First off, Im not intentionally nor trying to piss on anyones beliefs here. Second, if this has been asked before, please ignore my question but please post a link to the other thread. Anyways, how do you know that the text in the Bible is accurate? I wonder this becuase the stories inscribed in the text have been translated in so many languages with many different versions over thousands of years, how do you know that everything in the Bible you read is what really happened? I mean, if people "back in the day" were just as back-stabbing and power hungry as they are today, what would stop them from inflating events in the Bible, adding their interpretations of an event or even taking events out in the Bible only to further their political power quest?

If you are talking about how do we know the text in the original language is accurate.  It's called textual criticism.

Scholars have collected all of the ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts and compared them.  There are some differences, but only a few significant ones (John 8, Mark 16 e.g.)  They then consider all the manuscripts while giving the most weight to the oldest ones.  They then determine what the original said.

I didn't have very much faith in the methodology until I took a class in textual criticism in college.  The prof made a hand-written copy of a text from an out of print book.  He had his family copy that copy.  He then destroyed his first copy.  He brought his family copies to class and we had to copy those.  We then took the copies to our friends and had them copy those.  We ended up with 163 copies and quite a few variations.  He then mixed up the copies and told us we had to recreate the original document exactly using the rules of textual criticism.  If we missed one detail we failed the class.

We passed.  

Anyway, using textual criticism scholars have determined what the original text said.  As a safety measure any good original language text lists the variations in the margin.  For example I can look in my Greek text and tell that in John 1:3 the text originally said, "not one thing that was made" and that later this was condensed to "nothing that was made."  I can tell what manuscripts have which reading and decide whether I agree with the scholars or not.  As you can tell, the meaning of the passage has not changed one bit.

If you are talking about the accuracy of the various translations I can read Greek, Hebrew and some Aramaic so I just pull out the original language and check.  In my experience the New International Version and New American Standard do an excellent job.  If you are concerned about bias in the translators grab 2 or 3.  The two I mentioned above and the New King James Version would be good choices and read the text in all of them.  The different translations should cancel out any bias in any one of them.

I hope this has been helpful

Quoted: If you are talking about the accuracy of the various translations I can read Greek, Hebrew and some Aramaic so I just pull out the original language and check.  In my experience the New International Version and New American Standard do an excellent job.

Why does the NIV omit the word "begotten" in John 3:16?  I would think that dynamic equivalence would be more likely to include that word.  I don't know greek or hebrew so I'll also ask is "begotten" in the greek text?

Thanks,

Shok