While creeds do play an important role in Christianity, the true foundation of the faith is to be found in a collection of 66 books known as the Bible. The Bible is the guideline for the Christian; within it God’s blueprint for man, built around Jesus, has been revealed. A revealed religion is only as sound as the revelation upon which it is based. In the case of Christianity, this all-important foundation is quite weak due to tampering in its scriptures by man. The revelation is there alright, but the problem rests with what happened between the time that the divine inspiration was given and the time that these revelations were then written down.
A Closer Look At the Old Testament
The Jews saw their Temple at Jerusalem utterly destroyed in 581 B.C.E., and with it went their original copies of the Torah.. Although scribes–most notably Ezra–did eventually restore that loss, these scribes worked with copies from which they made yet more copies. That changes were made is a fact that few Biblical scholars will deny: changes in style, changes in grammer, additions to various stores to embellish the tale, and even deletions for things the scribe himself didn’t feel comfortable with. The work of these scribes was, in short, affected by both the times they lived in, along with their own personal feelings and beliefs.
Several examples of text alterations are as follows:
- There are two different versions of creation found in Genesis: in chapter one, it says that creation took six days; according to in chapter two, however, God did it all in just one day (2:4). Going along with this line of thought is the fact that Adam was said to be the last thing that was created in the first version (1:27), whereas he was created first, before anything else, in the second version (2:4-9). Along with two different versions of creation in Genesis 1 and 2, we can find two different versions of the Flood in Genesis 6, 7 and 8: we read two different versions of the number of animals Noah takes into the ark, two different versions of the agent of the Flood, and two different versions of how long the Flood lasted.
- In Genesis 22:2, God issues the following command to Abraham: “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac…”. The words “thine only son” can be taken as nothing else than an interpolation as Abraham had TWO sons at that time–Isaac AND his older btother Ishnmael–not just one.
- and if Moses is considered to be the author of the book of Deuteronomy, how is it possible that he could write the account of his own death as is found in Deuteronomy 34?