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.
Then we also have the Church of Rome deliberately mistranslating the First Gospel of Genesis 3:15 to make it appear that Mary would tread on Satan's head. Even when it was acknowledged that this translation was wrong, the Church of Rome continued to use the false exegesis.
The list of distorted passages is quite long. In contrast, the KJV remains a model of clarity and precision.
In Acts, you'll read that James the Just was the head of the Jerusalem Church, not Paul. And they (James and the Apostles) did consider Paul a liar, and they felt that he was apostate because of saying that the Law was dead. I happen to think they are right and that the great apostasy is a falling away from the Law, and NOT a falling away from the church as some would have us believe. jmo
I agree it's the most beautifully-written version, but not infallible. I read KJV most of all, but it has problems here and there. For instance, it says God "tempted" Abraham to sacrifice his son. Does God tempt? I suspect that is better translated "tested", as my KJV study bible says.
Another example is Matthew 17:21 "However this kind (of faith) goeth not out but by prayer and fasting." Some scholars remove this verse completely, with a footnote, since it supposedly isn't in the oldest available texts. Makes sense to me, not that prayer and fasting isn't a good thing, but I don't think Jesus or the early disciples of Acts necessarily had to pray and fast right before they did a miracle. I'm sure prayer and fasting was part of their normal lifestyle though, I know it's good for you.
It's all hair-splitting anyway, sometimes I think NIV may be the most accurate, even though the translators readily admit they know there must be flaws. Things get lost in translation over 4000 years. Does it really matter if Jesus was born to a virgin or just a "young girl"? With the words in Revelation about the true church being the bride, and Christ the head, I suspect Mary needed to be a virgin to allow Christ in the flesh to grow inside her, but I don't know that for certain. I had a problem with the catholic "Holy Mary, mother of God" prayer. Yet Elizabeth refers to her as "the mother of our Lord". I suspect yes, in context of Jesus the flesh, after reading Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1. A human cannot be the mother of a Being that existed long before humans existed.
Conflict among the churches is all so quibbling though. I see a few basic questions: Who is Jesus? And, what must I do to be saved? Who wants to deny this?
The funny thing is, this can be said of nearly every man-made attempt to transmit biblical texts, yet you have entire churches built up on the notion of "inerrancy" of the Bible.
What a laugh.
Another issue is the number of verses removed from the NT by the HIV and similar translations. That's too long to write about here, but it is a major theft.
Stick to the KJV family of translations. It does matter whether we read the pure Word of God or an adulterated Word of God.
The KJV was based on printed editions - not manuscripts - issed in the 90 years after Gutenburg. These editions were worked up without virtually no grasp of bibliographic or paleographic science simply by using whatever handwritten copies the editors could get their hands on ... these were mss worked up in monasteries and, judging from the fact that they were made available to the editors, might have been the less esteemed manuscripts that the monasteries thought they could spare.
With reference to the KJV of the New Testament, there were approximately a hundred printed editions of the Greek NT published before the KJV was issued, and we can suppose perhaps half those editions were available to the KJV translators. Scrivener supposed that they were mostly using Beza's edition, which was one of the few published in England, but Scrivener found that the KJV text departed from the Beza Greek text in several hundred places following one or another of perhaps twenty pre-KJV Greek editions. Scrivener also identified the manuscripts underlying approximately twenty of the pre-KJV editions -- a cumulative total of about 120 mss, most of them fragmentary and nearly all of them written after the Crusades. These pre-KJV editions are commonly classed as the "Textus Receptus" editions, based on an expression used shortly after the KJV was issued which was roughly equivalent to "best seller" (and NOT that the text was "received directly from the apostles"); this is not the same as the Majority or Byzantine family of manuscripts. It is worth noting that no Greek edition and no Greek manuscript exactly corresponds to the KJV text; there are small differences between any edition or ms and the KJV text.
Additionally, in 1611, very little was known of the Greek dialect of the New Testament. The grammar and vocabulary differ significantly from the Greek of Homer or Aristotle or Plutarch. In fact, until around 1880, the dialect of the Greek NT was often called "Holy Ghost Greek" on the supposition that, somehow, this dialect was invented (by God) and used ONLY in the New Testament; whenever it was unclear to translators (which was often) guesses were made on the basis of Homeric or other dialects ... or, more often, the (erroneous) assumption that the Latin of Jerome was an accurate and knowledgeable rendering of the obscure Greek. About 1880 a wealth of papyri dating back to the first century was found in Egypt, business and personal letters and the like, in the same dialect and seeing all that material made it possible to correct some misunderstandings of Elizabethan translators.
By the same token, the translators were at a distinct disadvantage with the Hebrew Old Testament. The best Hebrew Bible of that period, the Second Rabbinic Bible of 1525 was NOT the edition that underlies the KJV (we know this because the KJV contains verses that were omitted from that edition) and they most likely were using the OT text from the Complutensian Polyglot which had the advantage of a Latin running translation even though its Hebrew text was "corrected" by reference to the Vulgate. There hadn't been any Jews in England for about 350 years, so the KJV translators had learned their Hebrew third and fourth hand with virtually nothing to practice on except comparing the comparatively few (and primitive) printed Hebrew Bibles with the Latin version. Again there are imperfect translations.
No single translation is perfect but, although this may seem odd, I think very highly of the Today's English Version (Good News) done by Robert Bratcher, et al., from the best scholarly editions of the Old Testament and New Testament. Although the English is not elegant, it is clear and it is an accurate translation.
Wescott and Hort changed almost everyone's attitude about Biblical manuscripts in the late 19th century when they published their massive work on the subject. From then on everyone with a divinity degree was an expert on whether a verse "belonged" in the New Testament or not. The Nestle text is the result of five men voting on everything. A 3-2 vote leaves a verse in or kicks it out. Someone counted 5,000 changes in recent editions.
Modernists are in love with two codices - Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Both have no history. No clear origin. These two became the new pope for what should be in the New Testament even though they do not agree with each other.
The Church of Rome has constantly promoted confusion about the clear message of the Bible. The promiscuous production of ever-changing modern translations adds to this confusion. Hardly anyone knows a Biblical verse by heart now. Once we all learned from the same translation. The KJV is not perfect but it is better than all the "improved" versions.
Some of this reads like old news
Stop yourself before you go off the deep end. As a reader of NIV, NASB, KJV, NKJV, Living Bible, and more, I find often I know verses that I didn't even think I knew. And the diversity of translations -- several different ways of stating the same truth -- makes it easier, not harder, to remember a verse or a passage, as well as to realize insights into the meaning of that verse or passage.
Wasn't it Edmund Wilson who was among those who loudly proclaimed rgR the Scrollls would debunk Christianity
I did not trash any modern translations. I simply observed that they did a bad job. A bad translation is really a commentary, full of interpretation. For instance, the feminist Bibles do not want Jesus to be a male or even the "Son" of God. This adulteration began with the RSV translating Isaiah 7:14 as "a young woman will conceive."
The NIV and TEV are ideal for people with limited reading skills.
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