Vatican allows Scrolls to change to Bible

The Times (U.K.) ^ | 09/11/2001 | RICHARD OWEN

[Brian Kopp DPM]

Not one of them changes the meaning of a single sentence. The big news of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that the translations that we already have are more accurate than anyone previously believed

This was my suspicion. Thanks for providing these facts. Unfortunately, the true story is never nearly as salacious as the "Vatican is destroying large portions of the scrolls because they don't fit theology" deceits.

[Chemnitz]

The Roman Catholic Church has accepted the liberal historical-critical method of interpreting the Bible for many years now. I think the encyclical came out decades ago.

In reality the Church of Rome invented modern Biblical criticism when it claimed the Bible was incomplete and difficult to understand. These claims erupted when the Roman party lost every debate based on the Scriptures.

Unless one is smoking mushrooms all day, the Dead Sea Scrolls only underline the amazing accuracy of the Scriptures. No other ancient document is so precise. The only reason we have so many "manuscript errors" is that we have so many manuscripts, versions, and translations. However, almost all variations are so minor that they are next to meaningless. The questionable verses are about one half of one percent of the entire text.

The Masoretes were extremely careful in their transmission of the Old Testament. The Dead Sea Scrolls showed that in 800 years the Masoretes had not changed anything really. I believe there is one word different in Isaiah. That may be "holy holy" instead of "holy, holy, holy." Not enough to make me an atheist.

I have known several men who specialized in the Dead Sea Scrolls. One received his doctorate at Harvard. The other man taught at Notre Dame. There is no conspiracy.

I find the constant publication of new translations laughable. The KJV has not been equaled. I concede that some need the newer versions of the KJV (New KJV or the Third Millennium KJV).

Rome has always grown by confusing people about the Bible. After all, the very Antichrist is clearly predicted in 2 Thessalonians 2. He will be in the temple (a leader in the Church) and will be worshiped as a god (infallible). It is better for Rome to keep people from reading 2 Thessalonians with understanding.

[FormerLib]

No, only some of the findings of the translators. Why, have you read them? In the original?

The simple fact is that doing a good translation of such ancient texts is very difficult and tedious work. Many opportunists have attempted to use the delay to represent all manner of odd tales.

Don't by into the conspiracy theory nonsense! If the translators discovered some major new revelation, what reasonable man would assume that it could have been silenced for so long?

[Silly]

The Vatican has been accused of keeping them secret for fear that they would undermine Christianity.

Without any specific knowledge of this, I would still venture to say that, if the Vatican has been keeping the scrolls secret, it is out of fear they might undermind Catholicism specifically, not Christianity in general. Just a hunch, nothing more.

[FormerLib]

>>>It was as though written by someone else.<<<

I guess we both know that it was written by someone who had to drop all pretense of historical accuracy in an attempt to support their truly bizarre imaginative ramblings!

[FormerLib]

It is my understanding that the New King James Version is more correct because the translators of that work had all of the original Greek translations to work with (the original translators sometimes had to rely on other, previous translations).

Yes, there has been some updating of the language, but nothing approaching some of that modernist, inclusivist nonsense that is breaking out. Anyway, stand the two versions against each other and you won't find one doctrinal change.

[A.J.Armitage]

I'm not a Catholic basher(I'm not Catholic, so obviously I don't agree with a lot of what Catholics, but it's not an obsession of mine), but I still think I'll stick with the Textus Receptus.

[doubtfullyhopefull]

I went to an exhibition of the Scrolls in New York about 8 years ago.

[Ben Ficklin]

In about 1995 my father came for a visit and had with him a copy of Thiering's Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls which he had checked out of his local library. During his stay I read the chapters and explored a few of the appendices. After he left I went to the Half Price Book Store and found Deception and a book on the excuvations at Ebla. I was hooked. In the next 3 years I read probably 150 books dealing with the scrolls, near east archeology, biblical history, the historical Jesus, etc, etc.

In 1998, after getting on the internet my reading was sharply curtailed although I still read some on the subject.

The only brawl I ever got into on Free Republic was in 1998 when I referred to the Pharisees and the Sadduces as political parties, which of course they were.

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

The KJV has not been equaled.

The Douay-Rheims Bible is the scrupulously faithful English translation of the Latin Vulgate which dates to St. Jerome and the fourth century A.D. St. Jerome had access to the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, which have since perished. The Latin Vulgate has been in existence for over 1500 years. A more accurate statement would be that the KJV has not equaled the Douay-Rheims.

[ET(end tyranny)]

The Masoretic texts isn't where the problem lies! lol

The problem is when the Aramaic and the Hebrew texts are translated into Greek! Some mistranslations may be accidental, but some are purely deliberate. A deliberate one:

Isaiah 7:14 from the Tanakh (Jewish Bible from the Hebrew text)

Assuredly, my Lord will give you a sign of His own accord! Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel.

Matthew 1:23
23 Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

How did we go from “Young Woman” in the Old Testament to “Virgin” in the New Testament in quoting the same verse?

The word "HaAlmah" (which is in the Hebrew text) means "the young woman", while the word for "virgin" is "Bethulah."

The Hebrew word “HaAlmah” was purposefully mistranslated by the Essenes of Alexandria, Egypt, as “Bethulah” in the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek.

According to the King James Version (KJV) the verses says: "...Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son and call his name Immanuel." Translators hotly debate the use of the word "virgin" which came from the Hebrew word "almah." Hebraic scholars say "almah" means a "young woman" not a virgin. They further contend that the real Hebrew word for virgin is "bethulah." They refer to Gen. 24:43 and Ex. 2:8 which show "almah" means a maid, not virgin.

Who knows Hebrew better, the Hebrews or the Christians? The Hebrews say in their Masoretic text that "almah" should be translated as the young woman, not virgin.

Some scholars further allege that "shall conceive" should have been translated as "is with" child which is in the present tense and shows the prophecy pertains to a woman existing in Isaiah's time.

Other critics of Christianity's claim note that "shall conceive" was translated from "harah" which actually means “has Conceived." They say "harah" (conceived) is the Hebrew perfect tense, which represents past completed action in English.

The Jews, contrary to false tradition, did not translate the Prophets or the Writings into Greek. The Rabbis only translated the Torah. This means that Alexandrian Jews or non-Jews translated the rest of the Jewish Scriptures into Greek much later and the Rabbis from Palestine had nothing to do with it. This explains why pagan traditions crept into the text and the translation.

The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures chose another word in place of “almah-young woman” which conveyed a completely different idea... ”parthenos-virgin.”

71 Rabbis translated the Torah; yet it was not they who translated the sefer naviim (book of prophets)! It was the result of Essene (proto-Christians) authors who translated sefer naviim from Hebrew into the language of the pagans. When the Christian bible was translated to Latin, the mistake was intentionally kept in, even though the original Hebrew text was still available!

Not that it matters, because this isn't even a Messianic prophecy!

Jesus was never referred to as Immanuel in the New Testament, is never called Immanuel except by those who do so in order to fulfill the prophecy, and according to Luke 1:31 was to be called Jesus, not Immanuel.

[kaylar]

Now, now...I said I was giving the authors' opinions, not that I necessarily agreed with them. It's been awhile since I read the book, but I do recall one thing : If the documents are what they say, and the Vatican is burning them...where and how did they get ahold of them , translate them, and read them?

Actually, Spong is a much worse religious writer than are these two. "Bishop" Spong is the guy who "proved" that St Paul was a homosexual.

[Chemnitz]

That's funny. I'm sure dozens of Roman Catholic priests agree with you.

[DonQ]

The Vatican itself has virtually no ability to keep the Scrolls secret, because the Vatican never possessed them. At first they were in the custody of the Jordanian govt, but when Israel took the West Bank in 1967 it also got possession of nearly all the Dead Sea Scrolls. The text of the Scrolls was, for a while, kept under wraps by the consortium of scholars (virtually none of them Jewish) running the formerly-Jordanian scroll institute but about 6 or 7 years ago an insurgent group of scholars published a sort-of-complete-text of the scrolls by reverse engineering a concordance which the institute had published years ago, and the result was that the scrolls themselves were made accessible.

I am not the only one who has doubts that the scrolls are particularly earth-shaking for purposes of "correcting" the text of the Bible. Altho the oldest manuscripts yet found, they were the work of an heretical group, probably copied from inferior manuscripts and recopied with something less than the very careful techniques used by the (later) massoretes.

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

What's really funny is the "unequaled" KJV is a Johnny-come-lately finally arriving in 1611. That's only ~1200 years after the Latin Vulgate. Remakes always surpass the original? Hardly.

[malakhi]

The author claims that the Vatican is destroying huge parts of the scrolls because they supposedly show that the earliest Christians, those in Jerusalem who continued to pray in the synagogue and who followed Jesus' brothers as leaders of their community, hated St Paul and regarded his views as heretical, blasphemous, and satanic.

This is not news. Do a google search on "Ebionites". There is even an article about them in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

[malakhi]

when I referred to the Pharisees and the Sadduces as political parties, which of course they were.

Well, yes, but there were also substantive theological differences. I don't think one could completely separate the political from the religious.

[malakhi]

Kudos for your #31. I agree with you completely.

[JHavard]

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.

Now that's scary, we all know how expert the RS's are with forging documents, and now their going to rewrite the Bible?

Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review in Washington and author of Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, said that “unbiased Catholic experts”

Now there is the best example of an Oxymoron I have ever heard of.

I can't wait to see what developes here, thank you Pokey78,very interesting, butt stupiddt.

[Doctor Stochastic]

And it agrees with what I've read of biblical history.