Moving on...
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i said it to provoke you
Not a good reason to say anything, my friend, unless you want the discussion to degenerate into a fight. Please refrain from saying things merely for the sake of provocation in the future. In this, I am speaking not merely as an opponent in the discussion, but as a moderator of this forum.
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and didy, and educated man such as yourself knows that "the bible", as we know it now, was complied WAY after jesus was gone. and sure some of it was written shortly after his death and whatnot, but humans cannot possibly be perfect according to your own treatment of people like our friend ramrod (who you never allow, or anyone else for that matter, to forget that we are sniveling inherently flawed subordinates to some invisible father figure) and myself. so yeah. people wrote it. it must be flawed. and i don't expect you to ever believe me.
I already cited one article on why I believe a much earlier date for the writing of the manuscripts, as well as a much earlier date for listings of the canon. While the books themselves may not have been bound together in codices until much later, at least part of that is because codices weren't in regular use at the time. Most of these manuscripts existed as papyrus scrolls, as parchment was very expensive. But the writings of the New Testament were quoted by early Christian writers as early as the first century, meaning that there was at least some established recognition of them as authoritative at that time.
Furthermore, as I stated before, papyrus was very fragile. For us to still have papyrus manuscripts dating to the second century is in itself pretty remarkable, and would seem to indicate that copies of these manuscripts were being made and distributed pretty widely.
Furthermore, if there were elaborations made to the manuscripts, it would stand to reason that they would have ultimately caused the available texts to become so widely divergent, that none of them would be reliable. A copy of John's Gospel in Egypt would have looked radically different than a copy in Syria, or Armenia, or Rome. It is true that minute variances did appear in some later manuscript families, but far too late to effect a change of all available copies. Furthermore, these minute variations rarely present the reader with adequate reason to doubt the text, for the following reasons:
1. Such variances account for less than 1% of the entire biblical texts.
2. The vast majority of these variations can be attributed to slight copyist errors, for example, when a copyist might accidentally say "Jesus Christ" instead of "Christ Jesus".
3. There are at least two instances where long passages seem to have been added later. One is the ending of Mark 16. The other is from John 8, the story of the woman caught in adultery (where the famous "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!" passage comes from). So yes, certainly one ought to at least question such passages, but they still account for such a drastically minute portion of the whole, that they don't really diminish the overall message of Scripture, anyway.
More on this later.
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) Thank you for apologizing, though. *hug*