Posted on 09/10/2001 5:06:35 PM PDT by Pokey78
THE Vatican is to abandon decades of secrecy and obstruction to allow changes in the Bible based on revelations in the Dead Sea Scrolls, more than half a century after they were discovered. The extent of the changes is expected to be disclosed this month, but the revised version of the New Jerusalem Bible will take five years to complete.The scrolls have been the subject of controversy between Jewish and Roman Catholic scholars since they were found in caves at Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in 1947. The Vatican has been accused of keeping them secret for fear that they would undermine Christianity. In The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, two British authors, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, accused the Vatican of suppressing the scrolls because they contained material at odds with accepted Christian belief. The Jerusalem Bible, which was first published in French in 1956, appeared in English ten years later. The writer J. R .R. Tolkien was one of the translators. It is the official text for use in Roman Catholic liturgy and revisions are subject to approval by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Pope’s keeper of doctrine. Father Gianluigi Boschi, a Dominican theologian at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome and a leading expert on the scrolls, said the recent growth in scroll scholarship and the publication of previously inaccessible scrolls meant that some of the changes would be radical. He is to address a conference on the changes this month. Father Boschi said that the project would link “the whole picture of the origins of Christianity” to the findings at Qumran. He declined to say which passages would be modified, but predicted that the changes would be “surprising and innovative”. It was time to end to “the extraordinary scenarios put about by conspiracy theorists who claim that the Vatican has manoeuvred to hide the truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Several of the intact scrolls, preserved in terracotta jars at Qumran by an ascetic sect called the Essenes, are now kept at the purpose-built Israeli Shrine of the Book. Many of the other texts and tens of thousands of scroll fragments were bought with the aid of Vatican funds and have been under the control of Dominican scholars at the Ecole Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem since the 1950s. The failure to publish more than a fraction of the Ecole Biblique scrolls led the Oxford biblical scholar Geza Vermes to call it “the academic scandal of the 20th century”. Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review in Washington and author of Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, said that “unbiased Catholic experts” were now in the forefront of scroll scholarship. He said it was hard to imagine what the scrolls could contain that could undermine Christianity. Minor adjustments have already been made to the Jerusalem Bible in the light of the two scrolls versions of the Book of Isaiah.
The Catholic bashers and literalists will be here soon in full force.
I know in the U.S., it's the NAB, and some other translation in Canada.
I prefer the New English Bible myself, though the New American Bible is the preferred English translation.
Er, what am I missing here? I was not aware that "the scrolls" had been spirited away. In fact, large portions of them--with best-case translations--are available on CD-ROM, etc.
Couldn't be another Internet legend--COULD IT!?!?!
You know, fairness and all that. One can dance to Thunder:Perfect Mind.
The big news of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that the translations that we already have are more accurate than anyone previously believed. It will be the revisionists who'll be taking their lumps on this one so expect a lot of hype in the opposite direction. Their master just loves lies, you know!
If the Masons were half of what Baigent claimed they were, they'd have killed him off by now.
And the Apostles refered to Paul as the 'Spouter of Lies'.
But I don't expect the church to allow THAT in! lol
Considering the author's long track record for publishing his own imaginative wanderings and virulently anti-Christian fictions as fact, you might as well contact the DNC for the 'facts' on the Florida Presidental Election of 2000!
No, the Church won't allow much fiction into the mix. LOLouder!
Right on! Baigent, Lee and Lincoln wrote Holy Blood Holy Grail. The first 2/3 of the book was actually an excellent history of those times in Europe, but the closing 1/3, which contained their ridiculous conclusions, was so far off base as so illogical and unrelated to the first 2/3 as to be an embarrassment to the reader. It was as though written by someone else.
I journeyed to Renne Le Chateau after reading the book. Fascinating.
Let's see, now...BAR is pretty anti-Catholic, and one of the reasons why I cancelled my subscription some time ago. And I'd be willing to bet that those "unbiased Catholic experts" are the very same "Catholics" who have been participating in the Jesus Seminar, of notorious memory. Somehow, I don't think this little exercise is going to make the waves these guys were hoping it would. The whole thing probably boils down to something like this: HO, as in "HO!" HUM, as in "HUM!"
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