Timely -
This ATS thread is NOT about any possible (or even probable!) historical allusions that might be found here and there in the Hebrew 'canonical' Scriptures (the contents and eventual text type of which were not finally decided until after 140 CE wghen they STILL were arguing whether Esther or Job or the Scroll of the Prophet Hezekiel 'defiled the hands' or not - long after the earliest Nazorean Christians were running around with their own Messianic-Zionist agendas) or about any Midrashic zionist-interpretations of actual historical events to force a peculiar 'Jewish' Weltanschauung into actual, real, historical underpinnings - this thread is about the FACT that the earliest hand-copied texts of both the 'old' and the 'new' testaments in both the Rabinnic Jewish, Protestant and Roman Catholic 'bibles' have undergone massive changes in content and form over time as a result of scribes having a different point of view from the texts in front of them changing the texts as they copied and later destroying the master copies. But thankfully we have the findings in the Qumran Caves 1-11 of the Dead Sea Scrolls - which comprise several thousand fragments of texts representing families of copies of MSS which are 1000 years EARLIER than modern Masoretic family text versions of e.g. Hebrew 'sacred' texts - which show the 'more primitive' version of those texts which 'believers' both Jewish and Christian hold to be sacred enough 'to defile the hands' i.e. be considered as canonical 'inspired' scriptures.
This is one of the main reasons why there was such pressure put on the Roman Catholic Ecole Biblique NOT to publish these findings for at least 40 years - the general 'sheeple' would 'lost faith' in the integrity of their supposedly sacred scriptures - and that would be a big no-no for multibillion dollar tax free world wide 'organisations' like Synagogues and Churches worldwide - !!
But unfortunately for them, since 1991, these texts have finally begun to be leaked to the general public (amid hundreds of desperate lawsuits by Jews and Christians NOT to allow this damning information out of the bottle !!)
And now Churches and Synagogues of all stripes have to start dealing with hard facts, for once....
To take a very small example - are you NOT aware of the Dead Sea Scroll version(s) of say, the Scroll of the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, which copied around 150 BCE and rediscovered at Qumran after November 1946 are more than 32% different from the later Masoretic pointed versions read in the bibles of Protestants and Rabinnic 'Jews' (practicing various kinds of modern non sacrificial / non temple / non Priestly 'Judaeisms'), i.e. counting letter for letter and word for word ? If not, get out a copy of a ROMAN CATHOLIC version of the Book of Jeremiah (in English if that's all you can read) and compare it line for line and word for word with your own Protestant version of the Book of Jeremiah - and SHOCK AND AWE !! you will find that the two versions are NOT the same by more than the length 13 chapters !!
In view of this ONE SMALL EXAMPLE of text-comparison, how can you possibly EVER hold the delusion that the texts of 'the bible' are inerrant or have not undergone the most profound changes in the process of hand-copying over time by so many different groups with so many different Weltanschauungen and in so many different places in the ancient world?
Can you even read paleoHebrew or Aramaic or Koine Greek? If not, then how can you possibly claim that you know things about texts you cannot even read in their originals?
Just asking a basic question, is all...and if you really want to learn some HARD facts, check out this General Research Paper which delves into the Mess of Textual Transmission of Hebrew Scriptures
www.bible-researcher.com...
And also look closely at Emanuel Tov's recent Articles which dispell the myth of inerrancy (at least as far as the Hebrew Scriptures go) more or less once and for all...
www.emanueltov.info...
www.emanueltov.info...
(NB : this 2nd LINK for Imanuel Tov seems to have been recently supressed on the 'net by (ahem) 'certain authorities in high places' who do NOT want his rather 'disturbing' findings made too public - but maybe soon, someone will re-store the LINK - that is when they think the sheeple are READY for what he has to say !!) -
And stop with the selling soap - a person who cannot even read the texts of the 'sacred books' he claims to believe should not be 'preaching' to those who can...
Not to put too fine a point on it....
edit on 11-1-2012 by Sigismundus because: stuttering cccccooommmmputerrrr keeeyyyboardddd todayyyyy



