On historical mistakes
Submitted by Tygyr on July 09 1999 at 07:51:19
In reply to Sorry...that don't cut the mustard Submitted by Triple Q on July 07 1999 at 19:11:21
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Hi, I still cannot believe that whole portions of human history are merely mistakes written by very human people. In fact, as most historians will tell you, the sad truth is that history is as full of mistakes as accuracies. History is not an absolute truth - it is a person's account of what happened at the time, which of course means there's bias. Especially when there's conflict - the surviving account is invariably that of the winner. It doesn't even have to have happend very long ago for there to be huge errors. Take the famous case of Richard III of England in the Wars of the Roses. Up until recently history recorded him as an evil, tyrannical, regicidal mutant. Now, however, evidence has been uncovered which shows him to have been a kind, fair ruler - history was rewritten by the winning side, led by Henry Tudor. And we all know what a pleasant rule he founded. Errors can also happen during transcribing. Many a monk inadvertently misspelt a word with disastrous consequences. And of course think of the embellishments - King Arthur is a good example of this. Roman records record a general called Arturus towards the end of their reign in England, a general who helped unite many tribes in England. His story has been embellished to what it is today. Now take into account that such glaring errors and untruths can happen in under a century. What chance then that a 2,000 year old story, first written over 300 years after the events in a badly-understood language, retranslated many times, passed down the line of monks and rulers whose best interests lay in changing the Bible to suit themselves, could have withstood the passage of time? There are many different versions of the Bible, some mutally contradictory. Which is the correct one? I think if anyone is to read the Bible, one has to take it with a grain of salt. Otherwise instead of doing the work of your god, you may find yourself following the personal morals of a 13th century priest or the mistranslation of a semi-literate monk. Tygyr |