A Day in the Life of...

I am reading Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman. I was struck by the similarities between living genomes and ancient manuscripts. Christianity is a textual based religion as Judaism is. However, most Christians were illiterate at the time, 85-95%. The first Christian scribes were members of the early congregations who could read or write, but who were not scribes by profession. Since there were no copiers or printing presses in existence at the time, if you wanted a copy of a book or something published, you had a scribe write a copy. There are no original copies in existence of any of the gospels or letters of Paul. There are no copies of the copies of the copies, either. The earliest copies of the Greek manuscripts are 200 years after Jesus. Yet, scholars strive to piece together originals from all the copies that they have. They can tell the ages of some manuscripts by the particular errors they have (30,000 errors just in the Greek manuscripts). This revelation puts the literal word of God belief of Fundamentalist Christians to death. First, the English translation of the Bible from Greek, while good, loses some of its literal and spiritual punch. Second, there are sections in the Protestant Bible that were added much later because they weren't found in the earliest manuscripts. Third, there are thousands of errors just in the Greek versions, with the translation to English, the errors are possibly amplified.

There are other living books in existence, all as dynamic as the Bible. DNA is an informational storage medium, just as a book is. Both DNA and a book are sequentially read to an extent. Genomes have beginnings and endings (each of us is born and die), and we are all living books of DNA. Genomes from the past are gone just like the original gospel manuscripts. However, they can be reassembled by comparing different genomes of related organisms. If you wish to know the last common ancestor of mammals, you compare the genomes of dogs, cats, rats, mice, chimps and humans, etc. Comparative genomics can assemble an ancestral genome and tell us what animal we evolved from. I was kind of stunned that so much effort has been made by biologists and computer scientists to develop the software to perform this task and the Biblical scholars haven't figured out that they could use the same techniques and software to roll back time so to speak. Or, maybe they have. Guess we'll see.