Why didn't God cause the original Biblical letters and gospels to be preserved?
Come to think of it....
if we are dealing with a God who can do the seemingly impossible - why didn't He cause the original documents penned by Moses, Isaiah and David to be preserved?
Surely if God was so particular about the exact preservation of these documents that are "God's Word" - why not preserve the originals in a special, miraculous way?
Maybe cause them to be preserved in a kind of transparent supernatural glass case.
Maybe appoint a special order of Church officials who watched over them in a magical cave chamber under Jerusalem.. or under Rome or under Constantinople.
I think it was Bart Ehrman who quite genuinely wondered why this didn't happen... IF the exact original text/words of the Bible matter so much.
When I heard him suggest this, I have to confess I shuddered at the very thought of such a car crash!
Think of how the incredible bronze serpent was preserved from Numbers 21 right down to the time of Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18:4 - when eventually after over 800 years the bronze serpent had to be destroyed because it had become an idol that was leading to pagan worship.
That is the constant human problem.
We LOVE to worship creatures rather than the Creator.
We LOVE to give our attention to what is seen rather than what is unseen - to what is temporal rather than eternal - to what is on earth rather than what is in heaven.
Down through Church history, literal wars were fought over the relics from Biblical events and remains of great saints.
As it is, most Christians are much happier to sign up to statements ABOUT the Bible rather than actually read the Bible.
In my experience, even Church ministers will sign up to the most intense and rigorous statement about how perfect, infallible, inerrant and holy the Bible is - and yet spend less than 15 minutes a day actually reading it!
In other words, I have always assumed it would have been a catastrophic distraction if we had spent Church history fighting over original autographs or even obsessing about them... or worst of all, assuming that merely possessing these original autographs was the same as reading them, understanding them and obeying them.
As it is, we have the Word of God passed down to us through copies - copies of copies... copies of copies of copies... and in all those copies we find all kinds of copyist errors, missed verses, "typos" and variations.
Bart Ehrman always strikes me as a kind of.... how can I put this?
He always strikes me as a kind of caricatured "fundamentalist" who is looking for a particular vision of the Bible... and because the real, historical Bible does not fit what he expects, he (perhaps even reluctantly) ends up as a kind of atheist and skeptic.
I wish him well, but I wonder if he would get on with the Bible better if he stopped reacting against caricatured fundamentalism and just engaged with the Bible as it really is.
Another example is how he reads the birth and death narratives of Jesus.
He expects them to have a kind of single perspective uniformity to them - and that each biographer should come with exactly the same agenda and priorities.
So, the fact that Luke has no interest in the family trip to Egypt when Jesus was born, but Luke has lots of interest in the pregnancy and the family trip to the temple... or that Matthew is fascinated by the visit of eastern magi to see Jesus, but Luke has no interest in these non-Roman oddballs...
All of this is a problem for Bart Ehrman, but to the rest of us it is delightful!