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The Bible is the work of many human beings, which this book considers inherently sinful. Therefore, since the Bible was not written by God and the only other choice given is the devil, the Bible was written by the devil we know - ourselves. It is unknown how many people worked on the Bible, but one thing is known people wrote it. People wrote it down, people translated it and people edited it.

Versions of Problems

If you walk into a bookstore, you will see that there are dozens of versions of the Christian Bible available, all tailored to fit a particular denomination. There are separate Bibles for Catholics, Protestants, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. There are Bibles in versions called King James, Living, New International Version and countless more. Was there an original version that all of the other versions are based on?

What we call The Bible is based on the King James Version, which was the first English version written in 1611. That wasn't an original work. That was a mostly mistranslated attempt from Latin and Greek, which in turn were mistranslations of the original Jewish versions. Like a game of whisper down the lane, any original meanings have long been obscured.

Which Witch Is Witch?

For example, let's look at Exodus 22: 18. The King James Bible reads, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." The original Jewish versions read, "Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live." But "witch" was slang for "poisoner" in the 1600's. Also, King James VI was convinced that a group of Scottish witches were always trying to poison him. So "witch" it was, even though "poisoner" is what the Jewish translation originally meant.

What harm could come from a mistranslation of just one word? Quite a lot. For the next couple of hundred years, thousands of men and women were accused, tortured and executed for being suspected witches, including the infamous Salem Witch Trials.

Not From God's Lips

Karen Armstrong's encyclopedic work, The History of God, chronicles just how many times the book of Genesis was revised - at least twice in the Jewish teachings alone. And then Genesis had to go through Greek, Latin and then Shakespearian English. And then it has changed again for "modern translations".

If you take a verse and tell it to ten different people, you'll get twenty different interpretations. It is impossible to pin God down to one book, because everyone looks at a book in different ways. Everything in the Universe is subject to change. If it does not change, it is subject to decay. Either the Bible was not written by God, or God hired a series of bad translators and really should try to get His money back.

Learn more about this author, Rena Sherwood.
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