migtig said:
2A - when it comes to literal biblical - you do - however, not always are religious sources the sole source of info.
Pope Damsus or Damasus or whatever compiled the bible more than 3 centuries after the death of Christ. That was the bible until Martin Luther came along with his Christian reform movement and he struck out even more text from the bible.
So what I am saying is there are a lot more texts and documents that concern Jesus, his teachings, and his apostles, that were originally taught and shared until a man (regardless of how you spell his name - he was just a man) came along 300+ years later with power and authority and changed things. I would think, that you of all people would desire to learn more and would be interested in reading all the texts available. And a lot of the documents have been translated from armenic by language scholars and are available for public consumption.
Did you look at the Biblical time line? If you did you would see that the books of the Old Testament were complete 500 years before Christ and that all the manuscripts that comprise the 27 books of the New Testament were completed and accepted by the early church by the year 100 A.D.
Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome to put together a Bible that contained the Apocryphal books that were written between 500 B.C. and 200 B.C. Jerome wrote that he did not agree that the Apocryphal books should be part of the Bible but did put them in at the insistence of Damasus. That was in 390 A.D. Only seven years later, a counsel was held that took the Apocryphal books out of the Bible.
Martin Luther was not born until 1483.
Yes, I know there are documents that are available for people to read that are from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. All of the texts of the original documents from the first century prove that the Bible translations we have today are accurate.