"Jews and Christians believe in The Bible"

Actually, I do not believe in the Bible Jews don't believe in the Bible. We don't read the Bible. Muslims read the Bible more than Jews do, actually, as a supplementary text to the Quran. Jews don't read the Bible at all

Also idek what "believe in" means? If you "believe in Santa" that means you think Santa is Real. Do you mean you believe the Contents of the Bible are "Real"? What does it mean for the contents of a book of fables and parables to be Real? I mean the stories Exist sure, yes.

The Bible is a Real Book, or, uh, collection of books. We have them in the library they are materially real books. Just like Ender's Game! That's a real book too. It's not a factual book but it's certainly a book

Jews have a whoooole bunch of religious texts. Around the third century B.C.E. we had accumulated 35 holy books! The Torah is the most important set of texts, the first five of the books. These texts are a mix of oral histories, fables, poetry, erotica, myths, and laws

The Torah is considered to be written by G-d. The Nevi'im books are considered to be written by prophets of G-d (people who have received divine messages, but were free to write it themselves).

The Ketuvim are just like, important books to us. Like, Song of Songs was written by King Solomon supposedly and he was an important guy in our history but it's not like, Divine Erotica. G-d didn't write that. No prophecies were involved. It's just an important cultural text

Anyway, in the third century B.C.E. Ptolemy II had these 35 books translated into Greek in order to be kept in the Library of Alexandria. Supposedly it was a very good translation for the time but it was still a translation and they even got the order of the books wrong

The order of the books is important because mixing Ketuvim in with Nevi'im mixes up the authorship. We don't consider the Book of Job (sefer iyov) to be a divine book. G-d didn't write it. No prophets wrote it. It's just poetry. But that gets confused when you change the order.

ANYWAY

Like, 600 something years later, the Catholic Church decided they needed to make a set canon of religious texts for their completely different religion. And they took 27 of their books, and stuck'em at the end of the old greek translation of our books from Alexandria

At this point, their books were books that were originally written in Greek, and translated into Latin. The greek translations of our books were also translate into Latin. And this became the Bible! (it was more complicated than this)

BUT HERE'S THE THING

WE HAD MORE BOOKS

Jews didn't STOP making religious texts after those 35 books had been added to the Library of Alexandria. Over the following 600 years we kept writing! and arguing! and writing! We wrote Midrash. We wrote the Mishnah! We wrote the Gemara! The whole dang Babylonia Talmud!

By the time "The Bible" was canonized, we had already written down the Mishnah; the "oral torah" at the time considered just as important as the written Torah. And we kept writing. The Gemara came over the next few centuries and by the 7th century C.E. we have the Talmud Bavli

The Talmud has 2,711 double sided folios. About two million words. The Bible has 611,000 words. The TaNaKh is just 470,470.

Jewish religious texts share 470,470 words in common with Christian religious texts, only when in a specific translation, AND DIFFERS BY 2,140,530 words

Jews continued to study our religious texts in their original languages, Hebrew & Aramaic, on and on and on. But Xtians kept translating and translating and translating. The Greek became Latin became all these other languages. the King James Bibles became the Standard for a while

The King James Bible, from the 17th century, like, it's like if you translated 2000 year old books using not even Google Translate but like, a person trying to be Google Translate with even less knowledge. It's so poorly translated y'all. They TRANSLATED "OX" AS "UNICORN"

and it's not just a bad translation it's also a translation with a motive. All of our books they rewrote to fit English Christian culture and Christian theology and to make things "fit" and "predict" Christian texts. They made Eve come out of Adam's Rib? To make her seem lesser?

It's like when the fansubs on the anime are written so that the fansubber's OTP appears to be canon.

It's like a 4Kids dub. Or the original dub of Cardcaptors where they tried to change the main character with heavy editing to market it to boys

It's like how they made Robotech by editing together three completely different anime and recutting it. or Samurai Pizza Cats. or Speed Racer. like yes they took the original source footage but they've made a completely new and different piece of media out of their "translation"

Except even those people did so with a better understanding of Japanese than the King James Bible people had of Hebrew, and you still see the original footage just with new audio; whereas you don't see any hebrew at all in the King James Bible it's ALL in English

and we Jews, we KNOW our books are translations when we read them in English, so we also read them in Hebrew for our interpretations. We double-check translations.

Christians take the literal words, in English, Literally, as though it was originally in English

The Bible has allllll sorts of theological interpretations made out of it based on translation decisions made through a game of telephone with ulterior motives.
"It was taboo"
becomes
"It is an abomination"
That's pretty different!!!!

Ultimately, when I see passages from "The Bible" whether it's from the "New Testament" sections or from the sections that are supposedly my own religions ""old"" testament, I don't recognize it! It doesn't sound like my books! It's not recognizable to me. It's a different book!

I don't believe in the Bible. I've never read the Bible. I don't intend to read the Bible any time soon. The Bible is not Jewish. There is nothing Jewish about the Bible. It's not our religious text and we don't believe in it!!!

This doesn't even get into the completely different understandings and ways we approach religious texts. We do not read the TaNaKh as a literal factual accounting of history or inarguable set of rules and morals. Christianity is about obedience and authority. Judaism is NOT

If you ever pick up a Jewish translation of Genesis, instead of reading it like it's telling you what to do and how to live and "what actually happened" instead consider reading it like a Jew. This is a story. Read it as a story. Read it like a novel with characters in it..

Do not assume that the narrator is reliable. Do not assume that this LORD character is inherently correct in the actions they take. Do not assume you are supposed to behave like the characters in this book.

What does the story come to mean to you? What is it explaining?

We derive completely different meanings from these stories than Xtians. G-d is WRONG many times in Bereshit and the other characters ARGUE WITH THEM and G-d ADMITS FAULT and even APOLOGIZES.

Even the most divine source of life can be wrong and can be argued with

That's Judaism

Abraham does the right thing by arguing with G-d about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and does the WRONG thing by not arguing when told to sacrifice his son. G-d stops him from actually doing it and then NEVER SPEAKS TO HIM EVER AGAIN

What message do you get from that?

So no. I don't believe in the Bible. We do not read from the same book. Not even CLOSE. Xtians have their own book and it's got some historical relationship to ours sure but it is fundamentally not the same book or set of texts.

Like honestly how can Xtians even PRETEND we read the same books when not ONE of their books tells you how long King Nebuchanezzar's foreskin was? Nor do any of their texts have rabbis overthrowing G-d as the decider of the laws on earth.

The Talmud is fucking wild and it's so much longer than the Bible and it's so fucking good and just as important a part of Judaism as the TaNaKh like no we do NOT have the same religious texts lmfao nothing in the Christian "new testament" can compare to the Talmud