The fact that you are twisting yourself in knots trying to read the True Meaning (read: not embarrassingly inconsistent and out of date meaning) is perhaps a sign that there isn’t a True Meaning. Maybe the text is exactly as it appears on the surface (minus a few literary flourishes, of course). Maybe it, along with the Quran, the Vedas, the Sutras, etc were all simply written by people putting their own ideas down with no divine inspiration.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through my very painful deconversion process, it’s that if a theory takes a lot of work, a lot of reading into, a lot of explanation, and a lot of revision/backtracking to understand, it’s probably false.

Now, as to your assertion that we can find the original text easier when we have more data to work with – that’s not strictly untrue (though I fail to see how it is relevant). However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a great deal of debate in the matter. And even if we ended up with the absolute original version, that still wouldn’t tell us what the “true meaning of God’s written Word” is because if God guided the hands that wrote the NT, why are there so many fundamental theological inconsistencies between the books?

These differences are not just scribal errors. These are fundamental differences in the brand of Christianity practised in the various communities that wrote books later included in the Canon. If all these books are supposedly written with the guiding hand of God, the only conclusion one could draw (that maintains belief in the idea that there is a God and that he did author the Bible) is that God has a different theology in mind for each community. The logical end of this conclusion is that the NT is completely irrelevant because these communities are nothing like us and we would therefore need a modern revelation of our own – one for each modern community.

Or you can just do what Christians have done for two thousand years – don’t bother trying to have it all make sense and just pick and choose which bits you feel are “authentic,” ignore the rest or dismiss it as “metaphorical,” and all the while proclaim that the Bible is the inherent word of God.

Now, I will tell you what I personally did when I read the NT for the first time and realized that the various books CANNOT be reconciled. My first step was to say that the NT was written entirely by men who simply felt God in their hearts and tried to capture that through their own unique lenses. The NT is therefore completely irrelevant except as a historical curiosity. Instead, I had to look inside myself and listen to what God was telling me.

So I listened, and I listened. Then I listened some more. Then I realized that there was no one talking except my own mind, my own consciousness, my own feelings, and my own rationality. If God is doesn’t write and if God is mute, how do I know that he listens and acts? Well, I don’t see any acts, so that leaves listening. If all God does is listen, of what use is he? What is the point of struggling to reconcile so many different beliefs around the world, putting myself through the great physical and mental pain I now recognize to have been cognitive dissonance, in the name of a mute and impotent so-called deity. So I dumped him.

Here’s an example:
Say I hand-write a letter and send it to my friend. At the same time I write myself a copy of the letter for my records. My letter arrives at my friend’s house, but my own copy is destroyed when I spill some ink on it.

To see what I wrote, I can call my friend and have him or her tell me what I wrote. If he or she loses that copy of the letter, however, it’s gone.

Say I hand-write the same letter and send it to my friend, but also make and send out nine other copies to nine other friends. If my letter is destroyed, I now have a total of ten people I can contact to restructure my original letter.

Point #1: The more manuscripts (copies) you have of my letter, the more likely you will be able to reconstruct the original (even if there is no one perfect copy remaining).

Point #2: Had you considered that the early (first century) Christian’s might have done something similar with the early epistles?

Point #3: There are 5500+ Greek manuscripts of the NT available, 10000+ of the Latin NT available, PLUS all the other languages in which the NT was translated. On top of that(!), have you ever quoted a book or movie in a note to a friend? That happened too in the old days!

Point #4: I’ll be the first to say that their are apparent contradictions in the Bible that a Bible student will need to work through (which is why BE’s site is so great!) to get the true meaning of God’s written Word in some cases.

How you define the beginning of Catholicism?
A series of edicts on heresy, issues several hundred years after the death of Jesus, has been cited as proof that Catholics killed off all opposing sects. I’m not buying it. Sure, there were episodes of persecution, but there were outbreaks of heresy based on gnosticism all through the middle ages, and we still have Copts, Kurds, and Nestorians today.