Listen Up: the King James Bible (also known as the Authorised Version, or AV, after the wording of the preface) was commissioned by the new king with one specific purpose -- to reinforce the notion of divine right to rule. Simply, Jamess accession of the English throne was deeply unpopular and he figured the quickest way to silence his critics was to establish that he had a God-given right to rule. Meanwhile in mainland Europe, Catholic scholars were working on another translation (the Douay-Rheims) with the exact opposite agenda. Still think the Bible is infallible? The name of God, recorded as Jehovah in the AV, was written as YHWH in the original (Ancient Hebrew) text. The name itself was so sacred it couldnt be written down, hence the missing vowels. So how did they find them? Simples, they made them up. Read Genesis again: it contains two different accounts of the creation (In the beginning, there was nothing / In the beginning, there was chaos) and is clearly the work of three separate authors (look at the naming conventions for God). Furthermore, if we take it literally, the entire Pentateuch (or Torah, the first five books of the Bible) was supposed to have been written by Moses, but, um, it narrates Mosess death. As to the Rapture: did you know the Whore of Babylon was Rome? So according to Revelations, the Second Coming would coincide with the fall of Rome. Either Jesus is 600 years too late, or those who want to be raptured need to get storming the Vatican. Then theres the apocrypha, aka the books which never made the Bible. Worth a read, there be dragons! The Bible is a selectively-written and politically-manipulated account of an oral narrative, the events surrounding which occurred hundreds of years before the earliest surviving texts which documented them (and we all know how quickly stories change with the telling), written in at least three dead languages, translated into a couple more (now also dead) languages, and retranslated again and again in the years since. If the Bible ever was the word of God, it is no longer.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 12:43:37 +0000
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