Surprise! No Virgins in Paradise

The Number Twelve

12 Tribes. There are three tribes to the north, south, east, and west of the Tabernacle.

12 constellations on the ecliptic (zodiak).  The constellations are divided into four sets by the vernal equinox, the summer solstice, the autumnal equinox, and the winter solstice.

12 months.  The months are divided into three sets of four by the seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and fall.

12 gates in the Jerusalem. There were three gates in each of the four walls of the city.

12 Daylight hours.  There are four watches in a day.

12 Nighttime hours.  There are four watches in a night.

12 Stones on the brestplate of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest.

Compiled by Ben Mordechai

Is the Torah, otherwise known as the Tanach or Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, factual and accurate and if so how does anyone know?

Believers will immediately approach this question with the notion that the Bible is indeed factual and cannot err since it is God’s Word, and God cannot err obviously, however how many of believers base their beliefs on facts versus on faith?

Non believers and skeptics on the other hand approach this question with the opposite notion, that the Bible is so filled with other-worldy, miraculous events which nobody has witnessed anything similar to since the days of Moses, that the Bible has to man made and wrong until proven right. However isn’t holding the Bible to an unfair double standard or in other words, guilty until proven innocent, as irrational as believers are by their relying solely on faith?

The fact of the matter is that we have a wonderful thing to help us all find answers, a kind of universal language of sorts that you may have heard of before that is called science in English. If there indeed is a God, then s/he gave it to us out of love for us and as a tool and a means for all of us to use in order to verify truth and dispel falsehoods. However science is not the silver bullet to finding truth or the end to a means, science is simply a tool that has sadly been turned into a religion unto itself.

If the Hebrew Bible is not a God given document but rather a man-made collection of books  of metaphors, allegories, and fairy tales, then how does this reflect upon both Christianity and Islam and any other system of beliefs predicated on the the Hebrew Bible’s alleged divine nature?  Major sections and passages and concepts in both Islam and Christianity are predicated on the Hebrew Bible being a divinely transmitted document and on the concept that Moses was a the great prophet that talked to God.

So back to the question, did the Creator of time and space and matter and anti matter and reality and existence give the Hebrew Bible to Moses or not and is the Torah specifically that is used today the same Torah as given to Moses at Mt. Sinai ?

To answer this question let’s take a good look at what a Torah is.  The word Torah literally means “instruction”. The Torah is THE central ‘teaching’ for descendants of the tribes of Israel, or Jews in other words.

The Torah of today that can be found in your local Synagogue consists of the ‘Five Books of  Moshe, or Moses in English:

A Torah scroll is a scroll that contains the five books of  Moshe:

Arabic-Asian Jewish Torah Scrolls

European Jewry Torah Scroll

The Torah scrolls are found in Jewish synagogues. A Torah scroll is written on scored cow hide with special black ink and quill. Each page is then sewn to the previous page using gut from a kosher animal.

Quills and Ink

The scribe makes quills for writing a Sefer Torah. The feathers must come from a kosher bird, and the goose is the bird of choice for many scribes. The scribe carefully and patiently carves a point in the end of the feather and uses many quills in the course of writing one Sefer Torah. The scribe also prepares ink for writing the Sefer Torah by combining powdered gall nuts, copper sulfate crystals, gum arabic, and water, preparing only a small amount at a time, so that the ink will always be fresh. Fresh ink is a deep black, and only this is acceptable for writing a Sefer Torah.

Letters in the Torah

There is three hundred and four thousand, eight hundred and five letters on a Torah scroll

Letters and Words in the Torah

Unbeknown to most  people, a Torah has an amazing amount of coded information beyond the text itself. A Torah scroll contains numerous letters which are non-standard in terms of size, placement, and orientation. These unusual characters are exactly the same from one Torah scroll to the next. These are not mistakes, but rather they contain vast amounts of information.

The letters of the Torah come in three sizes: large, small, and the standard letters with which most of the Torah is written. A large Alef is known as an Alef Rabbasi, a small Alef as an Alef Zeira. A medium-sized Alef is called an Alef Regila (a regular Alef). There are about 100 abnormal letters in the Torah which are listed in the Talmud. Most Jews do not know about these codes in the Torah among many other things,  however very, very few non-Jews know this.  One of the major tenants of Christianity and of Islam and of any other sects that are based on the Hebrew Bible is that they reject the Talmud utterly and completely as any kind of usable source of information.

There are seventeen places in the Torah where a letter is written extra-large or extra-small: the scribal terminology is majuscule and miniscule. There are six miniscules and eleven majuscules. For example, the first letter in the Torah, the bet in the word Bereshit, is a majuscule (this is probably the origin of the illuminated capital of medieval manuscripts). The most famous majuscules are certainly the ones from the Shema in Devarim (Deuteronomy) 6:4. In this case, the letters are large to avoid confusion: a large ayin in the word shema to avoid confusion with aleph: ‘perhaps O Israel.’ The large dalet to avoid confusion with resh: ‘the Lord is another’.

LARGE LETTERS

The large letters are used mainly to call attention to certain Talmudic and midrashic homilies and citations, or as guards against errors. References to them are in Masseket Soferim of the Talmud.

SMALL LETTERS

How do we know that the Torah we have today is the same text given on Mount Sinai?

Well according to tradition, the Torah was originally dictated from God to Moses, letter for letter. From there, the Midrash (Devarim Rabba 9:4) tells us:

Before his death, Moses wrote 13 Torah Scrolls. Twelve of these were distributed to each of the 12 Tribes. The 13th was placed in the Ark of the Covenant (with the Tablets). If anyone would come and attempt to rewrite or falsify the Torah, the one in the Ark would “testify” against him. (Likewise, if he had access to the scroll in the Ark and tried to falsify it, the distributed copies would “testify” against him.)

How were the new scrolls verified? According to tradition an authentic “proof text” was always kept in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, against which all other scrolls would be checked. Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Sages would periodically perform global checks to weed out any scribal errors.

To eliminate any chance of human error, the Talmud enumerates more than 20 factors mandatory for a Torah scroll to be considered “kosher.” This is the Torah’s built-in security system. Should any one of these factors be lacking, it does not possess the sanctity of a Torah scroll, and is not to be used for a public Torah reading.

The meticulous process of hand-copying a scroll takes about 2,000 hours (a full-time job for one year). Throughout the centuries, Jewish scribes have adhered to the following guidelines:

• A Torah Scroll is disqualified if even a single letter is added.
• A Torah Scroll is disqualified if even a single letter is deleted.
• The scribe must be a learned, pious Jew, who has undergone special training and certification.
• All materials (parchment, ink, quill) must conform to strict specifications, and be prepared specifically for the purpose of writing a Torah Scroll.
• The scribe may not write even one letter into a Torah Scroll by heart. Rather, he must have a second, kosher scroll opened before him at all times.
• The scribe must pronounce every word out loud before copying it from the correct text.
• Every letter must have sufficient white space surrounding it. If one letter touched another in any spot, it invalidates the entire scroll.
• If a single letter was so marred that it cannot be read at all, or resembles another letter (whether the defect is in the writing, or is due to a hole, tear or smudge), this invalidates the entire scroll. Each letter must be sufficiently legible so that even an ordinary schoolchild could distinguish it from other, similar letters.
• The scribe must put precise space between words, so that one word will not look like two words, or two words look like one word.
• The scribe must not alter the design of the sections, and must conform to particular line-lengths and paragraph configurations.
• A Torah Scroll in which any mistake has been found cannot be used, and a decision regarding its restoration must be made within 30 days, or it must be buried.

After the formation of the 3rd State of Israel in 1948, Torah scrolls from around the world have been compared to one another for veracity and astoundingly, they all matched exactly with the exception of scrolls from Yemen. However the differences between the Yemenite Torah scrolls and the Ashkenazi torah scrolls are really minimal – almost all are but a handful or two of plene-defective variants (usually whether to spell with a yod/waw or without). there is also the variant of the layout of ex 15:19, and 2 differences concerning the paragraphs (lev 7:22,28). The Jews in Yemen apparently date back to the time of the Bavelonian exile and will be discussed at the end of this article.

However the story does not end there happily, apparently all of the scrolls that exist today are younger and slightly vary from the oldest surviving intact Hebrew Tanach, the Leningrad Codex, located in St Petersburg, Russia. The order of the books in the Leningrad Codex differs markedly from that of most printed Hebrew bibles for the books of Ketuvim. In the Leningrad Codex, the order of Ketuvim is: Chronicles, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah.

However the Leningrad Codex was corrected by the Aleppo Codex which is several decades older than the Leningrad Codex. In his article: “maimonides and the aleppo codex,” in textus (a journal from the hebrew university) 9 (1981), and in his book: “nusah hatorah” etc. (from bar-ilan university press, ramat gan 1992), Professor Penkower proves conclusively that Maimondes relied on the Aleppo Codex when writing his hilkhot Sefer Torah, and when writing his own Sefer Torah. The Codex Cairensis (also: Codex Prophetarum Cairensis, Cairo Codex of the Prophets) is an old extant Hebrew manuscript containing the complete text of the prophets. It was written complete with punctuation by Moses ben Asher in Tiberias “at the end of the year 827 after the destruction of the second temple.

A large number of the biblical manuscripts in the Qumran Bible, or Dead Sea Scrolls as they are commonly known as, closely resemble the Masoretic text, or tenth century CE Codexs in other words, which became the standard Jewish biblical text. Some of the texts were written in a Hebrew dialect used by the Qumran community, and were apparently in use by the sect. A few texts represent the text type from which the Greek Septuagint was translated and a few are similar to the Samaritan Bible.

According to archaeological and paleographic examination as well as carbon-14 tests, the Dead Sea Scrolls were copied between the third century BCE and the first century CE; the majority of the texts were copied in the first and second centuries CE. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest and most valuable source for the Torah and Tanach’s veracity but our story does not end there.

The Bavelonian forces swept across the land of Judah in 576 BCE and later on in 586BCE, wiping out everything and mostly everyone in their paths in two separate waves a decade apart from each other, which culminated in Jerusalem being flattened and the holy Jewish temple being destroyed utterly. Hundreds of thousands of ancient documents in libraries were burnt down, tens of thousands of Jewish men of fighting age were killed in battle or possibly executed in captivity. Thousands of wise sages and along with them secrets and wealth of ancient knowledge were killed or exiled on a forced march thousands of kilometers away in Bavel. Jerusalem was forcefully depopulated and  the country was left ruined as much of the elite population was exiled to Bavel.

The tablets containing the “Law” were stored in the portable tabernacle called the Ark of the Covenant which was housed in the first temple. The Ark disappeared when the Babylonians destroyed the Temple in 587 b.c.e., and it was not in the second temple. Half a century later, a small number of Babylonian Jews, probably mainly either Aramaic speaking or Hebrew-Aramaic bilingual, returned to Judah where they provided the leadership, under Persian imperial patronage, for a slow restoration of Jerusalem and a much reduced Judah known as the province of Yahud.

The Great Biblical Schism

What you have not been told about nor likely read before is that the Hebrew language that you know today and take for granted as God’s language only goes back until the return of the Bavelonian exiles. The Hebrew that is used today in every Torah scroll is called ktav Ashuri and it is not the exact Hebrew that God would have spoken to Moses with or that Moses would have transmitted to the people of Israel via Joshua and the priests and the judges, which we know as ktav Ivri. Ktav Ashuri was instituted by Ezra the prophet after the return of the Bavelonian exiles and during the time of the building of the second temple.

paleo-hebrew-comparisions

The ramifications of the entire holy, Hebrew language having being replaced with man made, different symbols once upon a time is massive in terms of todays sexy Torah concepts such as Kabbala, the Zohar, Sefer Yetzirah, and Gemmatria and codes in the Torah. It can be argued that Hebrew was not replaced as much as it gradually shifted due to the Aramaic and Assyrian influences of the times. An important thing to note about the differences between ktav Ivri and ktav Ashuri is that one form is quite pictoral in structure and the other form is symbolic-phonetic. In terms of the the concepts of communication the transmission of information and cybernetics, a picture is worth a thousand words, so does the pictoral, ancient, original Hebraic script tell us more than we are getting using the Ashuri script?

According to Aish Das:

The Gemara in Sanhedrin 21b-22a tells us what at first seems very surprising. However, after a careful reading and placing the events in an historical context they do not seem surprising at all.

Mar Zutra and some say Mar Ukva said: Originally the Torah was given to Israel in Ktav Ivri (paleo-Hebrew characters) and in the holy lanugage. It was given again to them in Ezra’s time in Ktav Ashurit (Assyrian characters) and in Aramaic. Israel selected for themselves Ktav Ashurit and the Hebrew language… It was taught: Rebbe said: Torah was originally given to Israel in Ktav Ashurit. When they sinned it was changed to Roetz (Ktav Ivri). When they repented, Ktav Ashurit was reintroduced… R’ Shimon ben Elazar said in the name of R’ Eliezer ben Parta, who said in the name of R’ Elazar Hamodai: This writing was never changed…

We see three opinions regarding the script of the Torah. According to Mar Zutra, the Torah was given to Israel in Ktav Ivri and in Hebrew but Ezra changed it to Ktav Ashurit and Aramaic. The people, however, only accepted Ktav Ashurit and Hebrew. According to Rebbe, the Torah was given in Ktav Ashurit but was changed to Ktav Ivri due to the people’s sins. According to R’ Elazar Hamodai, the script of the Torah never changed.

This passage raises a number of questions. How could Ezra change the script of the Torah? How could he change the Torah’s language from Hebrew to Aramaic? Furthermore, if he found the authority to do so, how could the people determine an outcome against his decision? According to Rebbe, why would the script of the Torah change based on whether Israel sinned or repented?

R’ Reuven Margoliyot (Margoliyot Hayam, Sanhedrin ad loc,; Hamikra Vehamesora, ch. 9) answers all of these questions with the following historical reflection. It is known that some ancient cultures had one script for sacred purposes and one for everyday use. For example, the Indians only used Sanskrit for religious purposes and not for the mundane. The talmudic sages mentioned in the above passage were debating the extent of this practice of having a script for only holy purposes in Israel. However, according to everyone this was the practice, similar to the talmudic dictum, “Something that is used for the sacred may not be used for the profane” (Avodah Zara 52a).

According to Mar Zutra, the first tablets of the ten commandments were written in Ktav Ashurit (see Responsa Radbaz 3:442) but once Israel sinned with the Golden Calf they were deemed unworthy. They could not be trusted to use Ktav Ashurit for purely sacred matters. Therefore, the second tablets and the Torah scrolls written for general use were in Ktav Ivri. This can, perhaps, be seen from the fact that in Megillah 2b Rav Chisda says that the mem and samech in the tablets were miraculously hanging in the air. This can only happen in Ktav Ashurit and not in Ktav Ivri. However, in the Gemara in Sanhedrin quoted above, Rav Chisda seems to agree with Mar Zutra that the Torah was originally given to Israel in Ktav Ivri. Therefore, it seem that Rav Chisda would have to say that the tablets were in Ktav Ashurit and the Torah in Ktav Ivri. Or, as the Radbaz suggested, everything was originally in Ktav Ashurit but after the sin of the Golden Calf the second tablets and the Torah were in Ktav Ivri. But not all of the Torahs were in Ktav Ivri.

That the original tablets were given in Ktav Ashurit but not the second tablets can be seen hinted in a number of sources. For example, the Gemara in Pesachim 87b says “the tablets broke and the letters floated in the air”. Exactly what it means that the letters floated in the air is unclear. However, on that same page the Gemara says, “Three things returned to their origin… the script of the tablets”. That sounds like Ktav Ashurit being replaced with Ktav Ivri. Similarly, the Mechilta on Exodus 17:8 says that after the tablets were broken “the heavenly writing returned to its place”. We perhaps also see evidence of the disappearance of Ktav Ashurit much later in history. The Tanchuma on Vayeshev 2 says, “What did they do [in response to the Samaritans]? Ezra, Zerubavel, and Yehoshua gathered the community to the sanctuary… and excommunicated the Samaritans with the sacred name of G-d, with the script that was written on the tablets, with the decree of the heavenly court,…” The use of the “script that was written on the tablets” is important for two reasons. First, it seems that this script was unique. Furthermore, we know from the Gemara in Sanhedrin and from other historical sources that the Samaritans used Ktav Ivri. The contrast between the Samaritans and the “script that was written on the tablets” implies that this script was not Ktav Ivri. We thus see that there is ample material supporting the Radbaz’s claim that the first tablets were in Ktav Ashurit.

Recall that Mar Zutra said that the Torah was given to Israel in Ktav Ivri. The Ritva deduced from this that the special Torah of Moshe that was kept in the ark and later in the Temple was in Ktav Ashurit. Only Torahs for the people were in Ktav Ivri. The ability to read Ktav Ashurit was maintained by priests and scribes, which is why King Yoshiyahu needed a priest to read to him from Moshe’s Torah when it was found in the Temple (2 Kings 22:8-11; Abarbanel). The king had never before seen Ktav Ashurit and his reaction to seeing it fo the first time, and in the Torah scroll that Moshe himself had written, demonstrates the deep religious emotion it evoked. We perhaps find hints of this in Isaiah 8:1 where the prophet is commanded, “Take a large tablet and write on it in common characters”. This is must have been referring to Ktav Ivri that was used by the common people (see Rashi). Ktav Ivri had gained such prominence that the existence of ending letters (?????) was forgotten by the masses and had to be restored (Megillah 2b-3a).

However, Ktav Ashurit was still studied by the priests and scribes, of which Ezra was both. When he saw that Ktav Ashurit was so forgotten that, when it was written on the wall of King Belshatzar of Babylonia, only Daniel could read it (Daniel 5) he realized that it must be reintroduced to the people. Yet, he still had the dilemma that people would then be writing Hebrew in the holy Ktav Ashurit for improper purposes. His solution was to translate the Torah into Aramaic and introduce the Aramaic Torah in Ktav Ashurit into common usage. That way people would become familiar with Ktav Ashurit without using it in their daily Hebrew writing. This is what is meant in Nehemiah 8:8, “So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation.” It was interpreted by translation into Aramaic (Megillah 3a). (This translation was later recreated by Onkelos). However, the people had lived their whole lives with a Hebrew Torah and were not ready to change the language of their holiest of books. Therefore, they decided to retain a Hebrew Torah in Ktav Ashurit but conduct their daily business in Aramaic. This would produce the results that Ezra desired because Ktav Ashurit in Hebrew would not be a part of the daily routine.

Rebbe agreed with this historical reconstruction but attributed the original transition from Ktav Ashurit to Ktav Ivri to the idolatrous era of the First Temple rather than the episode of the Golden Calf. According to Rebbe, it is even more plausible that the scholars always retained knowledge of Ktav Ashurit. It was only the masses who were busy with their daily lives and/or idolatrous ways who forgot Ktav Ashurit when the Torahs were changed to Ktav Ivri.

R’ Elazar Hamodai does not necessarily disagree that people forgot Ktav Ashurit. He only argued that the Torahs were never changed from one script into another. However, he agreed that people had forgotten Ktav Ashurit, the script used only for sacred purposes, and that Ezra had to re-educate the masses in the holy script (see Teshuvot HaRambam, ed. Blau no. 268).

As a final note, the Gemara in Sanhedrin 22a offers two opinions why the script is called Ktav Ashurit. One is that the Jews brought it back to Israel with them from Babylonia/Assyria (Ashur). The other is that it is a beautiful script (me’usheret). Since the literal translation of Ktav Ashurit is “Assyrian script”, we must ask why the Gemara even asks such a basic question. It is called Ktav Ashurit because the Assyrians used it. Furthermore, the view that it is called Ktav Ashurit because the script is beautiful strains credibility. We already know that it is called Ktav Ashurit because it is an Assyrian script, as the words simply mean.

We have seen that many questions can be raised about the validity of our Torahs. However, Judaism, like any other serious thought system, is complex. While by necessity we were taught simplicites in our childhood, we need to sieze all available opportunities to broaden our perspectives and deepen our faiths. Rather than using questions as reasons to reject traditional Judaism, we must use them as opportunities for intellectual and religious growth.

The Yemenite Torahs

Is this number of 304,805 letters in the Torah exact? Did G-d give Moshe a Torah with precisely that number of letters?

The Gemara in Kiddushin 30a says that we are not experts in chaser and yeter,( the addition and subtraction of letters in the Torah anymore because the information was lost over time). There are certain vowel sounds in Hebrew that can be spelled with (yeter) or without (chaser) an assisting letter. It is important to note that the presence or absence of this letter make no difference in terms of meaning and pronunciation. The words and verses mean exactly the same whether they are spelled chaser or yeter, which may be how these uncertainties crept in. Because of this, there are certain discrepancies between even good versions of the Torah in this respect. Beginning in the 8th century, the Masoretes tried to standardize the spelling of chaser and yeter words by recording them in their masoretic notes. Surprisingly, even some excellent manuscripts do not follow this Masora precisely (see R’ Mordechai Breuer’s introduction to The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Text of the Bible, par. 20). However, this standardization of chaser and yeter came after the talmudic statement that we are not experts in them so the standardization is not final (see Rama, Orach Chaim 143:3). Therefore, there remain differences between texts in terms of chaser and yeter. Again, it is important to emphasize that these minor differences do not change the meaning or pronunciation of the words

The second reason that there might be slight discrepancies between Torahs is that there are some words whose spelling is a matter of dispute. In the Torah itself, there are two major questions. Genesis 9:29 has a word that may be spelled ???? or ?????. Ashkenazi Torahs have the former and Yemenite Torahs have the latter. The difference is between singular and plural and is insignificant enough to be lost in translation from Hebrew to English. Small as it is, it is still a difference. Similarly, there is a question in Deuteronomy 23:2 whether a word should be spelled ??? or ???.

Dead Sea Scrolls, Aleppo Codex, Crown of Aleppo, Ben Asher Chumash, cantilation,  Leningrad Codex, copper scroll, jeremiah,

www.chayas.com/allepo.htm

Not too reliable -

www.betemunah.org/orallaw.html

Errors in your Bible?

Errors In The New Testament?

By Ben Mordechai

Every person that I have ever met who defines him or herself as a Christian or a Catholic, or by any of the sub sects and derivations such as Coptic and so on, takes the Old and New Testaments as the literal words of God. That’s fine, but what if the actual copy of the New Testament that he or she has and uses and relies on for guidance and support and moral clarity is misprinted by a publisher? How many people do you know check their Bible for errors or even know how to?

As a matter of fact, in 1631 CE, King Charles I of England ordered 1,000 Bibles from an English printer who accidentally  left out the word “not” in the seventh commandment (concerning adultery). This edition of the New Testament became known as the “Wicked Bible,” and the few copies that have survived are worth a sizable amount of money but that is not my point,  my point is that it has happened and this example illustrates that it is not the first and only time that the New Testament has been less than 100% accurate.

As I have demonstrated with the case of the “Wicked Bible”, removing or adding letters to the Bible can quite easily change the meaning of  entire passages of the Bible and therefore affects major theological concepts and matters of morality and ethics that affects millions of believers around the world. Now before I go on any further you may be thinking that a word or letter missing or added here and there is just not that serious of a matter to be concerned about and so to further illustrate just how important perfect accuracy is in regards to the Bible, let’s take the famous Biblical phrase and moral tenet Thou Shall Not Murder, it is four words or eighteen letters and removing a word or letters changes the statement to mean something else entirely, and that’s using English, however the Hebrew Bible was not given to Moses by God  in English but rather in Hebrew.  In Hebrew,  Thou Shall Not Murder transliterates into English as: Lo TeerTsach, which in Hebrew is only two words or six letters. A missing letter and or worse and entire missing word in Hebrew can really have massive implications.

Now let’s take New Testament Matthew 28:19 for example : “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”. Mathew 28:19 is the textual source for two major theological pillars of Christianity / Catholicism, the concept of the Catholic trinity and the concept of baptism to Protestants. Notice that it says “in the name” as opposed to “in the names.”? The addition or the subtraction of  one letter in this case, the “s”, or or in other words, pluralizing the word name, is the entire Protestant – Catholic debate into the two concepts that I mentioned. One of the reasons for this  theological debate is because there exist multiple versions of the book of Matthew that totally contradict one another. Some copies have NAME written and others have NAMES and nobody knows which is truly the more original source and which is the copy and you can be sure that the Church has been working overtime to reconcile this debate and settle it once and for all.

I’ll go into the existence of  different versions of the book of Matthew later on in this article but my points so far are that firstly, removing or adding a single letter to the Bible has massive ramifications that affect the world and secondly that the New Testament simply cannot be claimed by anyone to be the literal word of God, or perfect, or without error  as it is claimed by many to be, simply based on the fact that there exists contradictory copies of the Gospels.  In fact the King James Version (1611) is not considered authoritative anymore by most scholars and theologians in leu of the discovery of entire insertions into the text are present which are not found in any older, more authoritative versions and translations.

So how did the Christian Bible become corrupted? Who corrupted the New Testament?  Was there some sort of conspiracy? Is there anyone to blame? Can the New Testament be fixed? To answer those questions we need to go through the chronology and the story of how the New Testament came into being in order to illustrate just how complicated getting the answers to these questions is. But to repeat what I wrote earlier, from my experiences most self-proclaimed Christians and Catholics and members of the sub sects that I have ever and had the pleasure of being acquainted with and befriending do not know about the history of the New Testament whatsoever to the point of deliberate ignorance, yet they all define their morals and ethics by it. It is a good thing that it does not say in the New Testament: “if your priest commands thee to surrender all of your wealth to him and to jump in a lake upon his command, you must comply”!

Allow me to present to you the simple chronology of how the New Testament came to be  according to researcher Austin Cline who compiled this. It is not perfect time-line, but it is certainly a very good approximation that you can easily verify yourself.

———————————————————————–

c. 8 BCE Jesus of Nazareth born in Roman Judea, not Palestine as many Academics erroneously label the region (by some estimates).
6 Herod the Great deposed by Augustus.
14 – 37 Tiberius I, stepson of Augustus, became emperor of Rome (b. 42 BCE).
18 Caiaphas became high priest in Jerusalem (until 36).
c. 24 – 26 Jesus is believed to have begun his ministry.
26 – 36 Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea.
27 – 28 John the Baptist wandered and preached. Jesus would have been baptized. [Luke 3:1-2] (15th year of Tiberius).
28 John the Baptist was executed on orders from Herod Antipas.
c. 30 Jesus of Nazareth is believed to have been crucified in Jerusalem.
c. 31 Saint Stephen became the first Christian martyr when he was stoned to death for blasphemy. One of those present at his execution was the Pharisee Saul.
c. 34-35 Saul of Tarsus, formerly a rabbi and enemy of Christianity, converts to the new Christian faith and became known as Paul. [Acts 9].
c. 37-40 Paul first visited Jerusalem as a Christian.
37 – 41 Gaius Caligula, nephew of Tiberius, became emperor of Rome and declared himself a god. In the year 41 he would be assassinated and Claudius, a crippled son of Tiberius, would take command.
40 Paul went to Jerusalem to consult with Peter [Gal 1, 18-20].
c. 40 – 51 Paul traveled to Asia Minor and Cyprus, establishing churches and writing the earliest epistles which would became part of the New Testament canon.
43 Romans under Aulus Plautius invaded Britain. London was founded.
44 James, brother of John, was executed by Herod Agrippa I [Acts 12, 1-3].
47 First recorded use of the term “Christian” occurred in Antioch, Syria, home of one of the earliest Christian churches .
47 – 48 Paul and Barnabas were on Cyprus [Acts 13, 4-12].
48 – 49 Council of Jerusalem, 1st Christian Council, doctrines on circumcision and dietary law was agreed to by apostles and presbyters, written in a letter addressed to “the brothers of Gentile origin in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia” [Acts 15]
c. 49 Paul composed his epistle to the Thessalonians – the earliest known New Testament writing
49 Emperor Claudius ordered all Jewish Christians expelled from Rome.
c. 51 Paul wrote epistle to the Galatians.
54 Empress Agrippina had Emperor Claudius murdered and installed her 16-year-old son Nero as the new emperor.
c. 55 Paul wrote epistles to the Corinthians.
c. 55 Peter traveled to Rome where his leadership over the church of Rome established the tradition of the papacy. He has come to be regarded as the first bishop of Rome (pope).
57 Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem [Acts 21].
58 Paul was arrested and imprisoned in Caesarea [Acts 25:4].
c. 60 Paul wrote the epistle to the Romans.
61 Human sacrifices in religious celebrations were prohibited by Roman law.
62 Paul was held under house arrest in Rome, but then was allowed to resume his travels.
64 Roman emperor Nero (37 – 68) accused the Christians of having started the fire which destroyed large sections of Rome, initiating widespread persecution.
65 Famous and influential Roman philosopher Seneca committed suicide on orders from Emperor Nero.
c. 65 Q was possibly written, (German: Quelle, meaning “source”) a hypothetical Greek text used in writing of Matthew and Luke.
66 Jews revolted against Roman government (through 70).
c. 67 Nero ordered the execution of both Peter and Paul.
68 Qumran (Essenes?) community was destroyed by Rome. The site of their “Dead Sea Scrolls” would be found in 1949.
69 Vespasian, a Roman general, attacked to Rome in order to quell a Jewish uprising. A coup by other generals causes him to be made emperor.
70 Titus, son of Roman emperor Vespasian, captured and destroyed Jerusalem and suppressed a Jewish revolt, destroying the Temple in the process.
c. 70 Mark, earliest known gospel, was probably composed.
73 Masada, last remaining stronghold of Jewish Zealots, fell to Roman assault.
79 Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae.
c. 85 – 95 Gospel of Luke and Book of Acts were probably composed.
c. 90 Old Testament books, called “The Writings,” were established as part of Christian canon: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Chronicles.
c. 95 Book of Revelations was probably composed.
c. 95 Clement of Rome (c. 30 – 100), one of the earliest popes, wrote a letter arguing that church leaders possess a divine authority inherited from Christ and his apostles.
c. 95- 105 Composition of the “Pastoral Epistles,” falsely attributed to Paul: Hebrews, I and II Timothy, Titus, and I Peter.
c. 80 – 100 Gospel of Matthew was probably composed.
98 – 116 Trajan was emperor of Rome. Around this time the Roman empire reached maximum size.
c. 100 Christian churches were established in Greece, North Africa, Italy, and Asia Minor.
c. 100 – 125 Gospel of John was probably composed.
100 – 165 St. Justin Martyr lived and was one of the first Christian apologists to offer a defense of Christianity.
c. 100 The Romans built the first London Bridge across the Thames.
122 Roman emperor Hadrian visited Britain and began construction of a wall and fortifications between northern England and Scotland.
132 Shimeon Bar-Kokhba and Rabbi Akiba Ben-Joseph led Jews in a revolt against Roman rule. They captured Jerusalem and created an independent state of Israel.
135 Julius Severus, formerly governor of Britain, crushed a revolt in Palestine. Final Diaspora (dispersion) of the Jews occurs.
c. 140 Shepherd of Hermas was written, describing a highly developed system of bishops, deacons, and priests.
c. 144 Marcion founded an influential Christian sect which argued for the existence of two gods (one good, one evil) and for the rejection of the Old Testament.
c. 150 The four “canonical” gospels were collected together.
c. 150 The School of Alexandria was founded in Egypt, quickly becoming a major center for both Christian theology and Greek philosophy. Among its prominent teachers were the theologians Clement and Origen.
166 Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sent gifts to Chinese Emperor Huan Ti.
c. 180 Irenaeus (125 – c. 202), Catholic theologian, wrote Against Heresies in an attempt to fight the spread of Gnosticism. He claimed that “every church must agree” with the church of Rome because of its apostolic authority.
180 First African Christians were martyred at Scillium.
190 Christian council established “official” date of Easter.
197 First recorded usage of the term “catholic” appeared in the writings of Apollonius in reference to 1 John.
200 New Testament canon was mostly fixed in currently known form.
268 Goths sacked Athens, Corinth, and Sparta.
286 Emperor Diocletian divided the empire – he ruled the east and Maximilian ruled the west.
301 Armenia became the first country to make Christianity its state religion.
303 Diocletian ordered a general persecution of all Christians.
312 Constantine, emperor of the Eastern Empire defeated and kills Maxentius, emperor of the Western Empire. Constantine converted to Christianity after being inspired by a vision of a cross in the sky and the words: In hoc signo vinces.
325 First Ecumenical Council of Nicea was convened by emperor Constantine: established the Nicene Creed as the fundamental statement of Christian faith.
336 Arius, priest at Alexandria and founder of Arianism, died. Arianism was one of the most widespread and divisive heresies in the history of Christianity.
350 Christianity first reached Ethiopia.
351 Emperor Julian attempted to reintroduce paganism in the place of Christianity.
367 Festal Epistle of St. Athanasius offered earliest known list of the New Testament canon in its current form.
372 Buddhism was introduced into Korea.
380 Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under the reign of Theodosius I.
381 First Council of Constantinople. Convened by Theodosius I, then emperor of the East and a recent convert, to confirm the victory over Arianism, the council drew up a dogmatic statement on the Trinity and defined Holy Spirit as having the same divinity expressed for the Son by the Council of Nicaea 56 years earlier.
395 The Roman Empire was divided again between East and West, setting the stage for the eventual division of the Christian Church. Latin Christianity was based in Rome under the leadership of the popes, while Eastern Orthodoxy develops in the east in Constantinople under the leadership of patriarchs.
401 Innocent I became Pope (until 417) and claims universal jurisdiction over the Roman Church.
c. 405 St. Jerome completed the Vulgate – a Latin translation of both the Old and New Testaments. This remains the Latin Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.
410 Lead by Alaric, the Goths sacked Rome.
418 British monk Pelagius was excommunicated. Pelagius denied original sin and the need for baptism, asserting that if God asked men to do good, then they must be capable of doing good on their own. He was condemned by Augustine.
431 Ecumenical Council of Ephesus denounced the teachings of Nestorius (d. 451), who argued that Christ had completely separate human and divine natures.
433 Attila became ruler of the Huns (until 453).
451 Attila invaded Gaul but was repulsed by joint forces of Franks, Alemanni and Romans at battle of Chalons. Attila invaded Italy the next year.
c. 1380 John Wycliffe began the first English translation of the Bible.
1520 Martin Luther created his German translation of the New Testament.
1526 William Tyndale created his English version of the Pentateuch.
1560 The Geneva Bible was created. This version was the one used by Shakespeare and also by the Pilgrims who came to the United States on the Mayflower.
1582 Douay Version of the New Testament (English translation) was completed. After the Old Testament translation was completed in 1610, this became the first English translation of the Bible authorized by and for Roman Catholics
1604 King James (1566 – 1625) of England commissioned the “King James” translation of the Bible

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If you bothered to go through the chronology above then you may have noted and or figured out a few very important details such as:

• The exact dates of Jesus’ life and his death are not known exactly.
• The New Testament was not written by Jesus whatsoever.
• Of all of the people that Jesus may have met and had an impact on, no where is he mentioned by anyone or any of the sects that exist at the time.
• The entire New Testament was written down many, many decades after Jesus lived and died in fact not until after 125 CE.
• Some of the writers never met Jesus and in fact lived long after Jeus was dead and that their Gospels are based on stories of Jesus that were told to them by others.
• It took the church over two hundred years of fighting (sometimes bloody) over the doctrine of the trinity before this baptismal formula came into use.
• Multiple differing translations of the New Testament exist going back to the third centuries.
• Different streams of the Christian world use differing copies from one another.
• None of the Christian streams and sects agree on a final 100% accurate version of the New Testament.
• The words or terms Christian and Catholic were invented after Jesus’ life and did not exist even during Jesus’ lifetime.
• During the entire history of Christianity starting from the time of it’s earliest ministries there have been seriously deep and bitter schisms and disagreements in the Christian Church. These disagreements resulted in the Roman Latin Church and the Greek Orthodox Church separating from one another and then later on the split of the Protestant Church from the Catholic Churches.
• All of the original copies of  all of the ancient books are long, long gone and so there is no way of verifying anything until new evidence that can shed some light on the matter is found.

So how did the Christian Bible become corrupted and when did it happen?

It can be argued that the Vatican actually did indeed add text, or in other words, invent words that Jesus  said, which I will discuss at the bottom of this article about Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew.

How come more sources and proofs don’t exist?

In the time Jesus, it was a tumultuous time in the history of the world. In the first one hundred and fifty years CE, the entire nation of Israel fought two, messy, bloody and destructive revolts against the Roman occupation only to finally lose and be enslaved and deported en masse to the farthest reaches of the Roman empire. Rome itself was undergoing multiple internal upheavals and political dramas.

On a historical but relevant sidenote, that is why there are Jews scattered across the globe today and they are not located in Israel. It was not by their choice to be scattered to the four winds and for many centuries in the last one thousand years they were even prevented from returning to their homeland. Now the absurd thing is that the ficticious, so called Palestinians are being given what will surely be a Muslim, terrorist state when in fact Christian and Judaic history shows that they never had one ever nor were they even a people in history before this century. So, if the world has lost it’s collective mind regarding granting the so called Palestinians a State in the land of the Jesus and the Apostles where no such thing ever existed before, then it is not too far out to accept that we do not have the first copies of the gospels in our possession thus resulting in corruption in the text of the New Testament.

During those first one hundred years though, Christians were not accepted or welcomed by both the Roman occupiers and the majority of the Judeans from all of the various sects that existed at that time. The Judeans themselves were politically fighting amongst themselves anyways so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for smaller groups at that time to be bullied. This made maintaining and creating a movement very difficult as the early Christians had to kind of scurry about in society in order to just to survive. The first Christians were all Judeans, or Jewish in other words, not gentiles, which may be a surprise to you,  and they were very poor and could not afford an institution for record making and record keeping. Whatever words or information about Jesus that anyone happened to have written down was likely not on quality parchments and the ones that were made were likely copied  in terrible conditions by less than quality scribes and translators.

Sadly scholars today posses very little information about the early Christians or about many other groups alive at that time in that region. All everyone has been able to do is piece together the history based on a multitude of sources such as from the Gospels, historian Josephus and Greek writer Philo for examples. The Jewish Talmud has information pertaining to the life of Jesus however both the Vatican and scholars dismiss it entirely.

Can the New Testament be fixed? This is a problem which the Christian world has been working on for almost two thousand years, but on the other hand the Vatican’s position is that the New Testament is not in error whatsoever so therefore how can they possibly fix something that they perceive as unbroken? On a side note, the Vatican is the repository of all of the remaining wealth and knowledge that was plundered by the Romans and the Church over the last two thousand years. Sitting in it’s basement vaults is…

The dishonesty of the Vatican? The Vatican will deny that there are any errors in the New Testament and boast humbly that they truly do have the next best thing to the original copies of the gospels, however this is just not true as many academic scholars can prove to the contrary and what is astounding about this is that the Vatican refuses to acknowledge even the possibility. Furthermore, located in museums and vaults around the world are a multiplicity of copies of the texts of the New Testament in different languages that date from within a couple of generations of their writing. In total, there are approximately 200,000 variants of the New Testament.  Of those 200,000 variants, there are hundreds of serious grammatical and textual problems that have caused havoc for scholars and theologians  for a long time and then about fifty serious textual problems that are hugely important theological matters and concern.

You may be wondering and even worrying then just how many errors there must be in the Hebrew Bible which is  older and the answer to that is simply and utterly astounding, even miraculous. There are approximately 181,253 words  in the New Testament depending on which translation you use and in what language. There are exactly 79,847 words in a Torah scroll, and 304,805 letters, and in the early decades of the State of Israel when members of the Tribes of Israel began streaming in from all parts of the planet, from Russian and Morocco, from Yemen and from Britain, their Torah scrolls were examined closely for comparison. What scientists and clergy discovered  to their total and utter amazement was that all of the scrolls were exactly the same, letter for letter with the exception of scrolls  from Yemen, and then only by exactly nine letters. The Dead Seas Scrolls further confirmed the Hebrew Bible’s accuracy and consistency despite the horrible persecution that Jews endured over the last two thousand years.

Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew.

The Shem Tov Matthew is the Gospel of Matthew written in the Hebrew language and it is a serious thorn in the side of the Catholic Church that they have desperately tried to dismiss. The version is preserved within a work named Eben Bohen, which was written by a Jewish physician living in Aragon, Spain, named Shem Tov ben Isaac ben Shaprut (Ibn Shaprut), and after whom the manuscript is named. The text of Eben Bohen is preserved in a number of manuscripts, although the manuscript of Matthew that it quotes is lost. It is alleged by many Protestants, not Jews interestingly enough that the Catholic Church has known that the Jews had preserved a copy of the original Gospel of Matthew in the Hebrew language, if not other Gospels as well and they contend that Shem Tov Matthew is indeed a copy of original Matthew and not a copy of a translation of the original.

Irinocally it is the Catholic Church’s history which supports the Protestant claim:

“Matthew wrote the words in the Hebrew dialect, and each one interpreted as he could”
(Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 3.39). The Wycliffe Bible commentary: Matthew, Pfeiffer, C. F.

Papias (Eusebius, H.E. 3.39.16)
“Matthew collected the oracles (ta logia) in the Hebrew language, and each interpreted them as best he could.”

Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.1.1
“Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews n their own dialect while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and laying the foundations of the church.”

Origen (Eusebius, H.E. 6.25.4)
“As having learnt by tradition concerning the four Gospels, which alone are unquestionable in the Church of God under heaven, that first was written according to Matthew, who was once a tax collector but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, who published it for those who from Judaism came to believe, composed as it was in the Hebrew language.”

Eusebius, H.E. 3.24.6
“Matthew had first preached to Hebrews, and when he was on the point of going to others he transmitted in writing in his native language the Gospel according to himself, and thus supplied by writing the lack of his own presence to those from whom he was sent.”

Epiphanius (ca. 315-403), bishop of Salamis, refers to a gospel used by the Ebionites (Panarion 30. 13.1-30.22.4). He says it is Matthew, called “According to the Hebrews” by them, but says it is corrupt and mutilated. He says Matthew issued his Gospel in Hebrew letters. He quotes from this Ebionite Gospel seven times. These quotations appear to come not from Matthew but from some harmonized account of the canonical Gospels.

Jerome also asserts that Matthew wrote in the Hebrew language (Epist. 20.5), and he refers to a Hebrew Matthew and a Gospel of the Hebrews-unclear if they are the same. He also quotes from the Gospel used by the Nazoreans and the Ebionites, which he says he has recently translated from Hebrew to Greek (in Matth. 12.13).

The importance of Hebrew Matthew is that it not only contradicts Greek Matthew in numerous places, but the famous, classic sentence describing the trinity, the pillar of Catholicism is not even mentioned at all which supports the Protestant claim that the Catholic Church itself corrupted the New Testament and gravely sinned by putting words in the mouth of Jesus and selling it as God’s word for two thousands years.

In conclusion.

I am not suggesting that the entire New Testament is worthless or unusable, just that if we are really seeking truth in this world and truly trying to be with God then the weight of the evidence shows everyone that: the NT is not perfect as millions of ignorant people around the world presume and take for granted, nor is it a word for word document from God, nor can it be trusted 100% because men very well may have added to it or subtracted from it. If someone finds Gospels from before 125 CE, a lot of the problems will be clarified but until that day comes we are all stuck in doubt and shrouded by lies. If any of this has made an impression upon you then you have a duty upon yourself to pursue this to see where it will take, the worst that can happen is that you learn more about the world that you live in and about history.

With love of Israel

Ben Mordecchai

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