Posted on 08/12/2011 9:04:39 AM PDT by flowerplough
A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: The sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today.
An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened.
Scholars in this out-of-the-way corner of the Hebrew University campus have been quietly at work for 53 years on one of the most ambitious projects attempted in biblical studies — publishing the authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, and tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries and millennia.
And it has evolved, despite deeply held beliefs to the contrary.
For many Jews and Christians, religion dictates that the words of the Bible in the original Hebrew are divine, unaltered and unalterable.
For Orthodox Jews, the accuracy is considered so inviolable that if a synagogue's Torah scroll is found to have a minute error in a single letter, the entire scroll is unusable.
But the ongoing work of the academic detectives of the Bible Project, as their undertaking is known, shows that this text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Um, THE BIBLE IS NOT THE ROOT OF ISLAM.
Cool
Correct the Holy Spirit?
Sounds like more persecution to me!
Also should get into that little Thou shal not kill vs murder thingy.
The Masoretic (official) text of the Hebrew Old Testament was assembled centuries after the documents were first written. Textual criticism is not only allowable, it’s an imperative.
Islamic belief follows through Abraham then leads through Ishmael rather than Isaac.
old testament not new.
New testament Greek is still being used to this day so what are they “correcting”?
“Um, THE BIBLE IS NOT THE ROOT OF ISLAM.”
Some believe that both the new and old testaments were plagiarized by Mohahahamed along with some texts written in Sanskrit when HE wrote the koran.
Mohammed copied much of the early Koran from the Torah.
Later twisted it to something else.
haSatan always uses partial truth.
Yes, Abraham is both the Father of Christianity and Islam.Christianity evolved into a peace and love religion where Islam still does the eye for an eye and other ancient rules of law.
According to the History Channel , everything in the Bible can be explained by Aliens who came here and did all those miracles.
Don’t blame God’s Law for Islam. They made up their own.
If God has not maintained His Word true and accurate throughout all the ages then man has no way of knowing what is true and what is false. Therefore man has no shot at salvation. Therefore there can be no omnipotent and omniscient God, and by extrapolation no basis for ethics, morality, or even definitions of good and evil. That means we should all live strictly for as much carnal pleasure as fast as we can since there is nothing after death.
I think I’ll stick to my antiquated believes, thank you.
The Bible knows nothing about Islam. Islam came 500 years after Christ died; a full 200+ years after the Canon was closed. Islam picks and chooses from the Bible, forming a systematic theology that is inconsistent, not resembling Judaism or Christianity.
Christianity didn’t “evolve”. God shifted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which was the plan all along (Ephesians) before the foundation of the world; bringing Jew and gentile into the Kingdom as adopted sons in one body: the church.
The Hebrew text has “murder”. It was a translation fault into English to the inaccurate “kill”. Not all English bibles have the mistranslation, many have “murder” or “kill without just cause”.
As did the king james version of the bible.The God of Abraham is the same for christians, jews and muslims.Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, was an Arab slave.Ishmael was a half brother to Isaac. Ishmael and mother was sent packing after Sarah got jealous and told Abraham they had to go.This is where the split comes between muslims and christians.
The Masoretic (Hebrew) text is post-Christian, and NOT the basis of the Christian faith. The Dead Sea Scrolls, created up to centuries before Christ, are far older than the Masoretic text, and are far closer to the Greek texts.
This is not idle controversy. The Masoretic text describes the Messiah as being born from an unmarried woman (”Alma,” as transliterated from Hebrew). The Greek text says he will be born of a virgin (”parthenos”). Thus, the Masoretic text suggests that the Messiah would be born of fornication, whereas the Greek text suggests he would be born of a distinct, miraculous act of divine creation.
According to legend, the Greek text was created by a miracle: 72 scholars all were inspired by the Holy Spirit to create identical translations from a Hebrew source document, despite being isolated in individual cells. This is “legend” not because it isn’t necessarily true, but because it’s irrelevant: whether due to a one-time miraculous inspiration, or a continual gift of the Holy Spirit, the Greek text is divine truth.
In contrast, the Masoretic text is the creation of people who despite their inspirationally passionate love for God were blinded temporarily from the truth of Christ that they may be, collectively, an example of Isaiah’s suffering servant. Their text, therefore, was written outside the protection of the Holy Spirit, and their motivation included disproving the notion of the divinity of Christ. Even though Protestants have followed the Hebrew in editing out certain books, they too have followed the early Christian church in rejecting key doctrinally problematic Hebrew translations.
(After the death of Christ, the Jews rejected the deuterocanonical books, which Protestants label “apocryphal” because they created the expectation of an imminent Messiah, which Christians saw fulfilled in Christ. Many had historically believed that they were also rejected because they were composed in Greek, not Hebrew, but the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed the Hebrew, pre-Christian origins of six of the seven deuterocanonical books. Many others believe that the Hebrews considered them as less authoritative than “the Prophets” and “the Law,” but the Tanakh, in fact, includes other books from this class of books, the Khetuvim, which includes Proverbs, Job, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, etc.)
They do use all of the old testament stories though.....
I also read that Mohammed's sources were full of Gnostic heresies.
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