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Please, Revise the Bible, Again! Final Revision Dr Please, Revise the Bible, Again! Final Revision Dr. Adel Elsaie DEDICATIONS To The God of the universe. Thank You for showing me Your way. • O Allah, I bear witness that there is no god but You. • O Allah, all Praises are to You for Your Glory, Mercy, and Bounty. • O Allah, please accept this humble effort and forgive me for my shortcomings. • O Allah, help me to disseminate this knowledge to all those who need it. • O Allah, Help me to live as a Muslim, and die as a believer. • O Allah, bless anyone who seeks the truth, and Your way. Amen. The author owes immeasurable gratitude to his daughter Dr. Hanan Elsaie, DDS, for the continuous encouragement and the interminable patience for sharing her knowledge about God and religions. Three years ago on Christmas day, my granddaughter Dannah Diebas asked me a question: how can God be baby Jesus? This was the intuition of a 5 years old girl. Since then, she has been asking me a lot of questions about God and religions. May God bless my daughter, her husband Bilal Diebas, and my granddaughters: Dannah, Daliah, and Deyalah. Many friends shared their valuable comments on the manuscript. Special thanks to Imam Dr. Yusuf Kavakci of Islamic Association of North Texas, Brothers K. A. Shariff, Dr. Fouad Elrefai, David McClung, Ray Santillian Jr., Aftab Ahmad, Shehab Anwar, and Rich D. May God bless them all, and reward them on the Day of Judgment. • To all who contributed – my undying gratitude. • To all who seek the truth – my unfaltering encouragement. Preface 1 God sent many prophets to mankind with the same message “He is one and Only. He is the only One to worship”. As a prophet delivered the message, some people believed, and others rejected the message. From generation to generation, the message of the Unity of God was distorted and tainted by mankind through additions of some concepts and beliefs that brought the original message closer to human imagination, like adding idols that human can see and touch, or adding attributes to God that made Him love, marry, and have children. The original message is pure and simple that He is the creator of everything in this universe, He takes care of all His creatures, humans cannot see him because the human mind is limited, and God is not limited to certain time, space, power, knowledge, or anything for that matter. Rather than accepting this concept of unlimited God, humans tend to visualize God as limited like everything they experience in their lives. Judaism, in the Old Testament, shows a lot of human attributes to God such as: God regrets making man, God smells sweet savor, God wrestles with Jacob, Jacob saw God face to face, and Moses sees God’s back parts. These are obscene and imperfect descriptions of the Perfect God. Probably, these were the attempts of the writers of the Old Testament to bring a picture of God that people could imagine. This was not a correct approach to emphasize the concept of unlimited God, especially if there are verses in the Old Testament that clearly depict God as an entity beyond and above all His creation. Out of all religions, Christianity is singled out to introduce confusing concepts about God that are far from true monotheism, and were not mentioned by any prophet before or after Jesus. Not a single prophet before or after Jesus introduced the concept of the Trinity. Jesus himself did not state clearly that God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost are one and they are all “made” of the same substance, as was stated in the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea I – 325 CE. We have in our hands a New Testament that consists of 4 Gospels, and Epistles. The reader of the Gospels will notice the word “according to” in the title of each Gospel. This indicates uncertainty about the real author. As a matter of fact, Christian scholars are not certain about the real author, his biography, and the beliefs of any of the alleged authors of the Gospels. This poses an interesting question: How can anyone trust unknown authors for his or her life on earth from the present time to eternity? That is not to say that Jesus did not exist, or that he did not have a great message. There are basic questions about the Christian faith: Trinity, Son of God, original sin, atonement, and incarnation of God into a human form. If these concepts are true, they should have been mentioned by all prophets before and after Jesus, and should have been explained clearly and 2 without any ambiguity by Jesus. They should have been also mentioned by Muhammad (peace be upon him), the prophet that came after Jesus, and the last of the prophets of God. What is the origin of the Trinity? The word trinity does not exist in the Bible and is not explained or introduced by Jesus. Is Jesus God? Jesus never said obviously in the Bible “I am God”. Is Jesus the Son of God? Jesus never said clearly in the Bible “I am son of god”. In the New Revised standard Bible, Jesus called himself son of man 84 times; people and Paul called him son of God 63 times. The serious question now is who do we believe? Many times Jesus refers to God as “My Father”, and one time in Mark 14:36 Jesus said “Abba, Father” in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus Christ prayed privately to his Father before his crucifixion. The Greek word for “father” is pater , and it has a broad usage. Pater could mean a father, or an ancestor, or a respected elder, or the inventor/originator of something. It was also used as a title of honor for teachers. The Hebrew and Aramaic word that is equivalent to pater is abba, and was used in ways similar to those mentioned for pater . Abba could mean a father, or title of honor. Abba is also an Arabic word. Now, why did the writers of the New Testament translated Abba or pater to father instead of a title of honor, when Jesus did not explain what he meant by father? The first two hundred years of Christianity are often called “lost centuries’ or the dark period of the Christian history. It was a time of great Roman persecution upon the church. Christianity at that time was an underground movement that the Roman historians did not care very much about its history, and few of its records have barely survived. The victor of the ideological debates of early Christianity became the custodian of the church history. Victors always write the history of the wars they win and those histories often fabricate the story, justify their cause, ignore facts, and take liberties to demonize their opponents. We only know the Catholic Church was the eventual victor in the ideological debates, and we also know that the scarce information about the Christian history was provided mainly by the Catholic Church. Such information should not be accepted without valid questioning. There are over 50 major translations of the New Testament. Theories of translation are enthusiastically and even hotly debated among both laymen and the scholars. The debate largely focuses around whether a translation should be “word for word” equivalent to the existing manuscript, or what is called dynamic or functionally equivalent focusing on the ease of understanding of the intended reader. Every translation imperfectly represents the existing manuscript, because languages and cultures differ in ways that translation by itself cannot conquer. While translator bias is a fact to be contended with, translations are being tainted by the theological background of translators by interjecting their interpretation of ancient Hebrew and 3 Greek words and idioms. A translator's first and most essential job is to bridge the language and time gaps. The translator attempts to seek the best way of saying in English what was said first in ancient Hebrew or Greek. But even this is not simple. No English word fully matches a Greek or Hebrew word. For instance, the biblical words for "soul" are the Hebrew “ nephesh” and the Greek “psyche .” Unfortunately, nephesh is also translated as "life," "appetite," "neck" and "person," among other words. Jesus attempted to steer the Jews away from their rigid misapplication of the Law of Moses, in other words to add spirit to Jewish Law. Matthew 5:38-3938 "You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' 39 But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also”, This was a huge step forward because a complete religion is neither a set of commandments nor spiritual guidance. It should include commandments and emphasize moral spirituality such as mercy and love between humans, and between humans and other creatures. Paul, the best marketing Evangelist in Christian history, took the above message of Jesus literally and rejected the Law of Moses: 2 Cor. 3:7 "The service that brought death (the law) was written and engraven in stone" Gal.3: 13 "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the Law". There is compelling evidence to produce one unified final revision of the New Testament that is free from inconsistencies and additions or deletions of verses. The existing main discrepancies in the New Testament can summarized as: 1. Inconsistencies in events or words in the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. 2. Inconsistencies in additions or deletions of verses of the Gospels between different versions of the New Testament.
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