The Bible is never revised. The original documents in the original languages remain the same. Only the translations are updated. A few of the reasons that there are so many translations (not versions) of the Bible are: • The English language is very complicated. It changes all the time. English is different in different countries. English can be different in different neighborhoods. • Biblical scholarship improves every day. • Archeology learns more and more about biblical times every year. • Distrust. Protestants cannot trust a Catholic translation and Catholics cannot trust a Protestant one. One Protestant denomination might not even trust a translation from a different denomination. The original language documents have not really changed. The Dead Sea Scrolls helped prove this. The scrolls are important because they testify to the accuracy of the people who copied and recopied the Scriptures over the centuries. Despite minor errors, they show us that the Old Testament has not changed since it was compiled. ==== By the way, for most Christians in the world, there are 73 books in the Bible. The New Testament canon of the Catholic Bible and the Protestant Bible are the same with 27 Books. The difference in the Old Testaments actually goes back to the time before and during Christ’s life. At this time, there was no official Jewish canon of scripture. The Jews in Egypt translated their choices of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the second century before Christ. This translation of 46 books, called the Septuagint, had wide use in the Roman world because most Jews lived far from Palestine in Greek cities. Many of these Jews spoke only Greek. The early Christian Church was born into this world. The Church, with its bilingual Jews and more and more Greek-speaking Gentiles, used the books of the Septuagint as its Bible. Remember the early Christians were just writing the documents what would become the New Testament. After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, with increasing persecution from the Romans and competition from the fledgling Christian Church, the Jewish leaders came together and declared its official canon of Scripture, eliminating seven books from the Septuagint. The books removed were Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom (of Solomon), Sirach, and Baruch. Parts of existing books were also removed including Psalm 151 (from Psalms), parts of the Book of Esther, Susanna (from Daniel as chapter 13), and Bel and the Dragon (from Daniel as chapter 14). The Christian Church filled with the Holy Spirit did not follow suit but kept all the books in the Septuagint. 46 + 27 = 73 Books total. 1500 years later, Protestants decided to keep the Catholic New Testament but change its Old Testament from the Catholic canon to the Jewish canon. The books that were removed supported such things as • Prayers for the dead (Tobit 12:12; 2 Maccabees 12:39-45) • Purgatory (Wisdom 3:1-7) • Intercession of saints in heaven (2 Maccabees 15:14) • Intercession of angels (Tobit 12:12-15) The books they dropped are sometimes called the Apocrypha. Here is a Catholic Bible website: http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/ With love in Christ.

Actually, the Bible does not contain all the Books that were once considered sacred. There are quite a few book mentioned in the Bible that the writers considered authoritative that we do not have (http://scriptures.lds.org/en/bd/l/40). There were quite a few books that we do have that people in the first and second century considered scripture that were eventually excluded from the Bible for various reason (and, no I am not referring to the Apocrypha). The History Channel aired a two part series on these books that was quite interesting (http://store.aetv.com/html/product/index.jhtml?id=77459). So, there is much missing from the Bible. I also don't know that I would call it the final revisions. The original books which we do find in the Bible were written long before what we know as the Bible came into existence. These books were then COMPILED into the Bible.

I would say it is wrong, the 'canon', the selection of the books for the Bible, ommitted some pretty interesting books. One for example pictured Jesus as little kid annoying his friends with magic. I think that would be pretty worthwile to read, but they didn't like this image of Jesus so they kicked it out.

1) The Bible is not a book, but a collection of books. Some people selected those books among a great number of other books and different Churches made eventually different choices. Moreover, every single one of those books was not necessarily written by a single person, even if the title or the tradition conveys this idea. For instance, it is assumed that the books of Moses (Pentateuch) were written by five different people. According to modern scientific research, the book of Genesis, for instance, was an adaptation of much older Sumerian myths (Enki and Nihursag, Enuma Elish). Even the Gospels were not possibly written by comtemporaries of Jesus, and the similarities between them are rather a clue for them being inspired from one another than for a further evidence of truth. We also have not a single original text of a particular book, but many *different* manuscripts, and we have also discovered new ones and also other interesting, long lost apocrypha in recent times. This helps us to reconstruct better the history of those texts. 2) Enuma Elish: "This version was written sometime in the 12th century BC in cuneiform on seven clay tablets. They were found in the middle 19th century in the ruins of the palace of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. George Smith first published these texts in 1876 as The Chaldean Genesis. Because of many parallels with the Genesis account, some historians concluded that the Genesis account was simply a rewriting of the Babylonian story. As a reaction, many who wanted to maintain the uniqueness of the Bible argued either that there were no real parallels between the accounts or that the Genesis narratives were written first and the Babylonian myth borrowed from the biblical account. However, there are simply too many similarities between the accounts to deny any relationship between the accounts. There are significant differences as well that should not be ignored. Yet there is little doubt that the Sumerian versions of the story predate the biblical account by several hundred years. Rather than opting for either extreme of complete dependence or no contact whatever, it is best to see the Genesis narratives as freely using the metaphors and symbolism drawn from a common cultural pool to assert their own theology about God." Source and further information: http://www.crivoice.org/enumaelish.html "Comparisons between the Bible and other ancient Near Eastern texts are often obscured by English translations, which impose on the Hebrew the Christian doctrines of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) and of the Trinity. Thus the opening of Genesis 1 is traditionally rendered: "In the beginning God created both Heaven and Earth...", whereas the Hebrew makes it clear that Genesis 1:1-3 is describing the state of chaos immediately prior to God's creation: "In the beginning of God's creating the skies and the earth, when the earth had been shapeless and formless, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God's spirit was hovering on the face of the water, God said, 'Let there be light!" In both Enuma Elish and Genesis, creation is an act of divine speech - the Enuma Elish describes pre-creation as a time "when above, the heavens had not been named, and below the earth had not been called by name", while in Genesis each act of divine creation is introduced with the formula: "And God said, let there be...". The sequence of creation is identical: light, firmament, dry land, luminaries, and man." "Thus, it appears that the so-called Priestly Source account echoes this earlier Mesopotamian story of creation." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Elish 3) "‘Enki and Ninhursag’ is perhaps one of the most difficult Mesopotamian myth for Judeo-Christian Westerners to understand, because it stands as the opposite of the myth of Adam and Eve in Paradise found in the Old Testament Bible. Indeed, ‘ the literature created by the Sumerians left its deep imprint on the Hebrews, and one of the thrilling aspects of reconstructing and translating Sumerian belles-lettres consists in tracing resemblances and parallels between Sumerian and Biblical motifs. To be sure, Sumerians could not have influenced the Hebrews directly, for they had ceased to exist long before the Hebrew people came into existence. But there is little doubt that the Sumerians deeply influenced the Canaanites, who preceded the Hebrews in the land later known as Palestine’ (Kramer, 1981:142). Some comparisons with the Bible paradise story: 1) the idea of a divine paradise, the garden of gods, is of Sumerian origin, and it was Dilmun, the land of immortals situated in southwestern Persia. It is the same Dilmun that, later, the Babylonians, the Semitic people who conquered the Sumerians, located their home of the immortals. There is a good indication that the Biblical paradise, which is described as a garden planted eastward in Eden, from whose waters flow the four world rivers including the Tigris and the Euphrates, may have been originally identical with Dilmun; 2) the watering of Dilmun by Enki and the Sun god Utu with fresh water brought up from the earth is suggestive of the Biblical ‘ But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground’ (Genesis 2:6); 3) the birth of goddesses without pain or travail illuminates the background of the curse against Eve that it shall be her lot to conceive and bear children in sorrow; 4) Enki’s greed to eat the eight sacred plants which gave birth to the Vegetal World resonates the eating of the Forbidden Fruit by Adam and Eve, and 6) most remarkably, this myth provides na explanation for one of the most puzzling motifs in the Biblical paradise story - the famous passage describing the fashioning of Eve, the mother of all living, from the rib of Adam. Why a rib instead of another organ to fashion the woman whose name Eve means according to the Bible, ‘she who makes live’? If we look at the Sumerian myth, we see that when Enki gets ill, cursed by Ninhursag, one of his body parts that start dying is the rib. The Sumerian word for rib is ‘ti’ . To heal each o Enki’s dying body parts, Ninhursag gives birth to eight goddesses. The goddess created for the healing of Enki’s rib is called ‘Nin-ti’, ‘the lady of the rib’. But the Sumerian word ‘ti’ also means ‘to make live’. The name ‘Nin-ti’ may therefore mean ‘the lady who makes live’ as well as ‘the lady of the rib’. Thus, a very ancient literary pun was carried over and perpetuated in the Bible, but without its original meaning, because the Hebrew word for ‘rib’ and that for ‘who makes live’ have nothing in common. Moreover, it is Ninhursag who gives her life essence to heal Enki, who is then reborn from her (Kramer, 1981:143-144)." Source and further information: http://www.gatewaystobabylon.com/myths/texts/retellings/enkininhur.htm 4) "The documentary hypothesis (DH) proposes that the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known collectively as the Torah or Pentateuch) represent a combination of documents from four originally independent sources. According to the influential version of the hypothesis formulated by Julius Wellhausen (1844 - 1918) these sources and the approximate dates of their composition were: the J, or Jahwist, source; written c. 950 BC in the southern kingdom of Judah. (The name Yahweh begins with a J in Wellhausen's native German.) the E, or Elohist, source; written c. 850 BC in the northern kingdom of Israel. the D, or Deuteronomist, source; written c. 621 BC in Jerusalem during a period of religious reform. the P, or Priestly, source; written c. 450 BC by Aaronid priests. The editor who combined the sources into the final Pentateuch is known as R, for Redactor, and might have been Ezra." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis 5) "Of the many gospels written in antiquity, only four gospels came to be accepted as part of the New Testament, or canonical. An insistence upon there being a canon of canonical four, and no others, was a central theme of Irenaeus of Lyons, c. 185. In his central work, Adversus Haereses Irenaeus denounced various early Christian groups that used only one gospel, such as Marcionism which used only Marcion's version of Luke, or the Ebionites which seem to have used an Aramaic version of Matthew as well as groups that embraced the texts of newer revelations, such as the Valentinians (A.H. 1.11). " "The dominant view today is that Mark is the first Gospel, with Matthew and Luke borrowing passages both from that Gospel and from at least one other common source, lost to history, termed by scholars 'Q' (from German: Quelle, meaning "source"). This view is known as the "Two-Source Hypothesis". John was written last and shares little with the synoptic gospels." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel