The Telegraph is reporting that a new translation of the Bible will mean the very fundamentals of Judeo-Christianity will have to be reconsidered.
According to respected Old Testament and Hebrew scholar Professor Ellen van Wolde who re-analysed the original Hebrew text, the Bible was mis-translated. Instead of “In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth”, it should read “God separated the Heaven and the Earth”. God did not create Earth – it was there before, which is in line with many of the ancient texts on which the Bible was based.
According to van Wolde, the belief was that before God created man, there was only a world of water filled with darkness swarming with sea monsters. Very Lovecraftian. This is going to cause a few headaches for those Creationists who have extrapolated forward from the point of earth-creation in Genesis to suggest the planet is only a few thousand years old.
According to the Telegraph, Prof Van Wolde added: “The traditional view of God the Creator is untenable now.”
Like it.
Could this now provide the uber-geeky challenge of reading this and a standard KJ edition side by side and playing spot the difference?
I’m not ashamed to say….. maybe…..
HA! Oh that has cheered me up no end! Cheers Mark
Of course, it makes no difference what anyone says, be they a professor or a grade B sewage worker. We are free to believe any version we like. Well, not all of us. We live in a world of natural wonder which makes sense and no sense at the same time. One view of the world might contradict another and we might have always known the real truth behind it all but how can we tell? I’m quite happy to have the bible around in any form it likes as long as its contents aren’t used to destroy lives.
Problem there, though, is that the bible’s (perceived) teachings are actively destroying lives and will continue to until more irrefutable things like this surface and merge the world’s religions into one, simply just a sense of spirituality that acts as a force of unity.
Something I don’t like thinking about, but feel is true, is that even harmless beautiful people who hold fundamentalist beliefs are contributing to what I’d consider to be the evil in the world – if not directly, then in the voting booths.