It makes all the difference theologically and historically. Back to my original point, the Bible is a document of the Catholic Church. Sure, other versions existed in history like that of the Gnostics but it wasn’t preserved or transcribed by the Vatican through the ages so disappeared from history. The Catholic Church has been around for 2,000 years. Of course, the Old Testament we got from the Judaism which already had a history going back to Abraham.
Catholics do believe the message of the Bible to be inerrant (without error) but not the literal stories or history. Many are really alegoreis not literal history. So maybe I should say anyone who believes the Bible is literally true will find many contradictions and have trouble with science. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, defined the first scupientific method and does not find evolution contradictory to the Bible nor teaches the world is only 6,000 years old as do many Bible based Protestant churches erroneously referred to here as historically Christian.
Look at each Apostle’s different accounts of the same event of a Baptism. In Mark 1:11 and Luke 3:22, God says, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” But in Matthew 3:17 God says, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” So which is it? Did God say, “You are my beloved son” or “This is my beloved son?”
To someone who believes the Bible is the literal truth of God, written by God, we have a contradiction. But to the very folks who assembled the various books and decided which would be included and which would not this a minor difference in memory of each author written long after the events occurred. Again, Catholics believe the full text of the Bible, studied as a whole, provide us the revealed truth of God but not again as a literal historical account especially when it comes to the Old Testament.
Take for example this blog. If you told me your girlfriend left you and you miss her so much your heart is beating 100 times a minute when you think of her. In another post you say you are in good health. Which is it? Terribly high blood pressure or good health? Well that depends on whether I understand you were not speaking literally but instead figuratively.
The schism in the Catholic Church began when Martin Luther born in 1483, a priest who wanted to marry a nun, decided interpreting the Bible was not best left to the experts but anyone could make his own interpretation. Thus we now have 40,000 Protestant faiths mostly all Bible based (exceptions are Mormons, Jahova Witness and others who added their own Scriptures) all arguing over true Christianity. Of course, corruption in the Catholic Church combined with the advent of the printing press made the Reformstion not only possible but to flourish eventually forcing the Catholic Church to begin translating the Bible into the lengua franca.
A wonderful book, by the way, on the beginning of Western thought going back long before Christ is Cahill’s book, “the Gift of the Jews.” He argues Abraham came out of the desert to form the first religion with a taught beginning and end to everything including the earth. Prior to Judaism, most world religion was cyclical and saw spiritual beings as coming and going like cycles in nature itself.