An unbeliever’s interpretation of Easter (3) By Douglas Anele

easter

Now, before sketching a very brief and plausible phenomenology of the character of Jesus I would like to make some remarks about the evolution of the Holy Bible, drawing heavily from the highly informative essay, “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin,” written by Kurt Eichenwald, and from other scholars that have written on the subject. Charitably, the Christian scripture can best be described as a chronicle of myths, legends and historical facts blended together to project a certain religious worldview cobbled from Greco-Roman and Hebrew civilisations. The Holy Bible in circulation all over the world now, irrespective of the version, is a bad translation from the original documents from which it was copied. As Eichenwald correctly observed, “it is a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times.” It took a long time, about 400 years, before the first Christian manuscripts were compiled into the New Testament.

Then, high-tech information storage and retrieval systems were non-existent. For example, there was no printing press, no vacuum-sealed technologies that can preserve paper for centuries. The bulk of biblical materials were laboriously written on clay, papyrus and parchment. But these materials are very perishable; clay broke, parchments crumbled away, just as the primitive ink used in writing on them faded, meaning that the information they contained may have been irretrievably lost. Thus, the Holy Bible as a whole cannot be, and did not claim to be, the inerrant word of God Christians worship. In putting together what eventually became the Holy Bible, writings from one era were transmitted to the next by copying them by hand. And although professional scribes were available who devoted themselves to that excruciating task, they did not commence copying the testaments and letters about Jesus’ time until hundreds of years after they were written. Before that, amateurs handled the job. Now, the manuscripts in question were written in Koiné, a version of the Greek language, and a sizeable number of the amateur copyists copied the scripts without understanding the words, because they were neither fully literate nor spoke the language. According to Eichenwald, Koiné was written as scriptio continua, meaning that there were no spaces between words and no punctuation marks.

Hence, an expression like “Heisgoingtoeatfather” could be understood as “He is going to eat father” or as “He is going to eat, father.” Likewise, depending on where spaces in-between words are placed, a proposition can have different meanings. For instance, “Jesusisnowhere” could be “Jesus is nowhere” or “Jesus is now here.” It requires little imagination to grasp and appreciate the level of mistranslations that the copyists inadvertently brought into the materials they were copying. All this did not matter for a very long time because Christians were convinced that God inspired the original writers and copyists and guided their hands. However, since the beginning of the 20th century, thousands of New Testament manuscripts have been discovered, dating back centuries. Experts in Bible research now realise that later versions of biblical texts vary significantly from the ones written earlier. Bart Ehrman, a scholar at the University of North Carolina, puts this point in proper perspective by stating that, “There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.” Majority of these discrepancies are the equivalents of typographical errors, which were then imported into the texts by the scribes who copied from the original documents. Again, changes were made by professional copyists centuries after the manuscripts were written as a result of what they considered flaws in the accounts they were copying. To illustrate this, consider an early version of Luke 3: 16 that stated, “John answered, saying to all of them…” but nobody asked John anything; but a 5th century scribe dealt with the problem by changing the words to “John, knowing what they were thinking, said…” This is a relatively minor matter, an inconsequential interpolation when juxtaposed with the fact that scribes added whole sections of the New Testament and excised words and propositions that contradicted emerging orthodox beliefs which constitute the core of Christianity.

In this connection, Alfred Loisy, a catholic priest excommunicated by the church in 1908, argued that whatever Jesus may have taught and whatever he may have been, his story has been doctored to fit in with the ideas of the Pauline Christian churches whose scribes re-wrote the accounts of Jesus’ life to justify their rituals. A classic example of biblical fabrication is the moving story recounted in John 8: 3-11.

The scribes and Pharisees took a woman allegedly caught committing adultery to Jesus. Under the law laid down by Moses, the Mosaic Law, the woman must be stoned to death. The Pharisees intended to put Jesus in a dilemma by forcing him to choose between validating Mosaic Law and his doctrine of forgiveness of sins. Jesus answered, “He that is without sin let him cast the first stone.” The group dispersed and Jesus asked the woman to go home and “sin no more.” Unfortunately, New Testament scholars have unearthed solid evidence which establishes that John did not write the story: it was invented by scribes sometime in the Middle Ages.

The literary style for that story differs from the rest of John’s gospel, and the section includes phrases that do not appear anywhere else in the Holy Bible. Indeed, there is consensus among experts that they are words more common many centuries after John’s gospel was composed. Again, consider the gospel of Mark 16: 17-18, which claims that those who believe in Jesus will be rewarded with glossolalia and supernatural powers to perform miracles. Christians use this story to justify the emergence of noisy and boisterous Pentecostal churches. As in the previous example cited above, the texts were not in the original document; an imaginative scribe inserted them into the gospel long after the gospel of Mark was written. The earliest Greek version of Mark ended at chapter 16 verse 8, which narrates how three women who had gone to Jesus’ burial tomb met a man who informed them that Jesus had resurrected and that he would see them later in Galilee. But the additional 12 verses in modern bibles detailing how Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene and the disciples and then ascended into heaven where he sits on the right hand of God are not there.

Added to the problem of deliberate doctoring of the original documents by scribes is the vexed challenge of accurate translation, which every professional translator encounters all the time.

Numerous expressions in the early Greek versions of the New Testament do not have precise equivalents in English language. Consequently, translation of the New Testament into English throws up issues of sentence structure, idiomatic expressions and stylistic differences so that the translation would capture the exact meanings of the original texts. As already noted, the bulk of the earliest versions of biblical narratives were written in Koiné, an extinct variety of Greek language. Therefore, different versions of the English bible reflect the views and guesses of modern translators, which do not always render accurately the real meaning of the original manuscripts. Centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus, different groups adopted conflicting narratives about his life and the meaning of his ministry, and killed those that disagreed. For hundreds of years, according to Eichenwald, corroborated by Joachim Kahl in The Misery of Christianity, Christianity was first a battle of books and then a battle of blood, partly because there were no universally accepted manuscripts stipulating what it meant to be a Christian. To be concluded.

VANGUARD

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