Watching Bill Nye the other night debate Ken Ham was great. But he kept referencing that the Ken Ham model of creation is dependent on the countless - er - NUMEROUS retranslations that have occurred. My questions is: How many scribes played Biblical telephone and what could have or is verifiably lost due to the translations?
The answer: not many, and not much.
Various sects have their own bible preferences, of course, but the the best translation from an academic point of view is currently the NRSV. This edition was created from the Greek and/or Hebrew text, and we have copies of (almost?) all of these at least from the 3rd century. While any manuscript tradition will show some variation due to scribal error, interpolation, etc, modern scholarly techniques for creating a critical edition, that is, an edition which shows the most probable original text with major variations, are highly advanced. Thus, the Greek and Hebrew from which the NRSV is translated is considered to be highly accurate.
While the NRSV was translated to English by competent scholars, translation will always be an act of interpretation. For example, the NRSV translators decided to represent the Greek word ecclesÃa as "Church", a meaning it would not have had for the actual authors of the New Testament, for whom it meant "community."
Most of these translator judgments are, however, relatively minor and only of interest with respect to intricate points of theology, and not of any practical consequence for most believers.
So, while I like Bill an awful lot, his point doesn't really stand up.
The textual basis of the Bible is fairly stable, current critical editions are the work of sifting through hundreds of texts, and the amount of overall variation is relatively minor, and the point of meaning up for grabs in textual variations is also relatively minor (there's only so much you can make of a difference between 'Jesus Christ' and 'Christ Jesus' in a verse, for instance).
The idea of numerous retranslations is a bit misleading. I don't know the context of the comment, but all major modern English translations are based on a translation of our critical editions of the Greek and Hebrew.
The idea of biblical inerrancy falls apart under scrutiny, if you believe that the bible is basically the inspired word of god copied down by a human agent. The problem is that we don't have those original words. We have copies of those words, as they were transmitted orally and copied by hand hundreds of times before the existence of the printing press. In some cases those differences are unimportant, and in some cases they are not.
You may want to pick up "Misquoting Jesus" a book by Bart Ehrman, a biblical scholar (and atheist) at UNC Chapel Hill that spends several hundred pages laying out the case that I've tried to summarize. He's also widely available on youtube and I find him to be an engaging speaker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfheSAcCsrE