The BIBLE did not exist in Jesus' day nor in the lifespan of his apostles.
People didn't walk around with one (Bible) tucked under their arm.
Christians didn't carry one (Bible) door to door for preaching and teaching.
The closest thing to THE BIBLE was the SEPTUIGINT Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures which not one person in a 10,000 had ever seen!
Creation of the Septuagint (wikipedia article)
...in the third century BCE [ 6 ] . According to the record in the Talmud,
'King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: 'Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher.' God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did' [ 7 ]
Further books were translated over the next two centuries. It is not altogether clear which was translated when, or where; some may even have been translated twice, into different versions, and then revised. [ 8 ] The quality and style of the different translators also varied considerably from book to book, from the literal to paraphrasing to interpretative. According to one assessment "the Pentateuch is reasonably well translated, but the rest of the books, especially the poetical books, are often very poorly done and even contain sheer absurdities". [ 9 ]
As the work of translation progressed gradually, and new books were added to the collection, the compass of the Greek Bible came to be somewhat indefinite. The Pentateuch always maintained its pre-eminence as the basis of the canon; but the prophetic collection (out of which the Nevi'im were selected) changed its aspect by having various hagiographa incorporated into it. Some of the newer works, those called anagignoskomena in Greek, are not included in the Jewish canon. Among these books are Maccabees and the Wisdom of Ben Sira. Also, the Septuagint version of some works, like Daniel and Esther, are longer than those in the Masoretic Text. [ 10 ] Some of the later books (Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Maccabees, and others) apparently were composed in Greek. [ 11 ]
The authority of the larger group of "writings", out of which the ketuvim were selected, had not yet been determined, although some sort of selective process must have been employed because the Septuagint did not include other well-known Jewish documents such as Enoch or Jubilees or other writings that are now part of the Pseudepigrapha. It is not known what principles were used to determine the contents of the Septuagint beyond the "Law and the Prophets", a phrase used several times in the New Testament.
Okay, so what?
Christianity pretends there is such a thing as a true Bible. There is not.
Christian apologists such as Josh Mcdowell and Norman Geisler assert that by literary standards, the New Testament is a reliable witness to the original text. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] Textual scholar Bart Ehrman disagrees: "It is true, of course, that the New Testament is abundantly attested in the manuscripts produced through the ages, but most of these manuscripts are many centuries removed from the originals, and none of them perfectly accurate. They all contain mistakes - altogether many thousands of mistakes. It is not an easy task to reconstruct the original words of the New Testament...Whether or not any of these ancient authors said anything that was true is another question, one we cannot answer simply by appealing to the number of surviving manuscripts that preserve their writings..." [ 6 ]
Bruce Metzger wrote: "Lest, however, the wrong impression be conveyed from the statistics given above regarding the total number of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, it should be pointed out that most of the papyri are relatively fragmentary and that only about fifty manuscripts (of which the Codex Sinaiticus is the only Uncial manuscript) contain the entire New Testament." [ 7 ]
Our contemporary ideas of what a Bible is are anachronisms. We are projecting backward through time a fallacy of imagination. This fallacy is known and concealed by all denominations. They pretend there is no such problem at all.
So what?
So this:
All the Christian teachings were oral. That's right: oral. Somebody said this and somebody else said that.
There were hundreds and hundreds of VERSIONS of who said what floating around.
STOP AND THINK FOR A MOMENT.
1.There are no original copies of THE BIBLE anywhere in existence. Why? Why not?
2.There are no existing copies of originals anywhere in the world. Why? Why not?
3.What we quote from, argue over and dispute about stems from the flimsiest of all hearsay reports many times over.
Why treat each word as though WE KNOW those words were actually spoken by the very sources attributed?
CHRISTIANITY is not on a firm, mathematical basis of sound, provable substance both tangible and irrefutable.
Right after the time of Jesus there were so many at-odds versions of who he was and what he said it is ----IMPOSSIBLE---to know anything at all for certain.
We can't intelligently take any of this as though it is provable, arguable or even valid.
It is shaky, flimsy, tenuous and mostly loud assertion passed off as infallible.
Come on, people!
Don't get sucked in.
If God did not see fit to PRESERVE (and He didn't!) the original manuscripts (when that should have been the most valuable of all possessions on Earth to the true Church) we must admit it was not worth preserving.
There is no "there" there.
Stop and ask yourself how any denomination can claim to be true. True to what?