Here: The So-called "Word Of God"

[Hervé]

Handwritten Draft Of King James Bible Discovered: Reveals No ‘Divine Powers’

Author: Antiphon Freeman October 28, 2015 8:51 am

The earliest known version of The King James Bible, perhaps one of the most influential and widely read books in history, has been discovered mislabeled inside an archive at the University of Cambridge. The find is being called one of the most significant revelations in decades. It shows that writing is a process of revising, cutting, and then more rewriting. The Bible is no different in this regard, even though some conservative Christians claim it is the divine word of God himself. Perhaps God, then, is a revisionist. This find certainly seems to suggest that.

The notebook containing the draft was found by American scholar, Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who announced his research in an article in The Times Literary Supplement. The New York Times didn’t take long to pick up the story. They ran an article about it, HERE. Mr. Miller was researching an essay about Samuel Ward, one of the King James translators, and was hoping to find an unknown letter at the archives. While you can say he certainly accomplished that end, he definitely wasn’t expecting to find the earliest draft of the King James Bible — which is now giving new insights into how the Bible was constructed.

He first came across the plain notebook not knowing what it was — it was incorrectly labeled. That’s why no one has found it until now. It had been cataloged in the 1980s as a “verse-by-verse” Biblical commentary with “Greek word studies, and some Hebrew notes.” When he tried in vain to figure out which passages of the Bible the commentary was referring to, he realized that it was no commentary at all — it was an early draft of part of the King James Version of the Bible.

Professor Miller described what it felt like when he first knew what he had in his hands:

“There was a kind of thunderstruck, leap-out-of-bathtub moment. But then comes the more laborious process of making sure you are 100 percent correct.”

Image via The New York Times

The material in the manuscript discovered by Miller covers the apocryphal books called Esdras and Wisdom and seems to show that the translation process at Cambridge worked completely different than what researchers had previously known. Until now, it had been assumed that six different teams, or companies of translators that is, had worked more collaboratively rather than individually. Yet — this draft throws that idea out the window.

Ward’s draft seems to indicate the people were assigned individual sections of the Bible and then worked on them almost entirely by themselves — a massive undertaking with little guesswork. You would think this would cause people to become more error prone. In fact, quite hilariously, Professor Miller noticed that the draft suggests that Ward was picking up the slack for another translator. This really shows how human the entire job was, according to him.

“Some of them, being typical academics, either fell down on the job or just decided not to do it. It really testifies to the human element of this kind of great undertaking.”

This is sure to piss off a lot of religious conservatives who claim that the Bible is the “actual word of God.” While this finding certainly doesn’t disprove God, it does show that the translators of the Bible didn’t get a finalized product the first go around — it wasn’t a walk in the park with an angel over their shoulder telling them what to write. It took many different individuals, working separately — and they often suffered from man-made struggles, like meeting deadlines. You know, now that we think of it, doesn’t sound that much different from the writers of today’s workforce.

[Daughter of Time]

History has always been written - and re-written... to please the king!!!

[Bill Ryan]

.
Thanks for this! Very important stuff. Gradually, it's all breaking surface how much of a novelized account much of the standardly-accepted Bible is.

[araucaria]

It's just a "lost in translation" thing. For a tiny example, see this post. Complexity is site-specific, and so is anything physical. What can be translated, i.e. transferred to another site, is a different complexity, and more in the order of an abstraction.

Say the complexity is a big joke that you explain or translate for someone. They may get the joke, but they probably won't laugh, or not so much.

If the complexity is a person, you have their foreignness to deal with: never easy.

[DeDukshyn]

Posted by Hervé (here)
[B]...
This is sure to piss off a lot of religious conservatives who claim that the Bible is the “actual word of God.” ...

When I was very young, I questioned "If the bible is the word of God, why did men write it?", "God told the men what to write", was the response. "How do we know the men wrote down the right stuff or that other men didn't change the information, how do I know this is the word of God?" I demanded to know.

"Because God says that no one shall ever change, add or subtract, any words to the written word of God." --> and then my child mind was satisfied ... not. That helped reinforce two things: Adults are gullible suckers, and that religion makes pretty much no sense at all (as a presented whole).

[Carmody]

The current count indicates something like a total of about 1400 changes or edits, compared to the earliest known versions.

[Citizen No2]

I once had to endure a talk by a group called 'Cornerstone'...... these guys were hard-core. They had come from all different types of church and formed this group as they felt their respective church's weren't hard-hitting enough. Anyhow, this talk. The lady said, "I'd like to show you this short film, and then discuss it afterwards".
The short film was about the terrible boxing day tsunami that hit Thailand, showing the utter desperation and carnage that was left in it's wake. After the film finished there was utter silence in the room. Said lady then pipes up, "The tsunami was a punishment from God to the Thai people, for them turning their backs' on him"........................ there were a couple of sharp intakes of breath from people in the room. Then said lady asks, "any questions?". I asked, "are you a christian?", "yes" she replies. I asked, "if you were there, walking around after the waters had cleared, would you help the dying, or pass them by because this was a punishment from god?"

She declined to answer the question. A couple of weeks later we received a verbal apology from her.

Talk about mind control.

I was absolutely stunned that any right-thinking person would hold those views. This type of person wants to drag us, kicking and screaming, into the twelfth century.



Regards.

[earthdreamer]

My religious parents can understand my criticisms of the Bible's composition being a relic of patriarchal political Roman church powers. They recognize its fallibility. I think there are lots of religious church-going people who are not fundamentalists and they realize the "word of God" is from the hand of man. The Bible stories are revered though for their repetitious patterns of tradition, moral lore and examples of Jesus's love and forgiveness. Some churches take stories to heart that emphasize peace and goodwill towards others. Some religious fools stress hell and damnation. It doesn't seem to matter how much evidence presents itself to the religious public that the Bible was constructed by a series of ancient corruptions (like the game telephone), allegories lost in translation to literalists and so forth; people love their Bibles! Nobody understands it, but they love it anyway, such is the power of tradition.

Even I will sometimes look to the gnostic gospels and texts from Nag Hammadi for some esoteric meaning but quickly get lost. Perhaps some songs from Psalms contain beauty that a poet could love. For me though, no matter how kind the fellowship, how lovely the people, sitting through a church service as the Bible is reverently quoted constitutes a torturous exercise in repressing the convulsive shudders of my inner cringe. honestly.

[ghostrider]

I don't want to ruffle feathers, this is just my observations, so many hinge their very reason for being on the words of god whom never wrote a single word, it is always a voice or feeling sent to a person who then put pen to paper...we all know how good ETs are at controlling earth humans with religion... They use our own fears against us, if we are afraid of snakes they appear as serpents, dragons they appear as dragons , if we think angels have wings they appear with wings ... We must shed fear, and leave behind beliefs and enter the age of knowledge...

[DeDukshyn]

Posted by ghostrider (here)
... We must shed fear, and leave behind beliefs and enter the age of knowledge...

Here's a fitting quote from here:

"Beliefs are like a static conclusion and they do not fit in a dynamic, ever changing Universe." - DeDukshyn

[Hervé]

A Vatican researcher and translator's conclusion on the matter:

Ex Vatican Translator, Mauro Biglino , Bible Hoax, Alien Manipulation of Man, Genocide, Cloning

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8BE-4wmdCpg

Published on Jul 21, 2016
"The Book that will forever change our ideas about the Bible" Mauro Biglino. =Special Thank you to Claudia for translating for us!

This is a round table with Mauro Biglino, ex translator for the Vatican and best selling author. Gerald Clark, author of Anunnaki of Nibiru and Mercury Rising. Mauro has turned the religious world upside down, with his translations of the old testament and other ancient documents.
Topics of discussion -
Old Testament
Ancient Aliens
Genetic Manipulation
Cloning
Archons
Anunnaki
Nephilm
Nibiru Orbit Cycle
Slaves
Torture
Genocide
Intergalactic Sex
& More.

Mauro Biglino's "THE BOOK THAT WILL FOREVER CHANGE OUR IDEAS ABOUT THE BIBLE - THE GODS COMING FROM SPACE" (PDF)

See this thread: Biglino's Unexpected Bible - Translating it literally - UFO's

[Franro]

Personally i think that god did not create man in his image but man created god in his image. There is no telling what and how much was edited in the original text. So we are left to find the truth ourselves. And not take these texts at face value.

[Hervé]

It gets even better... according to this researcher and scholar, the Bible is a large-scale psy-op experiment initiated by Plato...

And now... for the champion winner of all times in holding the title of fake news and its "good book":

What Does Plato Have To Do With the Bible? The Truth Perspective: Interview with Russell Gmirkin

Sott.net Sun, 11 Dec 2016 17:00 UTC

Just how old is the Old Testament?

If Moses didn't write the Pentateuch, who did?

For millennia, people have thought the Hebrew Bible was as old as many of the events it depicts. In recent generations, scholars have thought it was created over a long period of time, with various authors and editors. But the writings in the Hebrew Bible may not be as ancient as we've been led to believe.

On this episode of the Truth Perspective, we'll be interviewing Russell Gmirkin, independent researcher, scholar, and author of two of the most revolutionary books in biblical studies:

• Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus: Hellenistic Histories and the Date of the Pentateuch ​(New York-London: T&T Clark, 2006)

• Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible ​(London-New York: Routledge, 2016)

Russell's work radically challenges our understanding of the history of the Hebrew Bible. He demonstrates that there is simply no evidence that the Bible existed prior to the time of Alexander the Great (ca. 325 BC). All the evidence indicates that the collection of books we know of as the Hebrew Bible was written around the year 270 BC. And not only that: they relied heavily on Greek literature, particularly Plato's final work: Laws.

Listen in as we discuss how, when, and why the Bible was created.

You can visit Russell's website here: russellgmirkin.com

Running Time: 01:56:09

Download: OGG, MP3

Listen live, chat, and call in to future shows on the SOTT Radio Network!

====================================================

Well, that gives enough of a paradigm shift to throw the towel in about books...

... yes... floored...

... hard to fathom the amount of time in research, studies, speculations as well as lives and generations wasted on that #@%& book...

Disclosures about ETs, Aliens, government secrets, etc. are rendered very pale and insignificant in comparison to the enormous energy-release from three (3) major religions (based on that book) realizing they have been had...

[Foxie Loxie]

Amazing about Plato & his influence! Thanks, Herve!

[Hervé]

Check also this blog article: David, an Ideal Greek Hero — and other Military Matters in Ancient Israel

[Hervé]

Russell Gmirkin: Athenian, Ideal Greek Tribes were the model for the Tribes of Israel

By Neil Godfrey Vridar Fri, 16 Dec 2016 18:31 UTC

The Bible's narratives evidently share much of the cultural heritage of ancient Syria and Mesopotamia but zoom in for a more detailed study and one arguably sees many signs of a distinctively Greek influence. That's the argument of Russell Gmirkin in Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible. Previous posts in this series that include explanations of how Greek sources could have influenced the biblical authors are:

1. Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible
2. The Pentateuch's Debt to Greek Laws and Constitutions — A New Look
3. David, an Ideal Greek Hero — and other Military Matters in Ancient Israel
4. Some preliminaries before resuming Gmirkin's Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible

Nothing is more essentially "Biblical Israel" than its Twelve Tribes. Genesis is for most part the story of the origins of these twelve tribes. The history of Israel is a history primarily of the tribes of Israel, mostly twelve at first, but then divided into two kingdoms of ten and two. One of the tribes was assigned for the priesthood and therefore not given a territorial allotment, but two of Joseph's sons were each given land areas to maintain the all-important twelve inheritors of the land while the sons of Levi became a thirteenth tribe. Always twelve, though sometimes ten and sometimes thirteen.

So very "biblical", yet so very Greek as known about Athens and various Greek colonies from the writings of Plato and Aristotle housed in the Great Library of Alexandria.

It's a fascinating observation. Gmirkin's argument is as follows.

Tribal groupings in the Ancient Near East generally consisted of literal kinship groupings. When we read about the tribal organization of Israel in the Hexateuch (the Pentateuch plus Joshua), however, we find something different. Most distinctive are the clear geographic boundaries that marked the set locations of each tribe. Furthermore, each tribe's geographic area was determined by lot. Take the case of the tribe of Zebulun in Joshua 19:

10 The third lot came up for Zebulun according to its clans:

The boundary of their inheritance went as far as Sarid. 11 Going west it ran to Maralah, touched Dabbesheth, and extended to the ravine near Jokneam. 12 It turned east from Sarid toward the sunrise to the territory of Kisloth Tabor and went on to Daberath and up to Japhia. 13 Then it continued eastward to Gath Hepher and Eth Kazin; it came out at Rimmon and turned toward Neah. 14 There the boundary went around on the north to Hannathon and ended at the Valley of Iphtah El. 15 Included were Kattath, Nahalal, Shimron, Idalah and Bethlehem. There were twelve towns and their villages.

16 These towns and their villages were the inheritance of Zebulun, according to its clans.

See also Deuteronomy 4.5, 14; 5.31; 6.1; 12.1; cf. 11.2 and Joshua 13, 15-19, 21.

But people move. Families need to find better opportunities elsewhere when conflicts increase and resources decrease. A tribe defined by a geographical region is likely to be a fictive kinship group.

What we see here are two concepts of tribes. In one instance a tribe is identified by a geographical area; other times a tribe is understood to be kinship group descended from a common ancestor.

Gmirkin's study is a more methodical and in-depth exploration of some of the close similarities between Plato's Laws and the Pentateuch that I happened to post about earlier, a study initially inspired by Wajdenbaum's Argonauts of the Desert.

1. Plato's and the Bible's Ideal Laws: Similarities 1:631-637 (2015-06-22)
2. Plato's and Bible's Laws: Similarities, completing Book 1 of Laws (2015-06-23)
3. Plato's Laws, Book 2, and Biblical Values (2015-07-13)
4. Plato and the Bible on the Origins of Civilization (2015-08-13)
5. Bible's Presentation of Law as a Model of Plato's Ideal (2015-08-24)
6. Plato's and the Bible's Ideal States (2015-09-21)
7. Plato's Thought World and the Bible (2016-01-30)

Both concepts sit side-by-side in the Biblical account.

Such a system is unknown in the Ancient Near East, where tribal designations reflected either real kinship groups or in some cases perhaps social classes, but did not typically correspond to bounded geographical areas or form the formal basis for provincial organization. (Gmirkin 2016, p.21f)

Unknown in the Near East, perhaps, but well known in the Greek world.

Just as Joshua is said to have done, Greeks who set out to colonize new regions were depicted as first conquering a new territory and then dividing it up equally (compensating for areas of different quality). Scribes were appointed to mark out the different allotments that became the basis of tribal units. As in Israel, a primary concern of many comparable Greek colonies was to guarantee the inalienable right of land ownership and avoid an impoverished landless class or debt slavery. So much for the ideal, and it was an ideal that was espoused both by Plato in his Laws (3.684e and 5.736c) and Aristotle in his Politics (2.1266b and 6.1319a). The reality was that attempts to so redistribute land led to conflict. New colonizing expeditions sometimes set out with the same ideal in mind to be the foundation of their new society.

As in the Greek world we see in the Bible the same ideals, methods and functions of the tribal systems (a combination of fictive tribes based on geographical area that in fact cut across kinship groups and real tribes): land was to be divided equally according to different needs and quality; scribes were appointed to mark out the land allotments and divide them among the people; the allotted land was to be inalienable; the tribes became the basis of various administrative functions including military enrollment. As in both Athens (after late sixth century reforms) and biblical Israel citizens were identified by both their tribe and home district (village in Israel; the district or deme in Athens).

Each tribe in the Greek world was assigned its eponymous god while in Israel, as we know, we have the twelve eponymous patriarchs.

Interestingly Greek tribal divisions, both in Athens and various colonies, were by tens or twelve. Variations of both were found in Athens.

Did the Greek ideals then become the basis of the biblical political-economy? Gmirkin thinks so and I suspect he's right.

The arguments goes beyond the kinds of points in common that I have mentioned above. What I find especially significant is Gmirkin's point that quite unlike anything found in the literature of the Near East is the common interest in the Bible and Greek philosophical literature (Plato's Republic, Laws and Aristotle's Politics) with the establishment of an ideal state. When this common interest that extends to discussions of ideal geographical boundaries and specific administrative divisions and then when we go on to find the particular ideal solutions to these questions overlapping, I believe Gmirkin presents a strong case.

Continuing. . . .

Related:
So... Jesus read Plato?

[Krist]

Read this book some years back.Part of the "sometimes thirteen".http://www.christusrex.org/www2/koestler/
The Thirteenth Tribe,The Khazar Empire and its Heritage by Arthur Koestler.
This book traces the history of the Khazar Empire.Where do the Ashkenazi Jews come from?
Might be relevant to the discussion.

[Hervé]

Thanks for the input.

If ever you take the time to listen to the above linked interview (<---) and which demonstrates the whole story as a Greek social engineering experiment, you may realize that anything derived from that so-called "Old Testament" becomes irrelevant... since they are artificial concoctions designed to turn any of the self-appointed priesthoods into slave masters.

That's the kind of disclosure that none of the Bible/Torah/Quran thumpers can stomach. That's a lot of people to have been conned...

That also makes for a lot of research, discussions and arguings irrelevant and pointless...

[syrwong]

I have read some articles on evidence that the a great part if not the whole ancient Greek civilization was concocted, to give a boost to the lack of historic aspect of the western civilization. Set this aside, it is quite clear that religion is invented to control the people, because obedience to god implies obedience to the ruler who is given the authority by god or rules by the word of god. What is less clear is the rewritting history is the main form of mind control. In this case it is imagining the world of god which best suit for the subjugation of the people. In others it is the loss of the identity of their own culture, the belief in the superiority of an alien culture, as found in many "developing"countries once conquered and are still controlled by the west.

[Krist]

Posted by Hervé (here)
Thanks for the input.

If ever you take the time to listen to the above linked interview (<---) and which demonstrates the whole story as a Greek social engineering experiment, you may realize that anything derived from that so-called "Old Testament" becomes irrelevant... since they are artificial concoctions designed to turn any of the self-appointed priesthoods into slave masters.

That's the kind of disclosure that none of the Bible/Thora/Quran thumpers can stomach. That's a lot of people to have been conned...

That also makes for a lot of research, discussions and arguings irrelevant and pointless...

Thanks,
Yes, I could have clarified my post....10 years ago I was conned.Thought I might add something I felt was part of the con. I did take the time to listen,I might be a little slower than some here to get the "point". My research ability and depth has changed in the last 10 years dramatically....It's my meager attempt to add to a deeper discussion where I simply found a dot in an area that might be connected.
We can throw the Thirteenth Tribe out as pointless research to any who might stumble upon it in this post.
For me it is very clear with most books ,teachings,religious or other wise it is just one point of view.It never has had any more effect if the words were from god,plato,jesus or fill in the blank.
I left those names lower case because not one person here can prove they even existed except by the word , hand of man.For this lifetime I have not been able to verify man can be trusted with anything....Just one point of view of course.
Thank you for the opportunity to improve my posts content.