In 1535, William Tyndall was burned at the stake for making an English translation of the Bible. All religions have been very touchy about making translations of their sacred texts into vernacular languages.

The notion that there is only one version of religious truth for all of humanity, whose purity must be preserved at all costs, and that there is an obligation to convert as many as possible outside the fold to accepting that truth, is something that only really began with the rise of Christianity. It made its second appearance six centuries later with the emergence of Islam.

But Christianity and Islam are merely the second and third attempts to establish a one-world religion. The first attempt was made by Buddhism in the 6th Century BC and that missionary effort had enormous success except in South West Asia.

The Jews and the Persians were also convinced that their religion was the only true brand, but they made little effort to evangelize others who didn't share their faith or viewpoints.

Despite all appearances to the contrary nowadays, Christianity and Islam are actually sister religions with a thousand affinities linking them together, and to their common roots in Judaism and the cultures and religions of Greece and the Middle East. It is significant that the three great western religions that have their roots in Abraham, are called the Religions of the Book, since written texts have always played such a central role in their traditions.

But there are other major differences between how Christianity regards its sacred texts and how Judaism and Islam regard theirs. Both Judaism and Islam maintain that the central parts of their sacred texts were directly dictated by God; for example the Jewish Torah (or Pentateuch), and the Muslim Qur'an. But Christianity has never officially claimed that for its sacred texts. In fact the names of the distinguished early Christian human authors who wrote them down have always been proudly displayed in their titles.

Nevertheless, most fervent Christians of all varieties believe that the Bible, especially the New Testament, while written down by human beings, is the inspired written words of God. In practice many believing Christians depart from the official line of their Churches since they seem to assume those words were in some shape or form sent down directly from Heaven by God via the equivalent of e-mail or fax, or were communicated through the direct inspiration of every word written down by the authors of the biblical books.

But whatever may be said about how the originals of the biblical books came to be written, unfortunately we do not have those original copies of any of the books of the Bible, not even of the New Testament. What we do have are multiple generations of error-ridden copies of those originals.

The Jewish and Muslim peoples have always been able to read their own scriptures in the original Hebrew and Arabic in which they were written. The Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christians could do the same with the New Testament since the original versions of the books of the New Testament as we have them were written in Greek. But the Western Church has had to rely on translations and this is where much of our trouble lies.

Unlike Judaism or Islam, for the first three centuries of its existence, Christianity was an illegal and fugitive religion. Any copying or translation of the original documents was usually done by amateurs, in far from ideal circumstances, however diligent and devoted the copiers themselves undoubtedly were. This unprofessional copying continued throughout the first 300 years before Christianity became the state religion under Constantine. About 5,700 Greek manuscripts of the Bible survive today, even though some manuscripts only contain small fragments of the texts. Of these texts, only ten contain the full Bible as we know it today, and only four of these are earlier than the tenth century!

The two oldest copies of almost the full Bible as we know it are the Codex Sinaiiticus and Codex Vaticanus, held in the British Library and the Vatican Library respectively. The latter may well be one of the Bibles commissioned by the Emperor Constantine. In neither of these texts, for example, does the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (John 8) appear, showing that this account was inserted into the Bible for the first time at least 300 years after the event is said to have taken place, and some 250 years after the Gospel into which it was inserted was written.

In that collection of 5,700 manuscripts some scholars estimate that there are as many as 400,000 places where the manuscripts are at variance with each other, or as one noted biblical scholar expressed it, there are more variations of the texts of the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament.

So in what sense can we claim to have in the scriptures the inspired written words of God, since there is so much uncertainty about what the correct words are?

We also know from early Christian references that there were several other letters written by the New Testament authors that did not survive, such as Paul's Third Letter to the Corinthians. We have been plentifully assured in some quarters that God took great care to ensure that the existing Gospels and Letters of the New Testament were preserved so as to come down to us intact. Are we then to attribute some degree of carelessness to God because he allowed some of the other documents written by those same New Testament authors to get lost?

Some of these variations in the New Testament text are simply accidents of scribal copying. Some were deliberate changes to accommodate different theological points of view, or to ensure that sacred scripture corresponded to the teachings of the early church - the reverse of what one thought would have been the correct procedure! Good examples are the changes made in relation to the debate about whether Jesus was divine or human or a combination of both, or the status of women in the early Church, and there are several others.

At the dawn of the twenty first century there were more than sixty English translations of the New Testament Scriptures in print continuing a tradition that goes back to the seventh century. The King James Version of the Bible has rightly been beloved for centuries by Christian believers all throughout the English-speaking world, not least for the classically beautiful English prose in which the translation is written. Unfortunately for the King James Bible, it is a translation of one of the most corrupted of the Greek texts that have survived.

The earliest translations of the Greek New Testament were made into Latin in the middle to the late second century. St. Jerome produced a standard Latin translation which was completed in 406 AD. This version called the "Versio Vulgata" or 'common translation,' dominated Western Christianity for more than a thousand years, became the first book to be mechanically printed, and remains the official Bible of Roman Catholicism to this day. Many modern translations based on the original languages have removed many of the countless errors that had crept into the texts over the centuries.

Nothing said here should be taken to detract from the marvelous amount of lofty and inspirational material that has raised the hearts of countless generations of Christians down the centuries. But it is also necessary to realize that many of our most cherished beliefs such as how to understand the divinity of Jesus, the nature of the Holy Trinity, what awaits us after death, and many of the central Bible stories we remember from childhood, are based on either deliberate or accidental copying of the biblical text. Obviously, a knowledge of these very matters is essential for anyone who wishes to have an in-depth understanding of fundamental matters concerning human life and destiny before God, and it is a tragic fact that many of those tampered texts were used as justification for the cruel persecution down the centuries of many who were judged to have drifted outside the boundaries of orthodoxy.

Corruption of the biblical texts that have come down to us is a serious problem for proper interpretation, and one of which the majority of Christians are unaware. There is however, an even greater problem, the assumption that the biblical texts convey their message in the same way that we find normal and usual today, so we tend to assume unquestioningly that we can read the Bible as easily as we would read the morning newspaper. Nothing could be further from the truth, and we will look at that issue next month.

Miceal Ledwith appeared in the hit move "What the Bleep Do we know" and its sequel "Down the Rabbit Hole." He is co-author of "The Orb Project" published by Simon and Schuster/Beyond Words in November 2007, and has published three DVDs so far in his projected series, "The Hamburger Universe," 2005, "How Jesus Became a Christ," 2006, and "Orbs: Clues to a More Exciting Universe," February 2008. He has lectured extensively all over North and South America, South Africa, Australia, Europe and Japan. He is a long-time member of the Ramtha School of Ancient Wisdom

He can be reached at his website: hamburgeruniverse.com