Joel Osteen Releases New Edition Of Bible With All Words Redacted

HOUSTON, TX — Houston pastor Joel Osteen has released an exciting new study Bible where he has carefully gone through and redacted every single word of the text: The Redacted Study Bible.

Osteen is calling the new edition of the Bible "the most transparent study Bible in history" and claims the redactions were made for your safety, comfort, health, and wealth. The pastor has personally gone through the Scriptures and blacked out every verse that made him feel uncomfortable, which is, well, all of them.

For example, Revelation 20:15 in the ESV says, "And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire." Osteen's version? "███ ██ ████████ ████ ███ ███ █████ ███████ █████ ████ ██ ████, ██ ███ ██████ ████ ███ ████ ██ ████." The pastor claims this version "goes down much easier."

"This Bible is much more encouraging," Osteen said in a YouTube video promoting the new edition of the Scriptures. "No longer do you have to worry about being confronted with your sin, God's wrath, or hell. You can finally live victoriously in the abundant life God has promised each one of us!"

At publishing time, sources had confirmed that Osteen had teased an update to The Redacted Study Bible where he's gone ahead and de-classified the words "favor", "victory", "riches", and "pride."

You mean those books which contain error and historical inaccuracies?

The ones the Jews never accepted as Divinely Inspired Scripture to begin with?

I guess you have no problem with Scripture containing error then, do you?

Luther’s canon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther%27s_canon

“Luther’s canon is the biblical canon attributed to Martin Luther, which has influenced Protestants since the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. While the Lutheran Confessions specifically did not define a canon, it is widely regarded as the canon of the Lutheran Church. It differs from the 1546 Roman Catholic canon of the Council of Trent in that it rejects the deuterocanonical books and questions the seven New Testament books, called “Luther’s Antilegomena”,[1] four of which are still ordered last in German-language Luther Bibles to this day.”

“Luther included the deuterocanonical books in his translation of the German Bible, but he did relocate them to after the Old Testament, calling them “Apocrypha, that are books which are not considered equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.”[4]”

FWIW, Luther’s Bible was completed in 1534 but it wasn’t until a decade later that the Catholic church formalized ITS canon.

“Some Catholic sources state and certain historians contend that until the definition of the Council of Trent issued on April 8, 1546, the Roman Catholic Church had not yet dogmatically defined the contents of the biblical canon for Catholics and thus settled the matter.”

So now you have been corrected and can stop spreading error about Protestantism.

So Protestants redacted the version of the Old Testament that Jesus and the Apostles read and quoted,

There is not a single quote by Jesus or his apostles from the apocrypha. There are oblique allusions, but no direct quotations. These apocryphal books were not referred to by any of the New Testament writers as authoritative scripture.

The fact that they existed in the Septuagint was incidental. They were not considered authoritative scriptures by the first century Christians who wrote the New Testament. And by the third century, Jews had also rejected them as scripture for other reasons. Thus, two groups, mutually opposed, had both rejected these, and the Reformers made a good call.

In many cases, these apocryphal books directly contradict both OT and NT or both teachings, another good reason to reject them.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.