When I fire arrows at the statue they do not go all the way. they drop on the stairs or at the base of the statue. I tried a console command to get past this and my log says that I opened the stairs but they did not open but the statues came to life and attacked me.

Stand over the stairs and type 'setpos x/y/z' and teleport urself thru the floor.

Are you sure you are pulling the bow back all the way? Are you using a mod like Duke Patrick's Combat Archery that would make the flightpath different?

stupid question, but have you tried shooting it waaaay above the statue so it compensates for it descending? I rarely use bows in oblivion so I'm not entirely sure if this works or not.

Anyway since you're on PC you can just open the console, toggle collision and walk across in the air to where you're supposed to go, then toggle the collision again. (I think the command is 'tcl', it's been a while since I had the PC version though so you might want to check.)

Sounds like you've already advanced the quest stage so that should be all fine.

Thanks, that was it! I was not waiting to draw the bow all the way back.