Bible
This word for a holy book came from Byblos, the City of the Great Mother, the oldest continuously occupied temple in the world. The Goddess called Astarte, Baalat, Hathor, etc.--patronized learning and her priestesses collected a library of papyrus scrolls. There- fore, Greeks called any papyrus byblos, which came to mean any holy book. Hence the "Bible."
Scholars have found in the Bible's numerous layers of additions and corrections a substrate of the former Semitic matriarchy, such as the Book of Ruth with its matrilineal and matrilocal marriage customs, and the Book of Judges with its feminine government government of Israel (Judges 4:4). In several books the word translated "God" is really a feminine plural, "Goddesses," especially in reference to the matriarchal functions of laughing, avenging crimes, and bestowing the imperium of leadership.
Some of the miracles attributed to biblical heroes were copied from older myths of the Goddess. Joshua's arrest of the sun was formerly credited to priestesses of Isis, Hecate, and the Thessalian Great Mother, who were said to stop heavenly bodies in their courses, and lengthen night or day at will. Moses's flowering rod, river of blood, and tablets of the law were all symbols of the ancient Goddess. His miracle of drawing water from a rock was first performed by Mother Rhea after she gave birth to Zeus, and by Atalanta with the help of Artemis. His miracle of drying up waters to travel dry shod was earlier performed by Isis, or Hathor, on her way to Byblos.
The greatest mistake of religious authorities in the western world was their view of the Bible as intrinsically different from other ancient scriptures, in that it was dictated word for word by God, not collected slowly, rewritten and mis-written, revised, and worked over by human beings for a long time. The notion that the Bible did not evolve haphazardly, like most other holy writings of the same period, persisted almost up to the present day, even among people who should have known better.
According to the prevailing myth of biblical origins, the Old Testament was supposed to have been translated from Hebrew to Greek by seventy-two translators sent to Ptolemy by Eleazar, a Jewish high priest, in the 3rd century B.C., hence its name, Septuagint. Ptolemy locked the scholars in individual cells on the island Pharos, where each one made his own Greek version in exactly seventy-two days. Each translation agreed exactly, in every word, with the other seventeen translations.
Of course this never happened. The Bible's real history was far less tidy. A collection appeared in the first century B.C. and again in the first century A.D. to be accepted by the Jews of the Diaspora as sacred, and passed on to Christians. In both Jewish and Christian hands the papyri underwent many changes. In the 4th century A.D., St. Jerome collected some Hebrew manuscripts and edited them to produce the Latin Vulgate, a Bible of considerable inaccuracy, differing markedly from Jerome's stem texts.
The King James Bible relied mostly on a Greek text collected and edited by Erasmus in the 16th century, which in turn relied on a Byzantine collection assembled gradually at Constantinople between the 4th and 8th centuries. A few older texts have been discovered: the Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Alexandrinus, and the Chester Beatty papyri. All are fragmentary, all differ from one another and from the King James version. There are no known portions of the Bible older than the 4th century A.D.
The Revised Version of the New Testament published in 1881 tried to correct some of the more glaring errors. It erased the spurious final twelve verses of Mark, which were late interpolations including the words that caused centuries of suffering: "He that believeth not shall be damned." It eliminated the fraudulent translation "Joseph and his mother," intended to preserve the dogma of the virgin birth, and restored the original "his father and his mother." It omitted the forged interpolation intended to preserve the dogma of the trinity: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." These words appeared nowhere before the 15th century A.D. However, the Catholic church insisted on retaining the forgery. Churchmen's argument was: "How, if these versus were an interpolation, could the Holy Spirit, who guides and directs the Church, have allowed her to regard this lofty affirmation of the Trinity as authentic, and permitted its insertion in the official edition of the sacred books?" In 1897 the Congregation of the Index, with the approval of Pope Leo XIII, forbade any further research into the origins of this text.
Traditionally, the church forbade not only research but even reading of the Bible by laymen. Throughout the Middle Ages, possession of a Bible written in the vernacular was a crime punished by burning at the stake. With the Reformation came Bible reading in search of a new basis of faith; but in the process were found many new grounds for skepticism.
Richard Simon's 17th-century Critical History of the Old Testament exhibited the now well known internal evidence that the books of Moses were not written by Moses but were compiled by many hands at a much later date. Bishop Boussuet pronounced this work of scholarship "a mass of impieties," drove its author out of the Oratory and ordered the entire first edition burned. Dr. Alexander Geddes, a Catholic scholar, translated the Old Testament in 1792 with a critical volume proving that the Pentateuch could not have been written by Moses, nor at any time prior to the reign of David. He was denounced as "a would-be corrector of the Holy Ghost."
As the years passed, it became increasingly clear that the Holy Ghost needed correcting. Seven clerical scholars published Essays and Reviews in 1860, defining the new science of Bible criticism. They were denounced, and two were suspended from office; but they took their case to court, and won. In 1869, Kuenen's The Religion of Israel established Bible criticism as a valid field of investigation. He was followed by many others in Holland, Germany, and France. In 1889 the book of biblical essays called Lux Mundi gave up all pretense of the scriptures' historicity or divine inspiration, admitting that the Bible is a confused mass of myth, legend, and garbled history, often contradicting provable facts.
Naturally, there was constant opposition to the efforts of the scholars. Many 19th-century churchment insisted that the Bible's only author was God. Dean Burgon said, "The Bible is the very utterance of the Eternal; as much God's own word as if high heaven were open and we heard God speaking to us with human voice. Every book is inspired alike, and is inspired entirely." Dr. Baylee said the Bible is "infallibly accurate; all its histories and narration's of every kind are without any inaccuracy." Dr. Hodge declared that the books of the Bible are "one and all, in thought and verbal expression, in substance, and in form, wholly the work of God, conveying with absolute accuracy and divine authority all that God meant to convey without human additions and admixtures." Apparently none of these gentlemen were familiar with the earlier contradictory texts; nor had they read the Bible closely enough to see the many passages where God contradicted himself.
The real point was that organized religions had an economic interest in maintaining literal interpretation of biblical myths. Guignebert says, "The doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible...necessarily placed theology in an attitude of surly and sanguinary hostility toward the exact and experimental sciences, which it will not abandon save most reluctantly and after much delay as possible...[M]ethods have changed, the illusions still current have decreased, but its spirit is scarcely altered."
When theologians began to give in, they complained that viewing the Bible as myth would destroy the whole structure that their livelihood and self-respect depended on. After David Stress's Leben Jesu disposed of the historicity of the Gospel stories, and Renan's Vie de Jesus showed that the Gospels cannot be taken as literal truth but only as romantic symbolism, the Rev. Maurice Jones exclaimed, "If the Christ Myth theory is true, and if Jesus never lived, the whole civilized world has for close upon two thousand years lain under the spell of a lie." The Archbishop of Canterbury found it impossible to deny the Bible's apparent lies, and began to backtrack with his plaintive question, "May not the Holy Spirit make use of myth and legend?"
Obviously the Bible was full of myths and legends, but most orthodox theologians had no idea of their meaning. One reason was that they didn't study the corresponding myths and legends of other cultures ancient paganism, modern mysticism, the non Christian beliefs of people both civilized and uncivilized throughout the rest of the world. Christian missionaries thought that theirs was the only pipeline to divinity, and the myths of the Bible were absolutely true whereas all other myths were absolutely false.
Nowadays such crude beliefs seem no less superstitious than the primitive animism that the missionaries sought to destroy. Yet an even darker blot on the history of Christian missions was their arrogant vandalism burning books and artworks, smashing images, forbidding the songs and poems of heathen tradition instead of listening and recording them in order to understand the people, to display a decent respect for what alien races held sacred, as the pagan Romans did in the days of their empire. It may well have been that, had the missionaries been willing to listen and learn, they would have discovered the mythology of the Bible all over again in other offshoots from its original sources; for all peoples, nearly everywhere in the world, shared the same fables of the creation, the flood, the magic garden with its tree of life and its primal couple, the wise serpent, the heaven piercing tower, the divided waters, the chosen people, the virgin mothers, the saviors, and all the rest. It has been said both testaments of the Bible are only recent and relatively corrupt derivations from a world-wide cycle of archetypal myths.
Least of all were righteous Christians prepared to understand that their awe of the Bible rested on a foundation of magical superstition; it was, and is, a fetish. Legal oaths were taken in physical contact with a Bible because of a very primitive belief in its destructive manner, which would automatically punish perjurers. Both Jews and Christians used their Bible for divination, just as a witch might use a crystal ball, an African might use a thunder stone, or a Roman augur might use the sacred chickens. Bibliomancy (taking omens from the Bible) was sometimes deplored, but from the 4th to the 14th centuries was "repeatedly practiced by Kings, Bishop, and Saints." St. Augustine frankly recommended taking omens from the Bible "in all cases of spiritual difficulty." Even in this "enlightened" age, in both Europe and America, the Bible is still used to give omens.
A favorite biblical method for discovering a thief easily lent itself to conscious legerdemain. The name of the accuser was written on a piece of paper and inserted into the hollow end of a key, which was put into the Bible's pages. The diviner recited Psalm 50:18: "When thou sawest a thief, then thou consentedst with him, and hast been partaker with adulterers." The guilt of the accuser was proven if the key was found turned around afterward.
Despite the many discoveries and clarifications made by biblical scholars in the last century or so, the average Christian's attitude toward the Bible is still hardly more sophisticated than this simpleminded magic. Most churchmen see to it that their congregations are not told the true origins of biblican myths. The most primitive or unattractive of these are constantly re-interpreted as deep allegories or metaphorical fables intended by their divine author to wait two thousand years or more for a correct explanation. Yet the real explanation of the sources of these stories, uncovered by the careful researches of higher critics, is seldom mentioned. Likewise ignored are many of the truly awkward passages such as "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," or God's frequent commands to wage merciless war, which no amount of exegesis can fit into a more tolerant ethic.
Erroneous but traditional views of Bible origins and meanings are doggedly preserved by male chauvinists in particular, since the canonical books were deliberately selected and edited to wipe out all feminine images of divinity and sanction religious suppression of women. Robert Ingersoll pointed out that "As long as woman regards the Bible as the charter of her rights, she will be the slave of man." Josephine Henry grumbled, "The Bible records that God created woman by a method different from that employed in bringing into life any other creature, then cursed her for seeking knowledge." Elizabeth Stanton said there is no escape from the Bible's "degrading teaching" as to the position of women, and advised women to boycott churches. "It is not commendable for women to get up fairs and donation parties for churches in which the gifted of their sex may neither pray, preach, share in the offices and honors, nor have a voice in the business affairs, creeds and discipline, and from whose altars come forth Biblican interpretations in favor of women's subjection.
One of the erroneous notions that still keep Christian women shackled to their Bible based "inferior" image is the notion that Christianity was founded on the New Testament, when in fact the early churches had no Gospels but rather created and produced their own. Not only did churchmen falsely pretend an apostolic origin for their scriptures; they also weeded out all references to female authority or participation in Christian origins. Only the forbidden Gnostic Gospels retained hints that Jesus had 12 female disciples corresponding to the 12 male disciples, or that Mary Magdalene was the leader of them all. Even women's scholarship was denied. St. Jerome openly admitted that his co-authors of the Vulgate were two learned women; but later scholars erased the women's names and substituted the words "venerable brothers.
History
The stories of the Bible evolved slowly over centuries before there were formed orthodox religions. There were many belief cults that spread stories and myths probably handed down by oral tradition from generation to generation before they were written down. Many of the stories originally came from Egyptian and Sumerian cults. Most of these cults were polytheistic in nature as practiced by the early Hebrews. Some of the oldest records of the stories of the Old Testament came from excavations in Mesopotamia where small cylinder seals depicting creation stories were found. These early artworks (dated at about 2500 B.C.E.) were the origin for the story of the Garden of Eden.
Virtually all human societies, before the advent of the northern invaders, practiced female goddess worship. It has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshipped the Goddess. Later the goddesses became more war-like with the influence of the invaders who slowly replaced the goddesses with their mountain male war gods. So why doesn't the Bible mention anything about the Goddess? In fact it does, but in disguise from converting the name of the goddesses to masculine terms. Many times "Gods" in the Bible refers to goddesses; Ashtoreth, or Asherah, named of masculine gender, for example, actually refers to Astarte-- the Great Goddess. The Old Testament doesn't even have a word for "Goddess." The goddesses are sometimes referred to as Elohim (masculine plural form) which was later mistranslated into the singular "God." The Bible authors converted the ancient goddess symbols into icons of evil. As such, the snake, serpents, tree of knowledge, horns (of the bull), became associated with Satan. The end result gave women the status of inferiority, a result which we still see to this day.
The Old Testament consists of a body of literature spread over a period from approximately 1200 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E. There exist no original writings of the Old Testament. However, there are hundreds of copies of fragments from copies that became the old testament that have been found in the form of Cuneiform tablets, papyrus paper, leather etchings and the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. The literature of the old testament was written in classical Hebrew except some brief portions which are in Aramaic. The traditional text was originally written in consonants, but the Rabbis later added vowels so that the words could be pronounced. Of course the Rabbis did their best in choosing the vowels that they thought gave the words their proper pronunciation. In the second century C.E., or even earlier, the Rabbis compiled a text from manuscripts as had survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and on this basis was established the traditional or massoretic text, so called from the Hebrew word massorah. This text incorporated the mistakes of generations of copyists, and in spite of the care bestowed on it, many errors of later copyists also found their way into it. The earliest surviving manuscripts of this text date from the ninth to eleventh centuries C.E. It is this text which has been used for the present translations.
The New Testament has even fewer surviving texts and it is believed that it wasn't until about 60 or 70 years after Jesus' death that the Gospels were beginning to be written. There is no evidence that the New Testament was ever written by the original apostles themselves or anyone else that had seen Jesus. Although the oldest surviving Christian texts are believed to have been written by Paul, he had never seen the earthly Jesus. But there is nothing in Paul's letters that either hints at the existence of the Gospels or that even talks of a need for such memoirs of Jesus Christ. It is more probable that the Gospels were written by scribes that followed the apostles after Jesus' death. The oldest fragment of the New Testament yet known is a tiny snippet of a Gospel of John. The little flake of papyrus was dated by the style of its handwriting to about 130 C.E. Most of the new testament was originally written in old Greek. There have been over a hundred different versions of the Bible, written in most of the languages of the time; Greek, Latin, German, etc. Some versions left out certain biblical stories and others contained added stories. The complete compiled version of the old and new testament was probably finished at around 200-300 C.E. It wasn't until 1611 C.E. that the King James version of the Bible was completed.
It's interesting that there were many competing Christian cults in the early years after Jesus's death. Some sects saw the universe in dualisms of goodness and sin, of light and darkness, God and the Devil. Other Christian sects performed odd rituals, some of which involved the swallowing of semen, thought to be a sacred substance. Many other Christians were also writing mystical stories and by the second century there were more than a dozen Gospels circulating, along with a whole library of other texts. These include letters of Jesus to foreign kings, letters of Paul to Aristotle, and histories of the disciples. In one of these secret Gospels, it describes Jesus taking naked young men off to secret initiation rites in the Garden of Gethsemene. There were Christian Gnostics (knowers) who believed that the church itself was a device of the Devil to keep man from God and from realizing his true nature. In those first centuries of Christianity there was no such thing as orthodoxy and when an organized orthodox church finally came, it was defined, almost inadvertently, in argument against many of the Gnostic sects.
So the idea of the Bible as a single, sacred unalterable corpus of texts began in heresy but was then extended and used by churchmen in their efforts to define orthodoxy. One of the Bible's most influential editors was Irenaeus of Lyon who decided that there should only be four Gospels like the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four divisions of man's estate, and the four forms of the first living creatures -- the lion of Mark, the calf of Luke, the man of Matthew, and the eagle of John. In a single stroke, he had delineated the sacred book of the Christian church and left out the other Gospels. Irenaeus also wrote what Christianity was not, and in this way Christianity became an orthodox faith. A work of Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, became the starting point for later inquisitions. The salvation doctrines of Christianity survived and flourished because they afforded the priesthood considerable power. The priests alone held the keys to salvation and could threaten the unbelievers with eternal punishment. Hence, in the evolution of Christianity in the last two thousand years with priests preying on human fears, the religion has demonstrated extraordinary powers of survival. Even without the priests, the various versions of the Bible have had more influence on the history of the world, in the minds of men than any other literature.
Unfortunately, the beliefs in Scripture has been the trigger for the most violent actions against man in the history of humanity. The burning of competing Christian cults (called heretics) by early Christian churches were the seeds of violent atrocities against man. There later followed the destruction of Rome by the Christian Goths, and the secret pagan sacrifices consented by the Pope, the Vandals that had the Bible with them as they destroyed imperial North Africa, the crusades in the eleventh century fighting in the lands around the eastern Mediterranean, Palestine and Syria, capturing Jerusalem and setting kingdoms from Anatolia to the Egyptian border. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade plundered Constantinople the most holy city at that time, with Christians fighting Christians. And the slaughters continued.
According to Romer, "More heretics and scholars were burned in the Middle Ages than were ever killed in Carolingian times. For at this time the Inquisition came into its own, and torture, largely unused as an instrument of government since Roman days, was reintroduced." In the early 1500's the German heretic, Martin Luther, almost single handedly caused the split from the Roman Catholic church and created the beginnings of the Protestant church. This split is still influencing violence up to this day. Luther also helped spread the seeds of anti-Semitism with his preaching and books such as his "The Jews and their lies." It must be remembered that Hitler's holocaust could not have occurred if it weren't for German Christian beliefs and their support.
There is little reason to think that violence inspired by religion, will ever stop. One only has to look at the religious wars around the world to see belief's everlasting destructive potential. One only has to look at the Protestant-Catholic uprising in Ireland, the conflicts in the middle east with Jews fighting Moslems & Christians, the Iran-Iraq war, Sudan's civil war between Christians and Islamics. The desperate acts of fanatical individuals proclaiming to have killed in the name of Jesus, Mohammed, God or Satan would create a death list far longer than any crimes in history. The Holy Bible supports the notion that war and destruction is not only necessary, but moral. If we wish to become a peaceful species, it may well serve us to understand the forces involved that keep us in continual conflict.
Michael
The True God, The Force mistakenly called god is much better than the one in KJ bible. It hurts no one for any reason. It is in all things and all ways the helping hand...........