" as well.

Answer 13

actually the muslims have 2 different understandings of the quran. the christians have more understandings like protestantism, baptist, etc.

Answer 14

Wrong again.

There is a Shite version, a Sunni version, a Sufi version, and several other minor groups that each have altered small sections of the Quran to suit the agenda of their muslim sect.

Left alone, the muslims would be at each others throats, killing, bombing, and burning each other as infidels, heretics, and liars.

Answer 15

The Koran was written when the prophet was still alive and was supposedly  dictated directly from God. There's a portion in the Koran that explains how that happened. Mohammad summoned a bunch of people in his lifetime after he received God's message and made them compile all the revelations as he himself did not know how to read/write.This is in contrast to the Bible, which was mostly written after Jesus by his followers who spread all over the Middle East. I'm surprised at all the comments people make without answering your question and they obviously have no idea what they are talking about.

Answer 16

Mans Ideals.  For example a Catholic is someone who believes the bible + traditions.