Amazing

Born

Thoughts

BORN AGAIN - AND AGAIN

by Doyle Duke

The Beginning of Knowledge

One of the first things I learned was that the gospels were not written, as supposed, by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Instead, I discovered they were written by persons unknown and probably originated from one master copy. What's more, I discovered that that information was more or less common knowledge. In short, almost anyone studying for the ministry would be aware of it. I was astounded. My own minister was learned and well educated, so I carried my discovery to him: Was he aware of such knowledge? Yes. Then why hadn't he told us, his congregation? He said that as a young man he had been forced to confront the same question I faced, and had wrestled with the problem. In the end he decided there wasn't enough evidence to dispute the Bible teachings he'd learned. Needless to say, I quit the church.

I'd never been concerned over planning for retirement. Money was a vulgar necessity that only caused greed and was better left to God's provision. A few years earlier, when I realized it wasn't going to be there for our children's college, I became involved in Amway and other multi-level marketing schemes. None were productive, but through one I became interested in insurance, mutual funds, and the stock market.

Shortly after I stopped attending church I decided on a career change. I stumbled onto the opportunity to become a licensed stockbroker and couldn't refuse. So I quit my job, studied for and passed the exams and was whisked off to Colorado for two weeks training. The pressure was intense and I doubled up on my Zantac, mistakenly thinking more was better.

The job offer was in Pensacola, Florida, and Fay was trying to sell our home. When I finished the school it was still on the market, so I went ahead to Pensacola to start working and find a house. Into the second week, I quit. I won't say the firm's sales practices were illegal, but they should have been jailed on ethical grounds. It was all a tele-marketing scheme to promote penny stocks. I also had to accept the fact that I wasn't a salesman. I came home in utter defeat. I was a failure, old and wasted with nothing to show for fifty years. It was the low point in my life.

When I first started experiencing depression, I associated it with the disappointing news of another ulcer. My doctor gave the impression it couldn't be healed. Quite a blow when I'd thought God had healed my ulcer permanently. When I looked back, the deep depressions began about the time I started taking the Zantac (and I was taking double doses), so immediately, I blamed the drugs. I questioned my doctor and he said it wasn't the medicine. At one point I admitted being suicidal and he said it would pass. He tried to tell me I was suffering the male equivalence of the menopause, but I didn't believe anyone could be so miserable just because some hormones or something was out of balance. Later, he suggested a psychologist, but my insurance wouldn't cover the treatment and I got mad at the idea of paying a hundred bucks an hour to pour my guts out to a stranger. Besides, I just knew there was nothing anyone could say that would make me feel differently.

I felt that the world had become a cruel, dirty, joke; you lived your whole life to just work, eat, and sleep--over and over--the same thing. You got married when you were too young to have any life experience, had kids, and presto--you were trapped for life. Then, before you even realized what had happened, your body wore out while your mind was still going strong. God was a laugh!

From a staunch Christian, I had begun to detest God. I no longer feared Him. I knew there was no hell and often prayed for death. Isn't that ironic; praying to a god in whom you don't believe? That is desperation! When I looked back at the years I'd wasted buried in my Bible when I could have been broadening my education; attending church services, rather that expanding my job skills; or giving tithes that could have paid for a college degree, I would get angry. But in my misery I had found at least one freedom--freedom from the life-long instilled fear of God. Eventually, like my doctor had promised, the periods of depression ended. Perhaps God did have a reason for ignoring me in my time of need. Perhaps He was answering the prayer I'd prayed for over twenty years--my prayers for understanding. Perhaps I had to reject Him before I could reject the ridiculous fantasies about Him and a make-believe son.

 Let me try and explain in greater detail why I rejected the doctrines of Jesus the Christ. And I hope to bring to light some of the tactics used by the Church for centuries to suppress and control the populace. But to do this we must first understand the history of the Church, the origin of the New Testament, and gain a brief insight into the lives of the early Christians.

Let's start with the origin of the New Testament. I quote from Erich von Daniken's, Miracles of the Gods.

Most Christians believe the Bible, as they know it, has been passed down through the generations, pure, unscathed and without error, miraculously preserved. Few know, or want to know, that for about two hundred years the first Christians had no scripture other than the Old Testament. And even the Old Testament had not been canonized. The New Testament had its origin in Paul's writings and oral tradition in the form of folktales. When those folktales were finally recorded none of the early Christians would have even remotely considered them as Holy Scriptures. The idea first occurred when different fractions were fighting each other and they needed something to back up their arguments. Plagiarism was never considered an act of theft, quite the contrary, signing a prominent, or well-known, person's name to a literary work, to promote its import, was considered a good marketing practice. Thus was the origin of the gospels.

The Catholic Church, in its constitution, has proclaimed for centuries that God was the originator of the Bible, that all parts are sacred and that all parts were composed under the influence of the Holy Ghost; that everything taught in the Bible is accurate, true, and without error.

Now, despite the feigned brotherhood that is exhibited between Catholics and Protestants, I can assure you personally, (and so can any Irishman) that neither considers the other worthy of the Kingdom. But that’s another subject. The point is, despite their often-hostile differences, the Protestants also echo the same beliefs in the inspired word of God. Again, from Miracles of the Gods.

So that they can defend this exclusive property to the vast community of believers, theologians, unaffected by the results of their Biblical research, fall back on the evangelists, the letters of the apostles, and the miraculous 'original texts' of the Holy Scriptures.

But none of the evangelists was a contemporary of Jesus, and no contemporary wrote an eyewitness account. Nothing was written down about Jesus and his followers until after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Titus (AD 39-81) in the year AD 70. And if the year 30 is accepted for the death of the Son of God, then Mark, the first author of the Bible, wrote his gospel at least forty years after the crucifixion of Jesus.

Dr. Johannes Lehman, co-translator of a modern edition of the Bible, says on this point: 'The evangelists are interpreters, not biographers; they have not illuminated what had grown dark with the passage of generations, but obscured what was still light. They have not written history, but made history. They did not want to report, but to justify.'

The 'original texts,' so frequently consulted and so often referred to in theological hair-splitting, do not exist at all. What does exist? Transcripts that without exception originated between the fourth and tenth centuries AD. And these transcripts, some fifteen hundred of them, are transcripts of transcripts, and not one single transcript agrees with another. More than eighty thousand variations have been counted. There is not a single page of the 'original texts' without contradictions. From copy to copy the verses were understood differently by different authors, and their functions were transformed to suit the needs of the times in which they were translated.

The oldest, most prominent, of the "original texts", the Codex Sinaiticus, was written around the fourth century and found in the Sinai Convent in 1844. It contains sixteen thousand corrections, which can be traced back to seven correctors. Many passages were altered three times and then replaced by a fourth "original text".

Though not an expert, I am familiar with the science of paleography, the study of ancient writings, and I know that the correctors were more or less what we would call proofreaders today. They checked each manuscript for errors and made the appropriate changes in the margins. And given the primitive conditions under which the copies were made, scribal errors were bound to be common. But what of the additional changes? Were they deliberately made to harmonize with existing popular beliefs or simply attempts to reconcile all the different versions?

The earliest effort to ascertain the original text of the New Testament was sometime near the end of the third century. By that time the corruption had already taken place. For over two hundred years fables and myths had been created about the man Jesus and his ministry. Gentile Christians striving to separate their story of Jesus from his message, invented antidotes of his life, and put their words in his mouth and thought nothing of it. For such was the practice of the day.

For example let me quote from, Our Bible and The Ancient Manuscripts, first published in 1895 by Sir Frederic Kenyon, a noted paleographer and defender of the scriptures:

We now have to consider what happened to the text of ancient writings during the period when they were transmitted by handwritten copies; and in so doing we shall have to explain what is meant by the phrase 'various readings,' which recurs frequently in the discussion of the text of the Bible, or indeed of any ancient book. No one can read our English Revised Version intelligently without seeing that in very many places there is considerable doubt as to the exact words used by the original writers. On nearly every page, especially of the 'New Testament, we see notes in the margin to the effect that 'Some ancient authorities read' this, or 'Many ancient authorities read' that-these readings being alternatives to the readings actually adopted in the text of the Revisers.

What were some of those various readings Sir Kenyon referred to? He continues on the next page:

...We will take, for the moment, the Gospels alone. The Doxology of the Lord's Prayer is omitted in the oldest copies of Matt. vi. 13; several copies omit Matt. xvi. 2, 3 altogether; a long additional passage is sometimes found after Matt. xx. 28; the last twelve verses of St. Mark are omitted altogether by the two oldest copies of the original Greek; one very ancient authority inserts an additional incident after Luke vi. 4, while it alters the account of the institution of the Lord's Supper in Luke xxii. 19, 20, and omits altogether Peter's visit to the sepulchre in xxiv. 12, and several other details of the Resurrection...

The list goes on citing incident after incident, yet Sir Kenyon was blind to his own observations, stating:

...The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hand and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true Word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.

How could he make such a statement? Which Bible? His contention was that since there were so many different interpretations, somewhere, one had to be correct. A bit like looking at water downstream from a herd of cattle and pronouncing it pure simply because its only a bit yellow. But what does he say of the origin of the text?

The books of the New testament were written between the years 50 and 100 after Christ. If anyone demurs to this lower limit as being stated too dogmatically, we would only say that it is not laid down in ignorance... The originals of the several books have long ago disappeared. They must have perished in the very infancy of the Church; for no allusion is ever made to them by any Christian writer...

As I've mentioned before, these discrepancies aren't hidden; they aren't buried in the secret vaults of the Vatican. They are readily accessible to anyone with a public library card or access to the internet. In fact, as Sir Kenyon records, they're noted in the margins of many Bibles. Why then, are so many people deceived? Let me quote again from Miracles of the Gods, because Mr. Daniken states it so much better than I ever could:

It is staggering that the fairy tale of the Bible as 'God's word' has endured so long--there is no comparison in the seven thousand years of human history. But the fact that the 'original texts' are still publicized as 'God's word' borders on clerical schizophrenia. I know that 'falsification' is a harsh term--'falsification' means nothing more or less than being intentionally misleading--but what else can it be? Even the Fathers of the Church of the first centuries AD agreed that, though they might quarrel about the culprits, the 'original texts' were falsified; they still spoke openly of 'interpolations, profanation, destruction, improvement, corruption, erasing'--but, then as now, the hair-splitting does not alter the objective fact of falsification.

How, in our enlightened age, is such a delusion possible?  In retrospect the subtle manipulations become obvious; beginning early in childhood. The main weapon is fear, fear of sinning, fear of hell, fear of missing a great reward. The very first thing a child is taught is that he is conceived in sin. Stop and think about that. In most cases, the child doesn't even know the meaning of conceived, yet the very first idea pounded into his head is that he is bad. Then he is taught the Booger Man will get him, if he tells a story, or says a bad word. At the tender age of seven, or there about, he's informed that he is responsible for the dead of the Son of God and is going to hell. Because he was born wicked, God's son had to die. Think about it! That's a heavy load for an adult; yet loving, kind-hearted, parents shovel it onto their kids! All in the name of God.

The next step is salvation, escape from one's wicked deeds. If one is, as the old Methodist ministers use to put it, "hair-hung and wind-blown over the pits of hell," any avenue of escape is acceptable. That is when the next control factor is introduced--faith. So easy, one has only to believe. Believe what? Believe there is only one God, one way, one plan of salvation; that the Son of God died for you. And if you say, "How do you know?"… the answer is, "You must have faith, only believe."