The Bible 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
Saturday, 01 April 2006
Abstract
Inspiration
The Bible comprises a Hebrew portion—the Old Testament, called by the Jews, the scriptures—and a Christian portion—the New Testament—both of which are accepted by Christians as inspired, it being popularly supposed that the New Testament contains the fulfilment of the prophecies of the Old.
The most important theme of the Old Testament is that of the creation and the fall of man, and the leading topic of the New is the career of the Christian saviour. In the creation stories of the Old Testament, the first man, Adam, disobeyed God, who cursed him and his offspring in His anger, introducing sin into the world—called original sin. To lift the curse, that He Himself placed on mankind, God had to manifest himself on earth in His aspect of the Son and be sacrificed, thereby propitiating the sin committed at the beginning of human history—though not everyone’s but only those who believe unquestioningly the fancies of the Christians. Christians have to hang on to these interesting but primitive Jewish legends to justify their God’s sacrifice, which otherwise is inexplicable. To do so they assert that the whole of the bible is the infallible or, at least, the inspired word of God.
Yet, the idea that the bible is inspired by an almighty god does not bear examination. How can any writing claim to be the infallible word of God and yet contain false statements and be self-contradictory, yet the bible suffers both these errors of fallibility. When errors occur in any one particular, they cannot be discounted elsewhere and everything must be verified. Then our confidence has evaporated and the whole theory of inspiration is vitiated. The bible not only makes mistakes in matters of Nature but it puts forward, in the first and second chapters of Genesis, two contradictory accounts of the creation which disagree in nearly every detail. The more one reads the bible critically, the more convinced one is of its lack of authority and educational value. To be divinely inspired, the reader had a right to be sure it was unimpeachable in history and logic, so that no doubt could have arisen.
Every sane person today accepts the theory of Copernicus that the sun is the centre of our planetary system. But until only a few hundred years ago Christianity taught that the earth was the centre of our system of planets, and that the sun rose and set daily over it. The Catholic Church, by order of its “Congregation of the Holy Office” (Inquisition), burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 for supporting the Copernican theory, the reason being that it was “contrary to the bible” and for suggesting that the bible did not contain the whole of science. In 1616, Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition, and silenced by threats. At the age of seventy, he wrote a book in which he proved the truth of the Copernican theory. Clerics made him kneel and swear with his hands on the gospels that the earth did not move round the sun, and that he would never again spread this “damnable heresy”. The church made the mistake of condemning and even murdering men who proposed what is now known to be true. In so doing it asserted that the Copernican theory ran counter to the science of the bible. In short the bible is wrong! Plainly, in this instant, it was not inspired.
If we are born tainted with original sin and it is removable, any just god would have given us all unequivocal instructions on its removal, instructions so clear that defiance of them would be the wilful act of those who chose a sinful life. Instead, we have stories of miracles performed where they were not needed and not performed where they would have helped. If a miracle was worked for the trifle of providing wine for a wedding, surely we could expect a miracle which would clearly delineate the path of salvation for people innocent of the sin of Adam. We do not get one, and are returned to the arbitrary salvation offered by Paul—those are saved who believe! Thus we are left to gamble on the mode of our redemption from a sin which we did not commit, but might yet incur the penalty for.
Books once included in the sacred collections of the early churches are now cast into outer darkness. Is this God’s doing? The divine message has been inscribed on old skins from which Pagan writings had been partly erased so that the “Word of God” could be written on them by Christian pens. If Paganism was wrong, did God allow mankind to be misled? If it was all that wrong, why is much of it adapted for use in Christianity and not treated with disgust? None of this reflects divine behaviour, unless God is as indecisive and sadistic as men. All of it cries out that one set of priests seeking power over people’s destinies have succeeded in ousting an earlier group.
Look at the attitude which God adopts towards the human race which he created! On the day of vengeance Jesus would return on clouds of glory and supervise the judgement of God. Judgement! Vengeance! A revengeful God will administer justice upon the hapless creatures because of the guilt of Adam and Eve. Why? God could have mercifully prevented the birth of any of us, we are told, to save us this punishment. It is just as well that His watch is not too accurate because Jesus promised the day of vengeance would dawn before some of his followers tasted death. Two thousand years later we still wait, but two billion Christians seem happy that God has a faulty timepiece.
Origin
Pre-“exilic” Jews did not have their bibles as Christians now have. In the reign of Josiah, about 100 years before the captivity, the bible suggests there was only one copy of the Law of Moses in the whole of Judah. It was neither read nor even consulted by them, for when Hilkiah the priest accidentally found a copy in a the builder’s rubbish of the temple (2 Kings 22:8), it was announced as a wonderful discovery, but it was afterwards destroyed by fire. All that the Jews knew about Moses and his religion they learnt from hearsay, just as the Greeks and Romans knew about their mythology.
It was a system practised by their priests. Ezra, in the apocryphal 2 Esdras 14, was the only man who knew the books of the law by heart. After the mythical “return from captivity” in Babylon, he had to retire to a field for forty days to dictate the five books of Moses and other books totalling over 200, aided by five scribes and by drinking a cup of some strong liquor, of the substance of water and the colour of fire! Sounds like whiskey. Moses and Joshua could not have been the authors of the books attributed to them, for they describe their own deaths. Here it is being admitted that the books of the scriptures were re-written by the Persian colonists sent from Babylon, Ezra being the head of a priestly school, or even a Persian ministry.
When the literate class of Jews were taken away by the Babylonian conquerors, the reamining Jews must have lost much of any tradition they had peculiar to themselves, as opposed to Canaanites generally. The ones left behind were poor and illiterate and were called the Am ha Eretz and the Samarians by the sophisticated colonists. Ezra must have been born in in Babylon or Persia and he supervised the setting up of a “restored” Judaism meant to suit the Persian rulers. The colonists had the duty of setting up a temple as significant for the nations of Syria and the Levant as the Tower of Babel was to the Eastern Semites, a Persian Fort Knox, and a sinecure for themselves and their descendants that would last for millennia, far longer than the Persians who set it all in place. They therefore wrote the stories emphasizing God’s messiah, the Persian king, and his priesthood in Jerusalem.
The Old Testament was written in ancient Hebrew, like modern Hebrew, written from right to left, on rough skins in ink. It was glossed in different inks and languages and eventually became almost obliterated by age. The writing consisted of badly formed capital letters only, with no vowels, stops or division into words by spaces. There were originally about 150 books like this, supposed to have been inspired by the spirit of God. Fifty-three, including the Pentateuch or five books of Moses, were formerly considered by the Christian church as canonical. In 1380 AD, fourteen were deemed as uncanonical and classed as “apocryphal” by Wycliffe—the Reformer and bible translator. These fourteen books were omitted from the Protestant bibles, though considered useful “for example of life and instruction of manners”. Many of the other old writings are now lost.
The books of the New Testament were written on papyrus in Greek, also in capital letters with no divisions between words, though the original Matthew was possibly written in Aramaic. Twenty-seven books are now considered to be canonical, but there were sixty-one others now classed as apocryphal. Twelve were excluded at first, but afterwards received as canonical.
Out of 182 works accepted for centuries as the genuine writings of Christians during the first 180 years of the present era, only twelve are now accepted by theologians as genuine. The other 170 books were not noticed as forgeries by the Holy Ghost, and yet were believed by poor, undiscerning Christians. The manufacture of some of these manuscripts probably took place at the great monastery at Mount Athos, in Salonica, where about 60,000 monks were employed in religious composition. Christians today are even more prolific, writing vast numbers of tomes all professing to clarify something, but most of it tosh.
The first that we know of the four Christian gospels is in the time of Irenaeus, who, in the second century, intimates that he has “received four gospels as authentic scriptures”. Irenaeus was himself a pious forger and possibly the editor of John. Three accounts are given of how the books which now appear in the New Testament were chosen.
- That by Popius, in his Synodicon to the Council of Nicaea, says that 200 versions of the gospel were placed under a communion table and, while the council prayed, the inspired books jumped on the slab but the rest remained under it.
- That by Irenaeus says the church selected the four most popular of the gospels.
- That by the Council of Laodicea (366 AD) says that each book was decided by ballot. Luke escaped by one vote, while the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation, the apocalypse, were rejected as forgeries.
Scriptural Mistranslation
The Jewish scriptures have been manipulated to induce the reader to believe that the Jews were always monotheists or worshippers of one God only and Christians have naturally, as monotheists, carried on the tradition. The Jews came to call their god Yehouah, usually written YHWH, which does not convey any idea of the Hebrew pronunciation, though Jews were not allowed to say the ineffable name and used other words instead. Christian bibles consider no name necessary for God because they have no need to distinguish Him from any other god and prefer to translate YHWH as the Lord or simply God.
Other Semites worshipped Yehouah pronouncing it as Yahu, or Yeho, but Yehouah held only a subordinate position in the general mythology of the Semites and is famous only because he was the father god of the Children of Israel and therefore of the Christians.
In the reign of the Assyrian King Sargon II. the throne of Hamath was occupied by Yahou-Behdi, which name literally means the “Servant of Yehouah”. The Phœnicians venerated this deity also, for in the inscriptions of Assurbanipal, another Assyrian King, the name of the crown-prince of Tyrenus is given as Yahu-melek—“Yehouah is my King”. On a coin from Gaza of the fourth century BC is a figure of a deity in a chariot of fire, over whose head is written Yho in old Phœnician characters.
Any honest translation makes it glaringly plain that Jews were not always monotheistic—if they actually are now since they, and Christians believe in Angels and Demons and what are they if not gods? Indeed the “two angels”, who appeared to Lot in the city of Sodom, are, in the original text, gods. Elohim, literally the gods, is deliberately mistranslated “God”, and YHWH Elohim is given as “Lord God” when “Yehouah of the gods” would be more precise. Adam’s demon-wife, Lilith, has been suppressed in Isaiah 34:14, where she is reduced to “the night monster”. Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter because she came to greet him, confirms that the Israelites accepted the existence of other gods, arguing with the Amorites in Judges 11:24 that every nation is entitled to what its national God bestows upon it.
Psalms 68 is positively a song to the Sun-God! It begins, “Let the Mighty One arise” (misleadingly rendered “Let God arise”), and bids all inferior creatures “cast up a highway for him that rideth through the heavens (not deserts) by his name Jah”. The frequent references to sun gods under various names are all disguised by the bible. Names used for the Hebrew sun god are Shaddai, sometimes preceded with the prefix El, Bel, the Babylonian sun god and Baal, the Syrian sun god. The title Adonai, the Phœnician name for the sun god, when it occurs singly, is translated “the Lord” but, when it is met with in conjunction with YHWH or Elohim, it is given as “the Lord God”. Psalms 110:1 says, “YHWH said to Adonai”—which should be translated, “Yehouah said to our Lord (the Sun-God)—Sit at my right hand”. The popular deity of Thebes, Amun-Ra (or Ammon, Amen, the hidden sun), is met frequently. It is often translated as “The God of Truth” as in Isaiah 65:16 or as “Amen” (Truly) as in Psalms 89:46. In Revelation written, of course, in Greek the word is written with Ho prefixed, yielding “The Amen”, a senseless expression if “truly” is meant, but not if the meaning is “by the God Amun”. In Revelation 3:14 we ought to read, “These things, saith Amun, the true and faithful witness”.
The translators of the revised bible admit the word Ashera or Asherah to be consistently wrongly rendered “grove” in the Authorized Version. Why? Because the Ashera was an upright stone used as a phallic symbol in some fertility rite. The idea connected with the word Jesus in its Semitic original, as in the Arabian fertility god Isa, was phallic vigour.
Of course sensible people will see that in ancient times the Jews worshipped the sun god and other gods and then later used various of their names for their adopted single God. But that is accepting that earlier Jews did not have this monotheistic God as their god and so the long history of His plan for His chosen people is shown to be false.
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Moses and Exodus
