I suspect that many of them started out with a basis in fact but suffered from the "telephone" syndrome; much of Biblical text was written down after having been passed down by oral tradition for generations, or were recorded many years after the events had happened, so there's bound to be distortions in the recollection. The Bible also suffers from multiple sessons of "editing by committee" to reach a compromise document, omitting a lot of other testiments as non-canonical (in both the religious and "story bible" senses) based on the understandings of people centuries after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. And then there's the translations, from Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek dialect into Latin (or formal Greek, if you're so inclined) and then into "vulgate" versions in multiple local languages. (Including English.)canadian_ace said:
Throw in that hand-copying, the only method of publication until the moveable type got invented over a thousand years after the Christian Church settled on an approved version, and there's bound to be mistakes. Unless you're determined to claim a whack-load of miracles happened over a fifteen-hundred-year period, human nature virtually dictates that some of the texts will have been changed.
-- Steve
PS: I know some people ready to claim that there are elements in many Biblical editions highly resembling fan-fic; the same sort of hyperbole, resort to archetype, the "Mary Sue" syndrome... I wouldn't necessarily agree without digging further, but it is food for thought. (Heck, there's even some Jesus/Mary-Magdalene in the non-canon stuff for Ghu's sake.)
