posted
The Bible is a history book as a well as a spiritual book.
It’s a book written entirely by black people. Yeah that's right, not a single book in the Bible was written by a white man.
The Bible is the only black history book that goes back more than 6000 years yet many of you fail to realize what an absolute treasure it is.
Please turn to this great book when talking about black history because much of what is in there is eye witness account of black history spanning 6000+ years.
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posted
No the Bible is not a history book,as it is a religious guide to good living,the Bible can be used to suppliment history in very limited cases.
Posts: 6546 | From: japan | Registered: Feb 2009
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posted
Many of us ignored the Bible because of the terrible experiences we had growing up in a superficial Christianity set-up. It is not to say the Bible isn't solid.
I personally try to see how the themes match AE themes but I must admit, it has been the case of ever-knowing but never-KNOWING for me.
Some people take the Bible too literally, for example, I know an elderly Christian man who insisted he was Job and proceeded to live his life out that way. Me personally, I don't buy that. I mean I can buy into trying to live "like" King Solomon (this would be my model) but to try to live out King Solomon's actual story is just ridiculous to me (apologies if I offend).
In any case, my faith in God/Supreme-Creator is not dependent on any one holy book. Call me foolish, chastise me if you will, but I don't believe any Book or man has the right to stand between man and his Creator, whether he is in tune with his Creator or not.
Posts: 368 | From: Oxford | Registered: Jan 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Twix-: Some people take the Bible too literally, for example, I know an elderly Christian man who insisted he was Job and proceeded to live his life out that way. Me personally, I don't buy that. I mean I can buy into trying to live "like" King Solomon (this would be my model) but to try to live out King Solomon's actual story is just ridiculous to me (apologies if I offend).
If our black ancestors wrote those accounts for our benefit what is wrong in taking them literally? Wouldn't that be exactly the reason they recorded the information in the first place?
quote: In any case, my faith in God/Supreme-Creator is not dependent on any one holy book. Call me foolish, chastise me if you will, but I don't believe any Book or man has the right to stand before man and his Creator, whether he is in tune with his Creator or not.
Well, but the Bible does more than tell you about how to worship God. For instance it is the only book that tells you why Africa and the black race is in the mess it is in. You can not ignore information coming from such a source when everything it prophesied is a living reality for the black race today.
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quote:Originally posted by Twix-: Some people take the Bible too literally, for example, I know an elderly Christian man who insisted he was Job and proceeded to live his life out that way. Me personally, I don't buy that. I mean I can buy into trying to live "like" King Solomon (this would be my model) but to try to live out King Solomon's actual story is just ridiculous to me (apologies if I offend).
If our black ancestors wrote those accounts for our benefit what is wrong in taking them literally? Wouldn't that be exactly the reason they recorded the information in the first place?
I can understand the prophesies and how we should take them seriously... the Book of Revelations is particularly disturbing given even the most recent world events.
And regarding them writing down the info for the sake of us FULFILLING it, that's neither here nor there for someone who is not an adept in Bible matters. I would say a deep and thorough study of the Bible by the INDIVIDUAL is neccessary before he/she can hope to fulfill anything in there. A man with any sense, will not "WITH OPEN EYES" to subject himself to the whims of priests and nuns as many Pentecostals clearly do.
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posted
OK here is the problem,are you saying the Bible as it stands now was written by blacks for blacks?
Posts: 6546 | From: japan | Registered: Feb 2009
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quote:Originally posted by Brada-Anansi: No the Bible is not a history book,as it is a religious guide to good living,the Bible can be used to suppliment history in very limited cases.
I take it you know very little of what is in the Bible.
Take my word for it. The Bible is the best black history book available. Nothing comes close in comparison.
It documents your ancestors from the time of Adam, through their four hundred years sojourn in Africa as slaves to the ancient Egyptians. Then it narrates how they won their freedom and went to build Israel. It follows on and then documents how Israel met its demise at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians. After which the survivors of the Israelites fled back to the ancient Egyptians and have remained in Africa ever since. As you can see all this info about your ancestors is recorded for your benefit.
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posted
I think the only way you could start to believe in it would be if you could be reading it in the original language(s) it was written. The problem is that subtle changes have taken place in the telling of the information, during many translations through the years. Also there is evidence that parts of it were omitted from translations, so you can never have the full story as it was intended....
I agree with Twix's comment about trying to match themes...and think that you would probably go mad in the end!
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quote:Originally posted by Brada-Anansi: OK here is the problem,are you saying the Bible as it stands now was written by blacks for blacks?
YUP! Not a single book was written by a white man. If you disagree, there are sixty-six books that make up the Bible, I would challenge you to show me a single book of the sixty-six that was written by any white man.
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quote:Originally posted by Fayrowla: I think the only way you could start to believe in it would be if you could be reading it in the original language(s) it was written. The problem is that subtle changes have taken place in the telling of the information, during many translations through the years. Also there is evidence that parts of it were omitted from translations, so you can never have the full story as it was intended....
I agree with Twix's comment about trying to match themes...and think that you would probably go mad in the end!
^ Yes, I noticed the themes are rather upside down in some places.
So for example where a character might be "good" in the AE version of the story, the character may have become "evil" in the Christian version of the story.
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quote:Originally posted by Twix-: And regarding them writing down the info for the sake of us FULFILLING it, that's neither here nor there for someone who is not an adept in Bible matters. I would say a deep and thorough study of the Bible by the INDIVIDUAL is neccessary before he/she can hope to fulfill anything in there. A man with any sense, will not "WITH OPEN EYES" to subject himself to the whims of priests and nuns as many Pentecostals clearly do.
Absolutely correct. That’s why you need to study the Bible for yourself and not listen to hearsay regarding it.
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quote:Originally posted by Fayrowla: I think the only way you could start to believe in it would be if you could be reading it in the original language(s) it was written. The problem is that subtle changes have taken place in the telling of the information, during many translations through the years. Also there is evidence that parts of it were omitted from translations, so you can never have the full story as it was intended....
I agree with Twix's comment about trying to match themes...and think that you would probably go mad in the end!
The original texts are still available for comparison. You would find most of the information in most modern Bibles are very accurate when compared to what is written and preserved in the dead sea scrolls.
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quote:Originally posted by Energy: Absolutely correct. That’s why you need to study the Bible for yourself and not listen to hearsay regarding it.
Yes, Trust Yourself to be able to acquire/deciper knowledge. Then make your own decisions on how you're going to apply it.
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posted
So the Nicene confrence did not happend under a Roman pagan Emporor called Constantine the great? and king James did not have his version written by one William Shakespeare.And as far as ancestors go they were just as likely to be slave masters as they were slaves.and if you want can have Dr Kwesi or DR Ben walk you through the Kemetic temples where those Christian concepts originated.as a matter o fact If you link to TNV you can view Dr Kwesi's Videos of him in Kemet taking you temple by temple and showing you their sacred text carved in stone for all eternity.
Posts: 6546 | From: japan | Registered: Feb 2009
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quote:Originally posted by Twix-: If our black ancestors wrote those accounts for our benefit what is wrong in taking them literally?
Remember when Adam and Even hid from God?
"And the voice of God walked through the garden of Eden ... "
I know what you mean though .. and i know what it means. I feel i come to enlightenment with the heavenly father's will, but that's what everything takes so..
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quote:Originally posted by Brada-Anansi: So the Nicene confrence did not happend under a Roman pagan Emporor called Constantine the great? and king James did not have his version written by one William Shakespeare.And as far as ancestors go they were just as likely to be slave masters as they were slaves.and if you want can have Dr Kwesi or DR Ben walk you through the Kemetic temples where those Christian concepts originated.as a matter o fact If you link to TNV you can view Dr Kwesi's Videos of him in Kemet taking you temple by temple and showing you their sacred text carved in stone for all eternity.
What you are saying has nothing to do with who the authors of the scriptures are. The Nicene conference was when white Europeans decided to adopt the black man's Bible and belief as their de facto religion and faith. By the time of the Nicene conference all of the Bible had already been written.
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posted
Energy – You are certainly welcome to your own religious beliefs; but when you play them off as more than beliefs, but rather facts, then I think that you have crossed the line.
History of The Bible
The Christian Bible consists of the Old Testament and the New Testament, with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox versions of the Old Testament being slightly larger because of their acceptance of certain books, and parts of books, considered apocryphal by Protestants. The Jewish (European) Bible includes only the books known to Christians as the Old Testament. The arrangements of the Jewish and Christian canons differ considerably. The Protestant and Roman Catholic arrangements more nearly match one another.
Apocryphal - Of doubtful authenticity
Canon - The usually codified law governing a Church: the body of principles, rules, standards, or norms of a Church.
Note: No original religious writings of the ancient Hebrews (except for the “Dead Sea Scrolls” which have not been made public) are known to currently exist, likewise no known copies of the original Septuagint are known to exist.
The first Bible: The Septuagint The History of the Septuagint, and its Terminology.
The SEPTUAGINT, derived from the Latin word for "seventy," Septuagint, can be a confusing term, since it ideally refers to the mid 200 B.C. translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in Alexandria, Egypt. There is a complicated story however, behind the translation and the various stages, amplifications, and modifications to the collection we now call the Septuagint.
The earliest, and best known source for the story of the Septuagint, is the Letter of Aristeas, a lengthy document that recalls how the Ptolemy’s – the Greek family that Alexander the Great set up to rule Egypt for him – specifically Philadelphus II (285–247 B.C.), who desiring to augment his library in Alexandria Egypt, commissioned a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. He wrote to the chief priest Eleazar in Jerusalem, and arranged for six translators from each of the twelve tribes of Israel to come to Egypt for that purpose.
The seventy-two (altered in a few later versions to seventy or seventy-five) translators arrived in Egypt to the Ptolemy's gracious hospitality, and translated the Pentateuch: the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, believed to have been written by Moses, in seventy-two days. There is no information available, as to how differing versions between individuals and tribes were resolved. Although opinions as to when this occurred differ, scholars find 282 B.C. to be an attractive date.
As attested by the Dead Sea Scrolls (the oldest known Hebrew scriptures, there was no “ONE” Hebrew belief or Canon at this time. Rather there were many sects, each with their own beliefs – some quite radical. Thus Ptolemy's need for many translators from each tribe, in hope of getting a consensus of the Hebrew religion. How much of the material presented was written (and when it was written), and how much was oral is unknown.
Those that dispute that Moses wrote the Pentateuch give as reasons..
1) One passage describes a sequence of events; a later passage states that they happened in a different order. Presumably Moses would have remembered the proper sequence.
2) In the story of the Flood, one passage has Noah collecting two of each species while another passage states that he collected 14. One verse describes water coming from the heavens and from below the ground; another describes all of the water falling as rain. The duration of the rain differs between two verses.
3) Genesis 11:31 describes Abraham as living in the city Ur, and identifies that location with the Chaldeans. But the Chaldeans did not exist as a tribe at the time of Abraham; they rose to power much later, in the 1st millennium B.C.
4) Deuteronomy 34 describes the death of Moses. It is difficult to attribute the description of a funeral to the deceased.
5) One passage in Genesis 33 has Jacob legally purchasing the location of Shechem for the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel. Genesis 34 has Jacob's sons killing all of the men of Shechem by a deceitful trick.
6) The first part of the story in Numbers 25 about the rebellion at Peor referred to Moabite women; the second part said that they were Midianites.
7) Moses is described as going to the Tabernacle in a passage where the Tabernacle had not yet been built.
8) A list of Edomite kings included some monarchs who were in power after Moses' death.
9) Some locations are identified by names that were invented long after the death of Moses. One example is seen in Genesis 14:14; it refers to the city of Dan. That name did not exist until a long time after Moses' death.
10) There are many verses in the Torah that state that something has lasted "to this day". That appears to have been written by a writer who composed the passages at a much later date.
11) Numbers 12:3 states "Now the man Moses was very humble, more than all men who were on the face of the earth." (NKJ) If Moses were that humble, it is unlikely that he would have described himself in these terms.
12) Deuteronomy 34:10 states "There has never been another prophet like Moses..." (NLT) This sounds like a passage written long after Moses' death.
The Shape of the Septuagint
The translation habits of the Septuagint vary from book to book. In some cases (e.g., Ecclesiastes), the Greek is a very literal, almost wooden, translation of the Hebrew. In other cases (e.g., Proverbs), it is more drawn-out. The quality and kind of translation must be taken on a book by book basis.
In many cases, it seems the SEPTUAGINT is based on a version of the Hebrew Scriptures that is different from the standard Masoretic text (MT), of 600-1000 A.D. There are a number of books in the Septuagint where the differences between the SEPTUAGINT and MT are very striking.
For instance: In SEPTUAGINT, Jeremiah is shorter than in MT Jeremiah by roughly one-eighth, and the order of its chapters is quite different.
In SEPTUAGINT, Job is about one-sixth smaller than in MT Job, and includes an ending not found in the Hebrew.
Almost half of the verses in SEPTUAGINT Esther are not found in MT Esther.
Material in SEPTUAGINT Exodus and MT Exodus differ in many places according to order of verses, and inclusion/exclusion of words and material. Scholars vary as to their explanation for these differences, but in many cases, they suggest that the SEPTUAGINT reflects a very early Hebrew text no longer available to us. It is often difficult to say categorically how much in the SEPTUAGINT should correct the MT, since some books suggest more clear-cut changes to the Hebrew than others. This may frustrate some readers who would prefer a clear-cut account of the transmission of the Hebrew text, since close study of the SEPTUAGINT tends to raise more questions than answers.
Nevertheless, this much seems certain: the MT changed over time, and the SEPTUAGINT is a crucial witness to this process. Some of the differences between the SEPTUAGINT and MT crop up in the New Testament (NT), which draws extensively, but not exclusively, from the SEPTUAGINT. The meaning of the theological vocabulary of the NT is interlocked with that of the SEPTUAGINT, especially in the Pauline writings, and the peculiarities of the SEPTUAGINT are readily apparent in NT quotations.
Notable is SEPTUAGINT Isaiah 7.14, which promises that a virgin will be with child. MT Isaiah 7.14 reports her merely as a "woman" (Heb: almah). Thus the argument behind Matthew 1.23, which cites this verse as a prophecy of Jesus Christ, only makes sense given the reading in the SEPTUAGINT. This, and examples like it, prompted early Christians to attribute to the SEPTUAGINT a special status, so as to safeguard the authority of the NT. As a result, the differences between the SEPTUAGINT and MT directly contributed to the distinct directions Judaism and Christianity took in Late Antiquity.
Although a factor for division, the SEPTUAGINT also constitutes common ground, since it bears witness to the way Greek-speaking Hebrews, before the Christian era, read and interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures. By their efforts, those who produced the SEPTUAGINT established a certain vocabulary and set of ideas that markedly changed the literature of the Graeco-Roman world. Many of these peculiarly Hebrew ways of reading the Bible filtered into the Christian community, often to the dismay of early pagan critics of Christianity (Celsus and Porphyry, notably), who saw in the SEPTUAGINT solecisms and myths.
The early Christians who responded to these charges generally refused to be embarrassed by the SEPTUAGINT, and often sought to transform the sense and sensibility of the ancient world in favor of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Septuagint is of importance too, because it is translated from texts now lost. No copy of the original translation exists and textual difficulties abound.
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The Egyptian historian "Manetho" (305–282 B.C.), writes about the Hyksos (Hebrew) expulsion: Quote: "And it was also reported that the priest, who ordained their polity and their laws, was by birth of Heliopolis, and his name was Osarsiph from Osyris, who was the god of Heliopolis; but that when he was gone over to these people, his name was changed, and he was called "Moses".Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005
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In the time of Antiochus IV a Greek translation of the Pentateuch was being prepared in Alexandria, where a large Jewish population had been transferred by Ptolemy Philadelphus in the previous century. The Jews of Alexandria had gradually lost their knowledge of the ancient Hebrew language, and many had adopted the Hellenistic culture to some extent.
In the document known as the Letter of Aristeas, which scholars believe was written by a Hellenistic Jew in the mid second century BC, an elaborate story is related about how the translation of the Pentateuch was done, and the reasons for it, and the circumstances. The Aristeas document pretends to date from more than a century earlier, and the setting of the story is the court of Ptolemy Philadelpus in Alexandria. Some scholars view the work as fiction, but nevertheless, it is the basis for the name by which the Greek Bible has become known, the "Septuagint" or "LXX". It is also regarded as an important source document for the history of the period.
The Aristeas story was clearly intended to persuade Jews of the authority and sanctity of the new Greek text. Whatever the specific date the translation occurred, evidence within the Bible itself, in the prophecy of Daniel chapter 8, suggests that changes to the cosmology of the Bible were ordered by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (Greek king of Mesopotamia), who reigned in the second century B.C. These changes, in the guise of "corrections", probably first appeared in the Greek translation of the scriptures, and were subsequently introduced into the Hebrew text from the Greek.
The Letter of Aristeas indicates that when the Greek translation of the Bible appeared, it was claimed that the new Greek text was even more authoritative than the Hebrew text. The Aristeas text contains a document purportedly written by Demetrius of Phalerum, the president of the library of Philadelphus the king. This document is reproduced below. Demetrius claims the Hebrew scriptures had been "somewhat carelessly committed to writing and are not in their original form." Further, this was supported by the evidence of "experts." Demetrius proposed that this could be rectified by making the new translation.
THE MEMORANDUM OF DEMETRIUS
An exerpt from the Letter of Aristeas, lines 28-34
When this business had been dealt with, he ordered Demetrius to submit a memorandum about the copying of the Jewish books. For at the court of these kings, everything was managed by means of decrees, and with maximum security, and nothing was done in an offhand or casual manner. This is a copy of the memorandum:
To the Great King, from Demetrius. In accordance with your Majesty's order concerning the library, that books needed to complete the collection should be acquired and added, and that those accidentally damaged should receive suitable attention, I submit the following report, having attended to my responsibility in the matter in no casual manner. Books of the Law of the Jews, with some few others, are wanting. For it happens that these books are written in the Hebrew script and language, but, according to the evidence of the experts, have been somewhat carelessly committed to writing and are not in their original form; for they have never had the benefit of royal attention.
It is important that these books, duly corrected, should find a place in your library, because this legislation, in as much as it is divine, is of philosophical importance and of innate integrity. For this reason writers and poets and the great majority of historians have avoided reference to the above mentioned books and to the people who have lived and are living in accordance with them because, as Hecataeus of Abdera says, the view of life presented in them has a certain sanctity and holiness. If then, your Majesty approves, a letter shall be written to the high priest in Jerusalem, asking him to send elders of exemplary lives, expert in their country's Law, six from each tribe, so that having established the agreement of the majority and obtained an accurate translation, we may give the book a distinguished place in our library, in keeping both with the importance of the affair and of your own purpose. May you ever prosper!
In view of this memorandum, the king ordered a letter on the subject to be written to Eleazar.
The parts of the original Hebrew scriptures, and specifically, the Pentateuch, most likely to have been viewed by Greeks and Hellenistic Jews at Alexandria as needing such modification, were cosmological passages such as the creation account of Genesis 1, that omitted mention of the rigid sky and Olympus in appropriate places. The concept of a rigid sky was essential for the Greek geocentric theory, but would be entirely absent in the original Hebrew text.
The ancient Greek philosophers and poets believed in a stationary earth at the center of the universe. At night they could observe stars revolving in a circle around a point in the northern sky, so it seemed as though the heavens were in continual circular motion. They reasoned that the stars must be attached to a rigid heaven, that held them fixed in the sky, so that their positions did not change relative to one another as the sky turned. Above this rigid heaven was a great reservoir of water. The mystery of the rigid heaven was the focus of their religion. The starry heaven of the night and the blue daylight sky, were identified as "Zeus Olympus" by the Greeks, and the same deity was referred to as "Jupiter" or "Jove" by the Romans. The words "Zeus" as well as "Deus" are derived from an old Indo-European root meaning "to shine". "Jupiter" is derived from Deus (sky) + Pater (father).
Thus, the above statement by Demetrius alleging deviations from the "original form" existed in the Hebrew scriptures seems very much like a ruse or a pretext for altering the cosmology of the Greek version of the scripture, and Letter of Aristeas apears an attempt to explain the discrepancy between the Hebrew and the Greek text, which was subsequently hidden when the Hebrew text was altered to conform to the Greek. The changes, identifying the 'raqia' with the sky had been introduced into the Greek translation; the Letter of Aristeas was apparently designed to account for them.
The Memorandum of Demetrius provides clear evidence that alterations were made to the scriptures, resulting in discrepancies between the Hebrew and the new Greek version; these were the parts that had been "somewhat carelessly committed to writing" and so were "not in their original form." The story related by Aristeas about the translation of the Pentateuch in Alexandria presents the new Greek text as superior to the Hebrew. The Greek text is touted as the more accurate version, in which the deficiencies due to "careless transcription" had presumably been corrected by the Israelite scholars.
The Septuagint continued.
According to Philo of Alexandria (100 A.D, he lived 200 years afterward?), only the Pentateuch was commissioned to be translated: and some modern scholars have concurred, noting a kind of consistency in the style of the Greek Pentateuch. Over the course of the next three centuries however, other books of the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek in an order that is not altogether clear. By observing technical terms and translation styles, and by comparing the Greek versions to the Dead Sea Scrolls, (see below), and by comparing them to Hellenistic literature, scholars are trying to stitch together a history of the translations that eventually found their way into collections. It seems that sometimes a Hebrew book was translated more than once, or that a particular Greek translation was revised. In other cases, a work was composed afresh in Greek, yet was included in the collection of original scriptures. Philo of Alexandria –Greek speaking Hebrew philosopher, considered the most important representative of Greek Judaism. His writings provide the clearest view of this development in Judaism.
By Philo's time, the seventy-two translators enjoyed a religious cult following, Pilgrims both Jews and Gentiles, celebrated a yearly festival on the island where the translators were purported to have conducted their work. The popularity of the legend of the translation helps to explain why, when we first hear Christians explicitly mention the translation in the mid-second century (Justin Martyr and Irenaeus), the entire Old Testament in Greek, whether originally written in Hebrew or not, is credited to the Seventy-two. Thus, from the second century onwards, Christians embraced a Septuagint that encompassed a larger body of literature than was found in the Hebrew Scriptures, and they attributed it all, to the work of the seventy-two ancient Jewish translators.
For their part, Hebrew rabbis, particularly Pharisees, reacted to the Christian appropriation of their Scriptures by producing fresh translations of their Scriptures (e.g., Aquila, in 128 A.D, or Symmachus in the late 200 A.D.), and also by discouraging the use of the Septuagint. In any case, in the second century, Christian and Hebrew leaders seemed to stake out and codify their position on the form and character of the Scriptures. By and large, Christians held to the peculiar, prophetic character of their Septuagint, while Hebrews rejected it.
In the third century A.D, the great Christian scholar, Origen (184–254), keenly interested in the textual differences between the Hebrew and the Greek, set out to arrange the Church's Old Testament in six columns: 1) the Hebrew, 2) a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew, 3) Aquila's translation, 4) Symmachus's translation, 5) the Septuagint, and 6) Theodotion.
The volumes were compiled in Caesarea, probably between 230 and 240 A.D, a project funded by Origen's patron. The resultant work, the Hexapla, was massive, and has for the most part perished, probably due to cost and labor of transcribing all 3600 folios for posterity. Although Origen was a very careful scholar, it seems that he composed his version of the SEPTUAGINT from several different manuscripts and preferred readings that brought the text into conformity with the Hebrew. Thus, this fifth SEPTUAGINT column, while establishing the first "standardized text" of the Christian Church, created problems for modern scholars who would seek to recover a pre-Christian version of the SEPTUAGINT.
Further recensions of the Greek text in the fourth century are also attested. Hesychius (3/400 A.D.) is said to have created a recension for the Church in Egypt; Lucian (312 A.D.), did one in Antioch. Some scholars believe that there were even more recensions from this period. Thus, we find some Greek Church Fathers varying widely amongst themselves in their Old Testament citations. There is no indication however, that this was troubling to Church leadership. The insistence on letter-for-letter, word-for-word accuracy in the Scriptures was a feature that was not to emerge in Christian thought for many centuries to come, and then in imitation of Hebrew models. As far as early Christians were concerned, any Greek version of the Old Testament read in the Church merited the term Septuagint.
Recensions - A critical revision of a text.
Wherever Christianity spread, translations of the Hebrew Scriptures were made based on the SEPTUAGINT. Thus, it became the basis for translations into Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Old Latin, Coptic, Georgian, and Old Church Slavonic. (It was not the basis for either, the Syriac version (known as the Peshitta), which is a pre-Christian translation based directly upon the Hebrew, or for St. Jerome's Latin translation, which is also based on the Hebrew.)
Modern scholars, sifting through this very interesting and eventful history, have attempted to create editions of the Septuagint that reflect as early a text as possible. Rahlfs's edition of the SEPTUAGINT (1935) is a diplomatic one, utilizing what he believed to be the chief manuscripts. Brooke, McLean, and Thackeray's partial edition (1906–40) sought a more critical approach. The Göttingen edition of the SEPTUAGINT (1931– ), now mostly complete, is the most critical edition of the SEPTUAGINT, taking into account over 120 manuscripts, many languages, and a multitude of patristic quotations. Modern Biblical scholars have accepted the Göttingen as the standard working edition, although the ease and accessibility of Rahlfs's edition has made it popular for less exacting work and study.
Thus, "Septuagint" could refer to any one or more of the states of the Greek translation throughout history. It is important to understand specifically what is meant in any given discussion of the SEPTUAGINT. A strict, purist use of "Septuagint" would allow the term to be used for only the earliest, (and probably) unrecoverable translation of the Pentateuch made by the Jewish scholars ca. 282 B.C. (some refer to this as the "Old Greek," but with some confusion, since the assignment of this term forces "Septuagint" to be applied to texts with no direct connection to the legend of the seventy-two). For our purposes, we use "Septuagint" to refer to the entire tradition of Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and not to any single text or edition.
The Masoretic text (MT)
(From Hebrew masoreth, “tradition”), the traditional Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible, meticulously assembled and codified, and supplied with diacritical marks to enable correct pronunciation. This monumental work was begun around 600 A.D. and completed in 1000 A.D. by scholars at academies in Babylonia and Palestine, in an effort to reproduce, as far as possible, the original text of the Hebrew Old Testament. Their intention was not to interpret the meaning of the Scriptures but to transmit to future generations the authentic Word of God. To this end, they gathered manuscripts and whatever oral traditions were available to them at the time.
During the middle years of the Masoretic’s creation, the powerful and influential Khazars, converted to the Hebrew religion. It is not known what input or effect, the Khazars had on the final version of the Masoretic text, or how closely the modern Jewish Bible reflects the Masoretic text.
Khazars – An ancient Turkic people who appeared in Transcaucasia, {the transitional region between Europe and Asia, extending from the Greater Caucasus to the Turkish and Iranian borders, between the Black and Caspian seas.} in the 2nd cent. A.D, and subsequently settled in the lower Volga region. They emerged as a force in the 7th century and rose to great power. By the 8th century the Khazar empire extended from the northern shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to the Urals and as far westward as Kiev. Also in the 8th Century, the Khazars converted to the Hebrew religion and made Judaism the State religion. “Itil” the Khazar capital in the Volga delta, was a great commercial center. The Khazar Empire fell, when Sviatoslav, duke of Kiev (945–72), son of Igor and of St. Olga, defeated its army in 965 A.D. The Khazars are the progenitors of European Jewry, the entomology of the term Jew or Jewish probably relates to these people.
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In its general framework, the Old Testament is the account of God's dealing with the Hebrews as his chosen people. The first six books of the Old Testament narrate how the Israelites became a people and settled in the Promised Land. The following seven books continue their story in the Promised Land, describing the establishment and development of the monarchy and the messages of the prophets. The last 11 books contain poetry, theology, and some additional historical works. The term Old Testament was devised by a Christian, Melito of Sardis, about AD 170 to distinguish this part of the Bible from the later New Testament.
The Hebrew canon recognizes the following subdivisions of the Old Testaments three main divisions:
1) The Torah/Pentateuch, in the broadest sense the substance of divine revelation to the Hebrew people: God's revealed teaching or guidance for mankind. The meaning of “Torah” is often restricted to signify the first five books of the Old Testament, also called the Law or the Pentateuch. These are the books traditionally ascribed to Moses, the recipient of the original revelation from God on Mount Sinai. Jewish, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant canons all agree on their order: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
2) The Nevi'im/The Prophets the second division of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. In the Hebrew canon the Prophets are divided into (1) the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) and (2) the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel - and the Twelve, or Minor, Prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi). This canon, though somewhat fluid up to the early 2nd century BC, was finally fixed by a council of rabbis at Jabneh (Jamnia), now in Israel, at about 100 A.D.
2a) The Protestant canon follows the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament. It calls the Former Prophets the Historical Books, and subdivides two of them into Samuel I and II, and Kings I and II. Some Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox versions further divide Kings into four books. Maccabees I and II are also included in the Roman and Eastern canons as historical books.
2b) The Prophets in the Protestant canon include Isaiah (which appears in two books in some Catholic versions), Jeremiah, and Ezekiel from the Hebrew Latter Prophets. The Minor Prophets (The Twelve) are treated as 12 separate books; thus the Protestant canon has 17 prophetic books. The Roman Catholics accept the book of Baruch, including as its 6th chapter the Letter of Jeremiah, both considered apocryphal by Jews and Protestants.
3) The Ketuvim/The Writings, the third division of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. Divided into four sections, the Ketuvim includes: Poetical books (Psalms, Proverbs, and Job), the Megillot, or Scrolls (Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations of Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes, and Esther), prophecy (Daniel), and history (Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles I and II).
3a) Thus the Ketuvim is a miscellaneous collection of liturgical poetry, secular love poetry, wisdom literature, history, apocalyptic literature, a short story, and a romantic tale. They were composed over a long period of time—from before the Babylonian Exile in the early 6th century B.C. to the middle of the 2nd century B.C. — and were not entirely accepted as canonical until the 200 A.D. Unlike the Torah and the Nevi'im (Prophets), which were canonized as groups, each book of the Ketuvim was canonized separately, often on the basis of its popularity.
The total number of books in the Hebrew canon is 24, the number of scrolls on which these works were written in ancient times. The Old Testament as adopted by Christianity numbers more works for the following reasons. The Roman Catholic canon, derived initially from the Greek-language Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible, absorbed a number of books that Jews and Protestants later determined were not canonical (see apocrypha); and Christians divided some of the original Hebrew works into two or more parts, specifically, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles (two parts each), Ezra-Nehemiah (two separate books), and the Minor Prophets (12 separate books).
In the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, various types of literature are represented; the purpose of the Apocrypha seems to have been to fill in some of the gaps left by the undisputed canonical books and to carry the history of Israel forward to the 2nd century B.C.
Old Testament pseudepigrapha are extremely numerous and offer accounts of patriarchs and events, attributed to various biblical personages from Adam to Zechariah. Some of the most significant of these works are the Ascension of Isaiah, the Assumption of Moses, the Life of Adam and Eve, the First and Second Books of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Letter of Aristeas, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Pseudepigrapha – Are works usually spuriously attributing authorship to some biblical character. Pseudepigrapha are not included in any canon.
The New Testament
The New Testament is the second and later, also smaller of the two major divisions of the Christian Bible, and the portion that is canonical (authoritative) only to Christianity.
Christians see the New Testament as the fulfillment of the promise of the Old Testament. It recounts the life and ministry of Jesus and interprets its meaning for the early church. Like the Old Testament, the New Testament is a collection of books, including a variety of early Christian literature.
The New Testament focuses especially on the new covenant created between God and the followers of Jesus. There are 27 books in the New Testament: The four Gospels of the New Testament deal with the life, the person, and the teachings of Jesus, as he was remembered by the Christian community. The book of Acts carries the story of Christianity from the Resurrection of Jesus to the end of the career of the Apostle Paul; The Letters (21), or Epistles, are correspondence by various leaders of the early Christian church, chief among them the Apostle Paul, applying the message of the church to the sundry needs and problems of early Christian congregations; and the Book of Revelation, a description of the coming apocalypse. The Book of Revelation is the only accepted canonical representative of a large genre of apocalyptic literature that appeared in the early Christian movement.
Apocalypse - The Jewish and Christian writings of 200 B.C. to A.D. 150 marked by pseudonymity – (a fictitious name), symbolic imagery, and the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil and raises the righteous to life in a messianic kingdom.
Most are believed to have been written shortly after Jesus’ death in the later 1st century A.D, though none can be dated precisely. Only two authors are known for certain: St. Paul, credited with 13 epistles; and St. Luke, writer of the third gospel and the Book of Acts. Attributions of other authors range from highly likely (for the other three gospels) to completely unknown (for the Epistle to the Hebrews). These documents circulated among the early churches and were used as preaching and teaching sources. The earliest known list of the current New Testament canons dates from 367 A.D, in a work by St. Athanasius. A church council of 382 A.D, gave final approval to the list.
Heretical movements such as Gnosticism and Montanism spawned a great body of New Testament pseudepigrapha. The existence of such purported scriptures lent great impetus to the process of canonization in the young and orthodox Christian Church.
Heretical - A religious opinion contrary to church dogma.
All the New Testament apocrypha are pseudepigraphal, and most of them fall into the categories of acts, gospels, and epistles, though there are a number of apocalypses and some can be characterized as wisdom books. The apocryphal acts purport to relate the lives or careers of various biblical figures, including most of the apostles; the epistles, gospels, and others are ascribed to such figures. Some relate encounters and events in mystical language and describe arcane rituals.
Most of these works, arose from sects that had been or would be declared heretical, such as the Gnostics. Some of them argued against various heresies, and a few appear to have been neutral efforts to popularize the life of some saint or other early leader of the church, including a number of women. In the early decades of Christianity no orthodoxy had been established, and various parties or factions were vying for ascendancy and regularity in the young church. All sought through their writings, as through their preaching and missions, to win believers. In this setting virtually all works advocating beliefs that later became heretical, were destined to denunciation and destruction.
In addition to apocryphal works per se, the New Testament includes a number of works and fragments that are described by a second meaning of the term deuterocanonical: (“added later”). The Letter to the Hebrews attributed to Paul, who died before it was written, is one of these; others are the letters of James, Peter (II), John (II and III), and Jude, and the Revelation to John. Fragments include Mark 16:9–20, Luke 22:43–44, and John 7:53 and 8:1–11. All are included in the Roman Catholic canon and are accepted by the Eastern Church and most Protestant churches.
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New Testament references to the “mysteries of the kingdom of heaven” (for example), Matthew 13:11; Mark 4:11; Luke 8:10) generated myth and legend. The New Testament emphasis on secrecy and on the mysteries of salvation became fertile ground for the exfoliations of myth and legend. Things hidden from the beginning of the world now blossomed in the signs of the new messianic age. These truths, now come to light, should be proclaimed to the whole world. Through myth and legend, Christians transmitted and explored, with the full force of the imagination, the wonders revealed in Christ and the secrets of his salvation.
Esoteric traditions, especially those based on apocalypses and apocrypha (such as the Apocalypse of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, Secret Gospel of Mark, and Gospel of Philip) preserve some legends and myths descending from the early Christian centers of Edessa, Alexandria, and Asia Minor. The First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus (known also as the Arabic Infancy Gospel) recounts that one day, Jesus and his playmates were playing on a rooftop and one boy fell down and died. The other playmates ran away, leaving Jesus accused of pushing the dead boy. Jesus, however, went to the dead boy and asked, “Zeinunus”, who threw you down from the housetop?” The dead boy answered that Jesus had not done it and named another (I Infancy 19:4–11).
This and other such narratives describe the “hidden life” of Jesus in the 30 years before his public ministry began. The Acts of Paul narrates the story of a friend of Paul who was thrown to the lions—one of which defended her in a manner similar to that of the lion in the story of Androcles, a well-known legend. Other exemplary legends appear in the Acts of the Martyrs and other histories. After Christian theologians defined orthodoxies in terms of Greek philosophy or Roman juridical code, these mythic themes appeared clumsy or tasteless and in retrospect, heterodox or even heretical.
Groups of Gnostics and heretics, who based their ideas on alternative mythologies of Christian salvation, furnished exotic Christian myths, legends, and practices. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D, these groups often subscribed to theories of dualism, that is: the world of matter was created by an evil god (of the Book of Genesis), and the realm of the spirit was created by a good god (revealed in the New Testament), and they were irreconcilably pitted against one another.
Many Gnostic sects—among them the Valentinians, Basilidians, Ophites, and Simonians—developed a variety of myths. Valentinus lived in Rome and Alexandria in the mid-2nd century. Valentinian myths describe how the pleroma (spiritual realm) that existed in the beginning was disrupted by a fall. The Creator God of Genesis, aborted from the primordial world, became a Demiurge and created the material universe. He deliberately created two kinds of human being and animated them with his breath: these were the hylics and the psychics. Demiurge - A subordinate deity who is the creator of the material world.
Unknown to the Demiurge however, certain remnants of pleromic wisdom contained in his breath lodged as spiritual particles in matter and produced a third group of beings called pneumatics. The God of Genesis now tries to prevent Gnostics from discovering their past origins, present powers, and future destinies. Gnostics (the pneumatics) contain within themselves divine sparks expelled from the pleroma. Christ was sent from the pleroma to teach Gnostics the saving knowledge (gnosis) of their true identities and was crucified when the Demiurge of Genesis discovered that Christ (the male partner of the feminine Holy Spirit) was in Jesus. After Christ returned to the pleroma, the Holy Spirit descended.
Another group: The Ophites (from the Greek word ophis, “serpent”) reinterpreted the mythological theme of the Fall of Man in Genesis. According to the Ophite view, the serpent of the Garden of Eden wanted Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, to eat from the tree of knowledge (gnosis) so that they would know their true identities and “be like God” (Genesis 3:5). The serpent thus, is interpreted as a messenger of the spiritual god, and the one who wanted to prevent Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is viewed as the Demiurge. In their rejection of the God of the Old Testament, who gave the Ten Commandments, the Ophites flaunted their sexual freedom by extreme sexual license, a trait common to other Gnostic groups as well.
The Phibionites in Alexandria were another Gnostic sect described by Epiphanius. They gathered at banquets that became ecstatic orgies. Married couples changed partners for dramatic sexual performances. Sperm and menstrual blood were gathered and offered as a gift to God before being consumed as the Body and Blood of Christ. By such erotic communions they sought to re-gather the elements of the world-soul (psyche) from the material forms into which it had been dispersed through a cosmic tragedy at the beginning of time. The re-gathering amounted to salvation, for all things would be gathered up into the one glorious body of Christ.
The Magi and the Child of Wondrous Light
The legend of the Magi-Kings was embellished in apocryphal books and Christian folklore. The Proto-gospel of James and the Chronicle of Zuqnin, describe the birth of the Savior. Like the God Mithra, the divine child is consubstantial with celestial light and was born in a mountain cave on December 25. Such imagery of the Nativity of Christ and the symbolism of the royal visitors may originally have descended from Persian accounts of the birth of the cosmic savior, for the accounts seem to owe a great deal to Persian theologies of light.
But the themes have been recast in Christian terms. The Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, relates that 12 Magi-Kings lived near the Mountain of Victories, which they climbed every year in the hope of finding the messiah in a cave on the mountaintop. Each year they entered the cave and prayed for three days, waiting for the promised star to appear. Adam had revealed this location and the secret promises to his son Seth. Seth transmitted the mysteries to his sons, who passed the information from generation to generation. Eventually the Magi, sons of kings, entered the cave to find a star of unspeakable brightness, glowing more than many suns together. The star and its bright light led to, or became, the Holy Child, the son of the Light, who redeems the world.
Mithra - pre-Zoroastrian Persia – The Sun god – also, the celestial deity who oversaw all solemn agreements.
(From the Latin editio vulgata: “common version”), Latin Bible used by the Roman Catholic Church, primarily translated by St. Jerome in 382 A.D. Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome, the leading biblical scholar of his day, to produce an acceptable Latin version of the Bible from the various translations then being used. His revised Latin translation of the Gospels appeared about 383 A.D.
The Septuagint was an important basis for St. Jerome's translation of the Old Testament into Latin for the Vulgate Bible; and, although he had doubts about the authenticity of some of the apocryphal works that it contained (he was the first to employ the word apocrypha in the sense of “noncanonical”), he was overruled, and most of them were included in the Vulgate.
Other apocryphal writings, canonical only to Roman Catholicism, with an exception or two, include the Book of Baruch (a prophet) and the Letter of Jeremiah (often the sixth chapter of Baruch); the First and Second Books of Maccabees; several stories from Daniel, namely, the Song of the Three, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon; and extensive portions of the Book of Esther. Certain other books found in the Septuagint—the Apocrypha for Protestants and Jews; the deuterocanonical books for Roman Catholics—were included. Deuterocanonical works are those that are accepted in one canon but not in all.
Various editors and correctors produced revised texts of the Vulgate over the years. The University of Paris produced an important edition in the 13th century. Its primary purpose was to provide an agreed standard for theological teaching and debate. The earliest printed Vulgate Bibles were all based on this Paris edition.
In 1546 the Council of Trent decreed that the Vulgate was the exclusive Latin authority for the Bible, and declared the canonicity of nearly the entire Vulgate, excluding only the Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and the First and Second Books of Esdras.
Eastern Christendom, meanwhile, had accepted some of the Old Testament apocrypha—Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus (Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach)—but rejected the rest.
The so-called Clementine Vulgate, issued by Pope Clement VIII in 1592, became the authoritative biblical text of the Roman Catholic Church. From it the Confraternity Version was translated in 1941. Various critical editions have been produced in modern times; in 1965 a commission was established by the second Vatican Council to revise the Vulgate.
John Wycliffe and the Lollards
The first complete English-language version of the Bible dates from 1382 and was credited to John Wycliffe and his followers.
John Wycliffe, a University of Oxford philosopher and theologian whose unorthodox religious and social doctrines in some ways anticipated those of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. The name “Lollard”, used pejoratively, derived from the Middle Dutch lollaert (“mumbler”), which had been applied earlier to certain European continental groups suspected of combining pious pretensions with heretical belief.
At Oxford in the 1370s, Wycliffe came to advocate increasingly radical religious views. He denied the doctrine of transubstantiation and stressed the importance of preaching and the primacy of Scripture as the source of Christian doctrine. Claiming that the office of the Pope lacked scriptural justification, he equated the Pope with Antichrist and welcomed the 14th-century schism in the papacy as a prelude to its destruction. Wycliffe was charged with heresy and retired from Oxford in 1378. Nevertheless, he was never brought to trial, and he continued to write and preach until his death in 1384.
Transubstantiation - The miraculous change by which according to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox dogma the Eucharistic elements at their consecration become the body and blood of Christ while keeping only the appearances of bread and wine.
The first Lollard group, centered on some of Wycliffe's colleagues at Oxford led by Nicholas of Hereford. The movement gained followers outside of Oxford, and the anticlerical undercurrents of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 were ascribed, probably unfairly, to the influence of Wycliffe and the Lollards. In 1382 William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, forced some of the Oxford Lollards to renounce their views and conform to Roman Catholic doctrine.
The sect continued to multiply however, among townspeople, merchants, gentry, and even the lower clergy. Several knights of the royal household gave their support, as well as a few members of the House of Commons.
The accession of Henry IV in 1399 signaled a wave of repression against heresy. In 1401 the first English statute was passed for the burning of heretics. The Lollards' first martyr, William Sawtrey, was actually burned a few days before the act was passed. In 1414 a Lollard uprising led by Sir John Oldcastle, was quickly defeated by Henry V. The rebellion brought severe reprisals and marked the end of the Lollards' overt political influence.
Driven underground, the movement operated chiefly among trades-people and artisans, supported by a few clerical adherents. About 1500 a Lollard revival began, and before 1530 the old Lollard and the new Protestant forces had begun to merge. The Lollard tradition facilitated the spread of Protestantism and predisposed opinion in favor of King Henry VIII's anticlerical legislation during the English Reformation.
The most complete statement of early Lollard teaching appeared in the Twelve Conclusions, drawn up to be presented to the Parliament of 1395. They began by stating that the church in England had become subservient to her “stepmother, the great church of Rome.” The present priesthood was not the one ordained by Christ, while the Roman ritual of ordination had no warrant in Scripture. Clerical celibacy occasioned unnatural lust, while the “feigned miracle” of transubstantiation led men into idolatry.
The hallowing of wine, bread, altars, vestments, and so forth was related to necromancy. Prelates should not be temporal judges and rulers, for no man can serve two masters. The Conclusions also condemned special prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, and offerings to images, and they declared confession to a priest unnecessary for salvation. Warfare was contrary to the New Testament, and vows of chastity by Nuns led to the horrors of abortion and child murder. Necromancy – Making appeals to the spirits of the dead for purposes of magically revealing the future or influencing the course of events
Finally, the multitude of unnecessary arts and crafts pursued in the church, encouraged “waste, curiosity, and disguising.” The Twelve Conclusions covered all the main Lollard doctrines except two: that the prime duty of priests is to preach and that all men should have free access to the Scriptures in their own language. The Lollards were responsible for a translation of the Bible into English, by Nicholas of Hereford, and later revised by Wycliffe's secretary, John Purvey.
The Gutenberg Bible
Also called the Forty-two-line Bible, or Mazarin Bible, the first complete book existing in the West and the earliest printed from movable type, so called after its printer, Johannes Gutenberg, who completed it about 1455 working at Mainz, Germany. The three-volume work, in Latin text, was printed in 42-line columns and, in its later stages of production, was worked on by six compositors simultaneously. It is sometimes referred to, as the Mazarin Bible because the first copy described by bibliographers was located in the Paris library of Cardinal Mazarin.
Like other contemporary works, the Gutenberg Bible had no title page, no page numbers, and no innovations to distinguish it from the work of a manuscript copyist. This was presumably the desire of both Gutenberg and his customers. Experts are generally agreed that the Bible, though uneconomic in its use of space, displays a technical efficiency not substantially improved upon before the 19th century. The Gothic type is majestic in appearance, medieval in feeling, and slightly less compressed and less pointed than other examples that appeared shortly thereafter.
The original number of copies of this work is unknown; some 40 are still in existence. There are perfect vellum copies in the U.S. Library of Congress, the French Bibliotheque Nationale, and the British Library. In the United States almost-complete texts are in the Huntington, Morgan, New York Public, Harvard University, and Yale University libraries.
The Tyndale Bible
Because of the influence of printing and a demand for scriptures in English, William Tyndale began working on a New Testament translation directly from the Greek in 1523. The work could not be continued in England because of political and ecclesiastical pressures, so the printing of his translation began in Cologne (Germany) in 1525. Again under pressure, this time from the city authorities, Tyndale had to flee to Worms, where two complete editions were published in 1525.
Copies were smuggled into England where they were at once proscribed. Of 18,000 copies printed (1525–28), two complete volumes and a fragment are all that remain.
When the New Testament was finished, Tyndale began work on the Old Testament. The Pentateuch was issued in Marburg in 1530, each of the five books being separately published and circulated.
The Coverdale Bible
On October 4, 1535, the first complete English Bible, the work of Miles Coverdale, came off the press either in Zürich or in Cologne. The edition was soon exhausted. A second impression appeared in the same year and a third in 1536. A new edition, “overseen and corrected,” was published in England by James Nycholson in Southwark in 1537. Another edition of the same year bore the announcement, “set forth with the king's most gracious license.” In 1538 a revised edition of Coverdale's New Testament printed with the Latin Vulgate in parallel columns issued in England was so full of errors that Coverdale promptly arranged for a rival corrected version to appear in Paris.
The Matthew Bible
In the same year that Coverdale's authorized version appeared, another English Bible was issued under royal license and with the encouragement of ecclesiastical and political power. It appeared (in Antwerp?) under the name of Thomas Matthew, but it is certainly the work of John Rogers, a close friend of Tyndale. Although the version claimed to be “truly and purely translated into English,” it was in reality a combination of the labors of Tyndale and Coverdale. Rogers used the former's Pentateuch and 1535 revision of the New Testament and the latter's translation from Ezra to Malachi and his Apocrypha. Rogers' own contribution was primarily editorial.
The Great Bible
In an injunction of 1538, Henry VIII commanded the clergy to install in a convenient place in every parish church, “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English.” The order seems to refer to an anticipated revision of the Matthew Bible. The first edition was printed in Paris and appeared in London in April 1539 in 2,500 copies. The huge page size earned it the sobriquet the Great Bible. It was received with immediate and wholehearted enthusiasm.
The first printing was exhausted within a short while, and it went through six subsequent editions between 1540 and 1541. “Editions” is preferred to “impressions” here, since the six successive issues were not identical.
Geneva Bible
Also called Breeches Bible – Was a new translation of the Bible published in Geneva (New Testament done in1557; Old Testament in 1560) by a colony of Protestant scholars in exile from England, who worked under the general direction of Miles Coverdale and John Knox and under the influence of John Calvin. The English churchmen had fled London during the repressive reign of the Roman Catholic Mary I, which had halted the publication of Bibles there.
The work acquired the sobriquet “Breeches Bible” because it described Adam and Eve as having made “breeches” to cover their nakedness (Genesis 3:7), instead of “aprons” or “loincloths.” The Great Bible (named for its large page size and first ordered by Henry VIII in 1538) was restored to the churches after Queen Elizabeth I's succession halted persecution of Anglicans and Protestants, but the Geneva Bible, imported from Europe and not printed in England until 1576, quickly surpassed the Great Bible in public favor. The work's enduring popularity made the Geneva Bible an important influence on the translators of the King James Version of 1611.
The Bishops Bible
The failure of the Great Bible to win popular acceptance against the obvious superiority of its Geneva rival, and the objectionable partisan flavor of the latter's marginal annotations, made a new revision a necessity. By about 1563–64 Archbishop Matthew Parker of Canterbury commissioned its execution and the work was apportioned among many scholars, most of them bishops, from which the popular name was derived.
The Bishops' Bible came off the press in 1568 as a handsome folio volume, the most impressive of all 16th-century English Bibles in respect of the quality of paper, typography, and illustrations. A portrait of the Queen adorned the engraved title page, but it contained no dedication. For some reason Queen Elizabeth never officially authorized the work, but sanction for its public use came from the Convocation (church synod or assembly) of 1571 and it thereby became in effect, the second Authorized Version.
King James Bible
Because of changing conditions, another official revision of the Protestant Bible in English was needed. The reign of Queen Elizabeth had succeeded in imposing a high degree of uniformity upon the church. The failure of the Bishops' Bible to supplant its Geneva rival made for a discordant note in the quest for unity.
A conference of churchmen in 1604, became noteworthy for its request that the English Bible be revised because existing translations “were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original.” King James I was quick to appreciate the broader value of the proposal and at once made the project his own.
By June 30 1604, King James had approved a list of 54 revisers, although extant records show that 47 scholars actually participated. They were organized into six companies, two each working separately at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge on sections of the Bible assigned to them. It was finally published in 1611.
Not since the Septuagint, had a translation of the Bible been undertaken under royal sponsorship as a cooperative venture on so grandiose a scale. An elaborate set of rules was contrived to curb individual proclivities and to ensure its scholarly and nonpartisan character. In contrast to earlier practice, the new version was to preserve vulgarly used forms of proper names in keeping with its aim to make the Scriptures popular and familiar.
The impact of Jewish sources upon the King James Version is one of its noteworthy features. The wealth of scholarly tools available to the translators made their final choice of rendering an exercise in originality and independent judgment. For this reason, the new version was more faithful to the original languages of the Bible and more scholarly than any of its predecessors. The impact of the Jewish upon the revisers was so pronounced that they seem to have made a conscious effort to imitate its rhythm and style in the Old Testament. The English of the New Testament actually turned out to be superior to its Greek original.
Two editions were actually printed in 1611, later distinguished as the “He” and “She” Bibles because of the variant reading “he” and “she” in the final clause of chapter 3, verse 15 of Ruth: “and he went into the city.” Both printings contained errors. Some errors in subsequent editions have become famous: The so-called Wicked Bible (1631) derives from the omission of “not” in chapter 20 verse 14 of Exodus, “Thou shalt commit adultery,” for which the printers were fined £300; the “Vinegar Bible” (1717) stems from a misprinting of “vineyard” in the heading of Luke, chapter 20.
The remarkable and total victory of the King James Version could not entirely obscure those inherent weaknesses that were independent of its typographical errors. The manner of its execution had resulted in a certain unequalness and lack of consistency. The translators' understanding of the Hebrew tense system was often limited, so that their version contains inaccurate and infelicitous renderings. In particular, the Greek text of the New Testament, which they used as their base, was a poor one. The great early Greek codices were not then known or available, and Greek papyri, which were to shed light on the common Greek dialect, had not yet been discovered.
A committee established by the Convocation of Canterbury in February 1870, reported favorably three months later on the idea of revising the King James Version: two companies were formed, one each for the Old and New Testaments. A novel development was the inclusion of scholars representative of the major Christian denominations, except the Roman Catholics (who declined the invitation to participate). Another innovation was the formation of parallel companies in the United States to whom the work of the English scholars was submitted and who in turn, sent back their reactions. The instructions to the committees made clear that only a revision and not a new translation was contemplated.
The New Testament was published in England on May 17, 1881, and three days later in the United States, after 11 years of labor. Over 30,000 changes were made, of which more than 5,000 represent differences in the Greek text from that used as the basis of the King James Version. Most of the others were made in the interests of consistency or modernization.
The publication of the Old Testament in 1885 stirred far less excitement, partly because it was less well known than the New Testament, and partly because fewer changes were involved. The poetical and prophetical books, especially Job, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah, benefited greatly.
The revision of the Apocrypha, not originally contemplated, came to be included only because of copyright arrangements made with the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge and was first published in 1895.
The New English Bible
The idea of a completely new translation into British English, was first broached in 1946. Under a joint committee, representative of the major Protestant churches of the British Isles, with Roman Catholics appointed as observers, the New Testament was published in 1961 and a second edition appeared in 1970. The Old Testament and Apocrypha were also published in 1970.
Apocrypha (apokryptein) - To hide away. In biblical literature, works outside an accepted canon of scripture.
The history of the term's usage indicates that it referred to a body of esoteric writings that were at first prized, later tolerated, and finally excluded. In its broadest sense apocrypha has come to mean any writings of dubious authority.
The New English Bible proved to be an instant commercial success, selling at a rate of 33,000 copies a week in 1970. The translation differed from the English mainstream Bible in that it was not a revision but a completely fresh version from the original tongues. It abandoned the tradition of “biblical English” and except for the retention of “thou” and “thy” in addressing God, freed itself of all archaisms. It endeavored to render the original into the idiom of contemporary English and to avoid ephemeral modernisms.
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You mentioned that the Scrolls were made public. That is not true; small, harmless snippets have been made public. Though the Scrolls have been translated for many years, In the 60+ years that the Catholics and the Khazars (jews) have been in possession of the scrolls, that is all that have been made public.
The fact that the Catholics and the Khazars (jews), will not allow the contents of the "Dead Sea Scrolls" to be made public, indicates that the Scrolls and the Bible do not agree.
BTW - Dead Sea Scrolls were found to contain tens of thousands of scroll fragments dating from app. 300 B.C. to 68 A.D. and representing an estimated eight hundred separate works.
Comment from scholars who were "Supposedly" allowed to see the Scrolls.
The Dead Sea Scrolls comprise a vast collection of Hebrew documents written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and encompassing many subjects and literary styles. They include manuscripts or fragments of every book in the Hebrew Bible except the Book of Esther, all of them created nearly one thousand years earlier than any previously known biblical manuscripts. The scrolls also contain the earliest existing biblical commentary on the Book of Habakkuk, and many other writings, among them religious works pertaining to Hebrew sects of the time.
The Dead Sea Scrolls offer unprecedented information about Hebrew religious and political life in Judea during the turbulent late Second Temple Period (200 B.C. to A.D. 70), a time of great corruption and conflict under Roman rule in Judea. Scholars estimate that the Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden in A.D. 68, when Roman legions reached the Dead Sea during the emperor Vespasian's campaign to Jericho.
The discovery of the scrolls established that Hebrew culture was far richer and more diverse at this time, than scholars had previously believed. Three main groups of Hebrews were prominent during the late Second Temple Period: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. Many other sects and political parties also flourished. This pluralism ended in 70 A.D, when six years after the start of the First Hebrew Rebellion, the Romans sieged Jerusalem, killing or enslaving half the Hebrew population and destroying Herod's Temple. The capitol fell to the Romans, and only the Judaism of the dominant Pharisees survived.
The scrolls also shed light on the time when Jesus and John the Baptist lived and early Christians began to organize. Specifically, they offer evidence that early Christian beliefs and practices had precedents in the Hebrew sects of the time. Sectarian scrolls tell of people who, like the early Christians, did not believe in the Temple worship of the Pharisees, people who had their own literature, their own rituals—including baptism—and their own beliefs, most significantly beliefs in a messiah, a divine judgment, and an apocalypse.
Three different scrolls depict a sacred meal of bread and wine. These similarities as well as parallels between the literary style of certain scrolls and that of the New Testament have led some scholars to claim that Jesus and John the Baptist were either part of, or strongly influenced by a sect at the Dead Sea. But no direct link has been established, and it is likely that similarities can be attributed to each being derived from a like strain of Judaism. Still, this debate has furthered speculation about the historical Jesus, such as the claim that he was a Zealot rather than a pacifist, a theory that does not fit with New Testament tradition but does fit with the history of this period (note: Jesus is NOT mentioned in the scrolls). And one of the most important discoveries in the scrolls has been the use of the name “Son of God” to refer to someone other than Jesus, implying a cultural use of the term that was not itself synonymous with God.
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Mike111 after that EXTREMELY long post. What exactly is the point you are making because I got lost somewhere along the line and quite couldn't get what you are trying to say.
Are you disputing the historical contents in the Bible? Are you disputing the prophesies or the fact that black people wrote the books that make up the Bible?
Please ask questions or make succinct points and thus let the debate flow. Just throwing out information as you have done with no clear direction is suffocating to say the least.
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Energy - I hope that you understand that I am not trying to tell you what to believe, that is entirely up to you.
But it became clear to me that though you may have "read the Bible" you did not "know about the Bible." I have given you a wonderful opportunity to learn about, and know about the Bible, I hope you take it.
I also noticed that you have a rather odd understanding of history, Hebrew history in particular. The Hebrews were actually part of an ethnic group from Anatolia (Turkey) called the Amorites. When you are finished reading about the Bible, you might want to read something about the Amorites.
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Energy - I hope that you understand that I am not trying to tell you what to believe, that is entirely up to you.
But it became clear to me that though you may have "read the Bible" you did not "know about the Bible." I have given you a wonderful opportunity to learn about, and know about the Bible, I hope you take it.
You have given me an opportunity a wonderful opportunity to learn about and know the BIble? Wow! How did you do that? Is it by making an extraordinary long post that no sane person would bother to read because the way you put it out is not how proper debates are carried out? No Sir. I can assure you, YOU can not teach me a thing about the Bible. But don't take my word for it. Let me prove it to you. We can start by posting succinct clear to follow arguments and everyone following the discussion would see for themselves who is the man of knowledge and who isn't.
quote: I also noticed that you have a rather odd understanding of history, Hebrew history in particular. The Hebrews were actually part of an ethnic group from Anatolia (Turkey) called the Amorites. When you are finished reading about the Bible, you might want to read something about the Amorites.
I have an odd understand of history? Which history Sir? Can you cut and paste the history lesson I have so far given on the subject? All I have done so far is make BOLD statements, a deliberate ploy on my part to get others to challenge those statements and thus give me the opportunity to educate and impart whatever knowledge I have on the subject. I have not made a single comment on any history. What you are doing here is a classic straw-man argument where you make up things I have not said and then proceed to build your argument around it.
With regard to the Hebrews, For your information, the Hebrews don't come from Turkey as you claim (You obviously don't know what is in the Bible yet YOU want to teach me about it). Read the Bible, it clearly tells you who the Hebrews were and where they came from because they are not the Amorites and they do not come from Turkey.
Posts: 620 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2009
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OK, everybody calm down... Mike that post was really too long,you could have chopped it up a bit and give the guy a chance to respond to specific points. Not a bad thread btw, I would hate to see it go south because of bad manners and name calling.
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Djehuti – You are absolutely right, the thread does belong in the religion forum. But I didn’t post it, and I only responded because some of the responders seemed a bit uncertain in their responses. Bearing in mind that most of our denizens are young, and hopefully, we can all agree that using ANY religious book as a historical reference is VERY dangerous, I saw the need to respond.
Brada-Anansi – See answer to Energy below.
Energy Quote: You have given me an opportunity a wonderful opportunity to learn about and know the BIble? Wow! How did you do that? Is it by making an extraordinary long post that no sane person would bother to read because the way you put it out is not how proper debates are carried out? No Sir. I can assure you, YOU can not teach me a thing about the Bible. But don't take my word for it. Let me prove it to you. We can start by posting succinct clear to follow arguments and everyone following the discussion would see for themselves who is the man of knowledge and who isn't.
Ordinarily that would be correct; however, how is one to debate the Bible (which is thousands of pages), without reading it? So why do you complain about a few web pages? And didn’t the nature of your post require extensive reading? After all, I don't think that any of the members have read the entire Bible, so wouldn't they need to read it first? Plus, if you refuse to read material that may be contrary to your position, just because it is long, but then, demand that others do the heavy reading, then how could you possibility claim honest debate. Your thread belongs in the religion forum!
In any event, the point of posting almost the entire history of the Bible was to demonstrate to you and anybody else interested; that there is NO possibility of debating the Bible. It is a book of Belief, nothing more, and nothing less. Either you believe or you don’t believe. As a historical book, it cannot be taken seriously – and only fringe scientist use it as such.
BUT: We can debate the “authenticity” of the Bible. But without the history of the book, such as I have posted, that would not be possible. So with the history above, we are all on a level playing field. And should anybody care to debate, the material is right above, should they care to read it.
Energy Quote: With regard to the Hebrews, For your information, the Hebrews don't come from Turkey as you claim (You obviously don't know what is in the Bible yet YOU want to teach me about it). Read the Bible, it clearly tells you who the Hebrews were and where they came from because they are not the Amorites and they do not come from Turkey.
Energy - That is why your thread belongs in the religion forum. In the secular world, AND Biblical, there is a clear history of the Hebrews and their brethren Amorites, which traces them back to Anatolia.
As an example:
(Genesis 11:31–32) Thare took Abram and his wife, Sarai, and Lot, the son of Haran, who was dead, and leaving Ur of the Chaldees, came to Harran and dwelt there till he died.
Harran is a city in South Central Anatolia.
Ur of the Chaldees – is the southern part of ancient Sumer (now Iraq). The Amorites/Hebrews established a usurping dynasty there (about 1800 B.C.), which lasted several hundred years.
The most famous of their kings was Hammurabi. Does the name look familiar?
Here is it’s breakdown.
In late Hebrew times, the prefix Rabi/Rabbi was afforded Hebrew Scribes, meaning Great or Master (Scribe or Teacher). In modern times, a Rabbi is a Teacher. So logically we will accept the following definition.
Hammurabi = the Amorite god (H) ammu (is) rabi (great).
(Num 16:3) And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan, thy father was an AMORITE, and thy mother an Hittite.
The above Biblical quote was merely a political posture. Jerusalem was an old Canaanite city not a Hebrew city, that is, until they conquered it in about 1000 B.C. and David made it his capitol.
The word Hittite is a misnomer; it should read Hatti. The error was created by the King James Bible (first published in 1611), which is a translation of a translation etc. of the first Bible, The Greek Septuagint, plus the Greek new Testament. The Hebrew words in question translate as the "Children of Heth". But this is a Canaanite group in the Bible.
No one is quite certain how the King James Bible writers confused this group with people in Anatolia; but the error has been carried forward for hundreds of years.
Until a few years ago, when researchers, because of the insurmountable problems associated with trying to prove the existence of a Hittite Empire: Many researchers have now come to the conclusion that there never really was a Hittite Empire in Anatolia, at all. They speculate that the so-called Hittite empire is really a confusion with that of the Hattians, Phrygians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, or some other ancient Empire. And that this is why: Neither ancient Greek, or any other ancient historians ever mentioned it.
But all of that is of no consequence here: because whether you prefer Hittite or Hatti – they are BOTH CENTRAL ANATOLIAN KINGDOMS!!
So you are Wrong – the Bible DOES say that Hebrew’s are Amorites AND Anatolians.
BTW - you can read my "Ancient Egyptians - World Travelers" thread for a little about the Hatti.
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Energy - Hope that I don't seem hostile to you, you seem like a decent person, it's just that this is SUPPOSED to be a forum for science, not theology! There is already a religion forum, I hope you use it. And as you can see, debating the Bible opens issues that you may not want to deal with, that's one good reason not to try to do it here.
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you posted way too much stuff. But we can have rounds point by point.
Energy may have a point about Hebrew=Black. I am not saying that I believe that all ancient Israelites were Black, but when, in Acts 21(or 22), Saul(Paul) is considered to be an Egyptian(at that time Egyptians were seen as either as Black, Brown, or Blackish), then there is a plausiable case, don't you think?
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Energy - Hope that I don't seem hostile to you, you seem like a decent person, it's just that this is SUPPOSED to be a forum for science, not theology! There is already a religion forum, I hope you use it. And as you can see, debating the Bible opens issues that you may not want to deal with, that's one good reason not to try to do it here.
No! no!! No!!! Hostility is good. I like it in a debate. I believe there is the need for a little bit of heat in the discussion to get a debate to come alive and flowing. You can be hostile as much as you want, it would only make the debate more lively and interesting. Furthermore, I am a big ass black man who can deal with whatever you care to throw at me. Don't worry give me your best shot.
The reason this thread is here is because even though I am using the Bible, it is to do with black people's history. Surely you don't expect me to discuss black history in the religious forum do you? This thread is to show the origin of certain class of black people as the ancient Israelites and their roots in Africa till the present day.
I am sure over the years you'd have seen, black people have tried to trace their roots and history through science and failed miserably. What is amazing is for black people to IGNORE the eye witness account of what our ancestors wrote down in the Bible but rather, try to use SPECULATION dressed as science to address ancient black African history. The result of this is no serious minded black race accepts whatever conclusions thus arrived at. For a fact I can tell you no African nations would accept history from this so called scientific approach to add to their history, let alone teach it in their schools.
Mike111 we learn everyday, so take this novel approach by me to use the Bible to tell the history of Africa as an opportunity to look at black history from a different perspective. I can assure you, you would be blown out of your mind.
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Israel - As I said "this is SUPPOSED to be a forum for science". And science provides us with a wealth of evidence that the Hebrews - and everyone else, were Black people. {White people didn't reach Europe (from central Asia) until about 1200 B.C.}
Asiatics as they appear in the Tomb painting in the British Museum. (Everyone East of Egypt were called Asiatics).
.
The Hyksos were Amorites/Hebrews
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The Aramaean's of Aram were Amorites/Hebrews
.
Assyrian relief from the "Black Obelisk"
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Close-up of a large wall relief depicting Assyrian King Sennacherib’s Attack and conquest of the Judean City of Lachish. British museum.
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See ANY White people???
This stuff is old and SHOULD be well known, maybe if everyone did some reading, instead of complaining about reading, it would be well-known.Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: (Num 16:3) And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan, thy father was an AMORITE, and thy mother an Hittite.
The above Biblical quote was merely a political posture. Jerusalem was an old Canaanite city not a Hebrew city, that is, until they conquered it in about 1000 B.C. and David made it his capitol.
The above Biblical quote is not true. This is what is actually said in Numbers 16:3; "3 and they assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and Jehovah is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the assembly of Jehovah?"
quote: The word Hittite is a misnomer; it should read Hatti. The error was created by the King James Bible (first published in 1611), which is a translation of a translation etc. of the first Bible, The Greek Septuagint, plus the Greek new Testament. The Hebrew words in question translate as the "Children of Heth". But this is a Canaanite group in the Bible.
No one is quite certain how the King James Bible writers confused this group with people in Anatolia; but the error has been carried forward for hundreds of years.
Until a few years ago, when researchers, because of the insurmountable problems associated with trying to prove the existence of a Hittite Empire: Many researchers have now come to the conclusion that there never really was a Hittite Empire in Anatolia, at all. They speculate that the so-called Hittite empire is really a confusion with that of the Hattians, Phrygians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, or some other ancient Empire. And that this is why: Neither ancient Greek, or any other ancient historians ever mentioned it.
But all of that is of no consequence here: because whether you prefer Hittite or Hatti – they are BOTH CENTRAL ANATOLIAN KINGDOMS!!
So you are Wrong – the Bible DOES say that Hebrew’s are Amorites AND Anatolians.[/b]
BTW - you can read my "Ancient Egyptians - World Travelers" thread for a little about the Hatti.
Hammurabi
Very short answer. The Israelites did not come from the Amorites. The Amorites are descendants of Canaan who was a son of Ham. God asked the ancient Israelites who descended from Shem, Abraham through Jacob to WIPE THE AMORITES OUT of existence. Therefore the Bible does not teach anywhere that the Hebrews are Amorites. Amorites were bitter enemies of the ancient Israelites.
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Israel - As I said "this is SUPPOSED to be a forum for science". And science provides us with a wealth of evidence that the Hebrews - and everyone else, were Black people. {White people didn't reach Europe (from central Asia) until about 1200 B.C.}
The problem with this type of approach is white racists can use the same approach as you to discredit whatever you have to say. The result is a stalemate.
quote: See ANY White people???
This stuff is old and SHOULD be well known, maybe if everyone did some reading, instead of complaining about reading, it would be well-known.
You are preaching to the choir here Mike111. The way I see it you are actually backing up most of what I have to say on the matter, it is just that you have one approach and I have another.
Because billions of people already believe in the Bible I believe my approach using the Bible to explain black history is the best as it is easily digested and accepted.
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^^ Sorry, the quote is from Ezekiel 16:3 (King James)
As you can see from my previous post, science has the issue of the race of the Hebrews well in hand. There is no need to debate it further.
BTW - My point in posting the history of the Bible was to let you see that it is a White document - do you really expect white people to tell you the truth, when their whole approach to history is to tell one lie after the other?
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As you can see from my previous post, science has the issue of the race of the Hebrews well in hand. There is no need to debate it further.
Do you see the problem with what you said in the above quote and the one below? Analyze your own words and see if there is no need for a different approach in telling the black man's history.
As I said previously, over the years, the above approach has been used and failed miserably. It does little to bring to, or convince either a black or white audience to a decisive and meaningful conclusion that black people wrote the Bible aka the book of the white man's civilization.
quote: BTW - My point in posting the history of the Bible was to let you see that it is a White document - do you really expect white people to tell you the truth, when their whole approach to history is to tell one lie after the other?
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Energy Quote: Because billions of people already believe in the Bible I believe my approach using the Bible to explain black history is the best as it is easily digested and accepted.
KING - I know that you are lurking - what have you to say?
As KING already knows, my feeling is that people can believe whatever they want to believe. But if they then complain about what the White man is teaching them about themselves, and how the White man is treating them based on that, then I say Fuch-em, they're getting what they deserve.
To be clear; Christianity and the Khazar/Jew religions are WHITE religions. I was tempted to post the "History of Christianity" also, but then I saw how reluctant these folks are to read. Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Mike111: But if they then complain about what the White man is teaching them about themselves, and how the White man is treating them based on that, then I say Fuch-em, they're getting what they deserve.
To be clear; Christianity and the Khazar/Jew religions are WHITE religions. I was tempted to post the "History of Christianity" also, but then I saw how reluctant these folks are to read. [/b]
Again analyze your own words and hopefully you can see the wisdom in my point and approach. It is not that folks do not read or can't read. They are simply rejecting your viewpoint. So according to you yourself, your approach is not working - does not work. Try a different approach. Use the same book the white man used on the black man instead of the science thing.
Trust me I am a scientist as a well as a computer programmer but when it comes to black history, I leave the science out of it.
Think about it, Mike111, the white man did not write the Bible, so it is easy as all you have to do is show the black man this truth using the Bible itself as the teaching tool and, 'voila!' Job done. Everyone would see from then on, the black man is the father of white civilization.
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Interesting discussion. I take it that you are a Hebrew Israelite, Energy?
The Bible is not ignored on this site. It is sometimes referenced for its connection to Ancient Egyptian history. However not everyone here is a Christian. Science is the main tool used on these boards to understand the biological affinities of the Ancient Egyptians.
I myself was raised a Baptist Christian but am now Agnostic.
I do not believe that the Bible is inerrant. I'm very skeptical of Divine Revelation in general because I have not seen any compelling evidence.
My two cents on using the Bible as a tool for Black history.....
As an African-American I recognize that Christianity has played an important role in the cultural (some might say spiritual) development of our people. A prime example of this is the Civil Rights movement and the way leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turned to the Bible for guidance and used its teaching to fight discrimination.
However as far as the Bible being written by Blacks and foretelling the fate of people of African decent I do not believe this is true.
I believe the Bible was written by people of Middle Eastern descent who looked like many tan-skinned, dark-haired people we find in the region today. I wouldn't call these people White either. The Ancient Egyptian artwork depicts Asiatics with distinctive features indicating that they looked the same way they do today.
Christianity is a religion whose adherents rely on their faith and was intended for all people who believed in Jesus's teachings. There are prophecies in the Bible said to foretell the fate of God's chosen people. I do not believe these prophecies have a racial element to them.
I'm sure that several other people on this site agree with me when it comes to religious books like the Bible.
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Damn - Both of you guys have your point of view, and no science or anything else, will ever touch it. And like I said - more power to you.
But on a factual basis:
Energy - I gave you an accurate history of the Bible, which you couldn't bother to read, because it seemed to conflict with your preexisting belief. But which clearly shows that a Black man has not gotten close enough to even smell the writing of the Bible - AND that is assuming that they really DID use Hebrew translators for the original version. After that NO Black man, saw it, touched it, or could smell it!!
But then you tell me that, Quote: "the white man did not write the Bible".
I mean, it seems to me that your head is so full of your own sh1t, that you can't hear anything else.
Morpheus - Show me an authentic picture of an ancient Asiatic that looks anything like the Turks who currently live there now.
Here again: it seems to me that your head is so full of your own sh1t, that you can't hear anything else.
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Energy - I just realized my mistake - I know Blacks didn't write the Bible, and you say that Whites didn't write the Bible, so obviously you must have some new information that it was the Chinese who wrote the Bible. I mean, Black, White, Chinese, those are the only choices.
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However as far as the Bible being written by Blacks and foretelling the fate of people of African decent I do not believe this is true.
I believe the Bible was written by people of Middle Eastern descent who looked like many tan-skinned, dark-haired people we find in the region today. I wouldn't call these people White either. The Ancient Egyptian artwork depicts Asiatics with distinctive features indicating that they looked the same way they do today.
Lets go back to the very beginning when Israel started off as a nation. Even there at the very beginning, the Bible makes it clear the ancient Israelites started off as dark skin or black people.
The story of the patriarch Jacob also known as Israel and his family of seventy that went to live in Egypt is the first call of proof of identification. According to the Bible his descendants became slaves to the Egyptians and were in Egypt for 430 years before they left.
The seventy that came to settle in Egypt may have been married so no problems there. Now think about this; Who did the children of the original seventy marry and have children with? The obvious answer is; Egyptians of course. If every one of of the offspring of the original seventy married an Egyptian/African then all the children from that first liaison would be mixed race. When the mixed race children from the next generation also married from the African stock and had children, their offspring would be dark African because the distinct features of the mixed race only last one generation.
By the time the Israelites left Egypt, 430 years later, the original seventy had multiplied to more then two million people because the Bible list the men as 600 thousand, excluding the women and children (Exodus 12:37 - 38) . This means after four hundred and thirty years of interbreeding it would hardly be possible to tell the difference between who was an Egyptian and who was the Israelite. If the Egyptians were dark skin people, so would the Israelites be dark skin people. (Ex.1:5; Lev. 24:10; 1Chr. 2:34-35).
According to the ancient Greek historian Herodutus; "The Colchians, Ethiopians and Egyptians have thick lips,broad nose, woolly hair and they are burnt of skin." -- Herodotus, 450 BC.
Herodutus words are actually backed up to show the israelites were black if you consider the following from the Bible;
Gensis 42:7-8, the story of Joseph's brothers not being able to recognize him suggest that it was not only the complexion that was the problem but in features as well the Israelites and the Egyptians/Africans looked alike - hence Joseph's brothers inability to recognize him. Later on from this episode the Bible again confirms that the Israelites looked indeed like black Africans in their features when we read about Moses first encounter with Jethro's daughters. You would remember, Moses, was born a few generations after the death of Jacob and his children, Joseph and his brothers in Egypt. In this encounter, Moses is described by the daughters of Jethro as a 'BLACK/EGYPTIAN/AFRICAN' (Ex. 2:19).
In the Bible book of the Song of Songs chapter one, the Shulammite maiden; the most beautiful woman in all of ancient Israel is described as a black or dark skin woman.
Song of songs chapter one verve five reads;
"I am black, but comely, Oh ye daughters of Jerusalem, As the tents of Kedar, As the curtains of Solomon. "
In the New Testament we read about the Apostle Paul who is clearly identified as a black African man by a white man. I hope you know who the Apostle Paul is. He is the Apostle who singlehandedly wrote the bulk of the new Testament.
In Acts 21:37 - 39 we read of this encounter that tells the world the complexion of the Apostle Paul.
"37 And as Paul was about to be brought into the castle, he saith unto the chief captain, May I say something unto thee? And he said, Dost thou know Greek? 38 Art thou not then the Egyptian, who before these days stirred up to sedition and led out into the wilderness the four thousand men of the Assassins? 39 But Paul said, I am a Jew, of Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city: and I beseech thee, give me leave to speak unto the people."
As you can clearly see, the captain of the guard who may have been a white man mistakes Paul for an African because of how he looked.
But some diehard ones among you the the readers may still be saying; Paul may have been one of just a few who were black among the millions Jews who were white.
Not true according to a Roman historian at the time. TACITUS the Roman historian wrote; 'The Jews of 90 AD and abounding in Europe were called ETHIOPIANS.'
Mind you, that's 90 years after the death of Jesus. If the the Romans saw the Jews as Ethiopians or dark skinned people 90 years after after the death of Jesus Christ, then for sure, as far as the Roman Empire was concerned, the Jews were Ethiopian/dark skinned looking long before the birth of Christ.
As you can see it was not an isolated case of the Roman officer who mistook the Apostle Paul for a dark skinned African, according to the historian TACITUS, all of ancient Rome identified the Jews as Ethiopians/Africans.
The foregoing is to do with the Jews in the time of the Romans, thanks to the Apostle Paul and Tacitus we know how they looked like in their complexion.
quote: There are prophecies in the Bible said to foretell the fate of God's chosen people. I do not believe these prophecies have a racial element to them.
As the discussion progresses I promise to show you from the Bible where the Bible talks about the Hebrews being in the Caribbean and the Americas due to slavery, in other words the Bible foretold the great Trans-Atlantic slave trade that took millions of the Hebrews from Africa and put them in the Americas
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Morpheus - I take it that you are one of Hawas's people. That's fine, but you might want to keep it to yourself. I don't have any use for that lying piece-of-sh1t Turk, Hawass, and I will embarrass you.
Posts: 22721 | Registered: Oct 2005
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^ Indeed, I've always said Hawass is an ass. Everything happens for a reason, even the giving of names like Haw ass Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006
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Morpheus - Show me an authentic picture of an ancient Asiatic that looks anything like the Turks who currently live there now.
Here again: it seems to me that your head is so full of your own sh1t, that you can't hear anything else.
Are you making the claim that the phenotype of the majority of modern inhabitants in Southwest Asia (The "Middle East") is due to migration from Turks?
What is your evidence for this claim?
Here are some images of Asiatics alongside Egyptians:
These are replicas of actual Egyptian art. I think they convey my point well.
quote:Originally posted by Energy: Lets go back to the very beginning when Israel started off as a nation. Even there at the very beginning, the Bible makes it clear the ancient Israelites started off as dark skin or black people
Energy, I have several questions for you regarding your use of scripture as evidence.
Where is the archeological evidence for the story of Exodus?
Who are the Pharaohs in the story and why doesn't the Bible mention them by name?
Who wrote the Book of Genesis and Exodus and how do we know who they are?
In regards to the children of Jacob the Bible does not say that they intermingled freely with the Egyptians. If that were the case they likely would have assimilated to their culture. It seems far more likely to me that the Bible is implying that the offspring of these children were the progenitors of a new nation and intermarried amongst themselves until they became a prominent minority within Egypt.
As far as Moses and Jethro's daughters are concerned, according to scripture they recognized him as an Egyptian but skin color is not referenced in the passage you cited.
I don't find this passage about Moses to be anymore credible a claim that the Hebrew were Black as I do the claim that the Hebrew intermingled extensively with Egyptians.
I do believe that the Ancient Egyptians were Black based on all the evidence I have seen. But the claim that the Hebrew were Black seems to hinge on loose interpretations of the Bible.
The Bible rarely mentions skin color but here is one passage where it does......
"Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil." (Jeremiah 13:23 NIV)
Can you explain this quote? If the Hebrew were Black why did they speak of an Ethiopian changing his skin? It seems to me that they were likely not of the same complexion as an Ethiopian for them to write something like this.
quote:Originally posted by Mike111: Morpheus - I take it that you are one of Hawas's people. That's fine, but you might want to keep it to yourself. I don't have any use for that lying piece-of-sh1t Turk, Hawass, and I will embarrass you.
What does Zahi Hawass have to do with anything that I have said? I don't know you Mike but you come off as extremely hostile and paranoid. I'd recommend that you calm down. It's just a message board.
Posts: 647 | From: Atlanta | Registered: Jan 2009
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Morpheus Quote: Are you making the claim that the phenotype of the majority of modern inhabitants in Southwest Asia (The "Middle East") is due to migration from Turks? What is your evidence for this claim?
Yes I am making that claim; My evidence will follow.
But first an observation; 13 posts above, I posted authentic pictures (I even indicated which museum they were in) of Hebrews that clearly showed that they were Black people - they were Asiatics. But yet you chose to ignore that evidence.
It seems to me then, that you are of the breed of kemp and that bunch. Serious people do not ignore evidence, they either disprove it, or they accept it; ignoring it just indicates that you wish to spew propaganda, that is the source of my irritation.
As you correctly indicated; what you posted was bogus drawings made by White people to further their lies. The only point that those drawings convey is that either you wish to lie, or you are very ignorant.
If you wish to find out how it is that Turks populate the region, then I suggest you read an Encyclopedia - there is a great deal on the subject in just about every Encyclopedia.
As I said, the Hebrews are 13 posts above.
Assyrian relief British Museum: The turban suggests one man is from north-western Syria, The man with monkeys may be Phoenician.
(Phoenician's - Canaanites who moved northward to modern Lebanon to avoid the Hebrew invasion).
Sumerian King (Iraq)
A Persian soldier (Iran)
Anatolian Prince (Turkey)
Indus valley King (India/Pakistan)
Canaanite God
Anatolian King (Turkey)
Berber (North Africa)
Morpheus - I believe that I have covered the entire area of North Africa and the Middle-east of ancient times, I assume that you don't need to see an Egyptian;
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You've made a point of acting like a jackass, calling me a liar and associating me with Kemp (If you are talking about Arthur Kemp from Stormfront you can go to hell).
I've read about the various Empires of the region and there is no evidence that all the light-skinned inhabitants of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula can be attributed to admixture with Turks from the Ottoman Empire.
Most of your sculptures do not look Black to me. The Elamite is dark-skinned like modern Dravidians but most of the rest resemble Middle Easterners.
Posts: 647 | From: Atlanta | Registered: Jan 2009
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