They don't add books you say? Well, perhaps not this century and perhaps not last century (at least to my limited knowledge it has not occurred very recently), but it happened quite a few times throughout history.
Even in this century there have been discussions about books that might 'belong' in the bible (after all) and others that are 'outdated' and need to be rewritten to fit the modern contexts. Especially the latter happened on great scale.
Really, they change and have changed more than you would think, but you won't find out about it just by looking at the titles of the chapters or even books that are in there.
Quote:
all the books in the New Testament were written really early AD. imagine looking through a new edition of the Bible that had a book written last year.
Well, probably no one would notice or care, because a.) the original content only exists in form of copies that are already altered anyways and b.) extreme alterations hardly ever occur all at once, but gradually.
There are some examples that come to mind. For example the "virgin" Mary and certain properties of Jesus. It's a fact that at some point women became too powerful because of what was written in the bible about Mary and it's the one reason why 'Jesus' became 'the son of God'. They've kept a vote about this. It's one of many alterations through time and although big ones like this may seem like rare at first sight, it's the gradual overall change of the whole document through time that really matters here.
In short, we wouldn't notice if certain books now are a page longer or shorter than say 100 years ago. Don't forget that because of the way the Bible is written, there are a lot of things that are quite multi-interpretable, let alone the choices translators face anyway in deciding how to translate all that. Really all they have to do is do a reprint. We have had a reprint of the Dutch Bible just a year ago and it's very different. The whole ancient language thing has been converted to something 'modern'. There are countless nuances to be found that could have been translated differently from the older (also Dutch) Bibles we have/had,
Cheers
