In the last chapter I asked the question whether or not Jesus¾ my Jesus¾ was the Messiah of Israel. After all, the answer to this either builds or destroys the very foundation of Christianity. The immediate solution should be that one could prove from both the "Old" Testament and the New the truth of the matter. The New Testament is, as every Christian has been taught, but a continuation of the "Old," and its pages easily prove the Messiahship of Jesus.

This attitude was the one with which I began a study of the all-important question confronting me after the research of MB. It led me, quiet naturally, into a study of the New Testament, but from a different angle: I first wanted to find out how the book I have put the faith of my entire life in, came to be.

Before getting too involved in this study, perhaps I should mention the initial NT problem that caused the difficulty with my conscience while researching and writing MB. In Matthew 3:16 we read: "And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him." Luke 3:22 says that the Holy Spirit was "in a bodily shape like a dove."

One need only go back to volume one and read how the dove was the symbol of the holy spirit within the Trinity of Babylon to understand my concern when I saw the same symbol representing the same Babylonian aspects of the Christian deity in the Gospels. Like hundreds of millions of other Christians I had no previous idea of the pagan connotation of the dove¾ especially regarding the holy spirit. And, I had to wonder why God would allow anything as important as His Spirit to be counterfeited so completely by Satan?

In order to answer this, let’s briefly review the concept of the Trinity of Babylon. The original Trinity was essentially composed of the Father, Son, and the Great-mother, who, as the "holy spirit," had the attributes of speech (the word), learning, and creativity. Of course, the Father and Son were patterned after Baal and Nimrod, while the Great-mother was patterned after Semiramis¾ whose name meant a dove! Hence, the dove became the symbol of the feminine holy spirit, and this spirit would descend on the adherents of the Mysteries when they were baptized. Eventually, the Great-mother was disguised as the masculine holy spirit within the Babylonian godhead and this became the prototype of the Holy Spirit of the Christian Trinity¾ but this new Holy Spirit still retained the symbol of the Great-mother¾ that is the DOVE!

We will here let the late Dr. C. Paul Meredith sum up the above: "Semiramis identified herself as this Spirit [of God] and ascribed to herself the power of aiding in the creation of the world. Through her method of deification, she taught her followers that she, in one of her forms, had been the dove¾ a symbol of the Spirit that ‘moved upon the face of the waters’ at creation." "She claimed to be one of the ‘Trinity.’"

When the concept of the Trinity was taken from paganism by the early church fathers, it was only to be expected that the masculine holy spirit of the Christian Trinity retained the same attributes of the old Babylonian deity¾ which also meant that the Great-mother’s symbol of the dove became the symbol of the Christian holy spirit. Of even greater significance is the fact that this doctrine of the Trinity¾ dove and all¾ was established two thousand years before the advent of Christianity!

Imagine my astonishment when I also learned by carefully examining the facts that the masculinized form of the Great-mother/holy spirit of the Trinity was in reality Satan himself! That is to say, that Satan, who, as the "Bright Morning Star," was in reality the Mother-goddess Semiramis¾ proclaimed in the Mysteries as the Holy Spirit and represented there as a dove!

The dove, then, becomes nothing more than the representation of Satan’s counterfeit religion and therefore Satan himself. Why was such a symbol in the New Testament? Why was it associated with God? While researching MB, I was quite reluctant to look at these questions head-on.

For some time I skirted the issue by trying to find some information about the dove/spirit story as presented in the Gospels. What I was hoping to find was that the account was recognized by Christian scholars as a spurious insertion, something like I John 5:7. However, I soon found that it was indeed a "genuine" part of the Gospel accounts.

Quite naturally, this research and realization led me to face another fact: it was the Roman Catholic Church that had retained possession of the New Testament Scriptures for the first three hundred years of the Common Era!

Added to this realization was the additional fact that the Christian/Catholic Church fathers had all come out of the world’s great Mystery Religions¾ they were pagans steeped in the Mysteries prior to their "conversion" to Christianity! How much do you suppose their former beliefs influenced their new-found "Christian" religious thought? (Of course, the answer to this question is easily found in their volumes of writings which are still extant.)

At this point, my only hope was one fundamental of my former faith¾ that the New Testament had been infallibly preserved, which would mean that these church fathers would have never had a chance to get their hands on and corrupt "God’s Word!"

However, the deeper I dug, the more I saw a fact of history: the men in charge of the New Testament books were the same church fathers who had been responsible for the introduction of numerous blatant pagan doctrines in the Christian Church. History also tells us that these same "fathers" did everything in their power to destroy the evidence of their dishonesty!

These are very significant facts when we keep in mind that Christianity was a religion that was not born all at once. As we shall soon see, there is overwhelming evidence that it developed rather slowly over the first few centuries to eventually take on the form that most Christians now know.

For this we may thank a succession of "church fathers" and the relative historical obscurity of the first three centuries of the Christian Church. Perhaps the truest of all Christian admissions can be found in The Shepherd of Hermas, which was once considered an inspired Christian book, but one which failed to finally make the Catholic canon. Hermas tells us: "I never in my life spoke a true word . . . I dressed up falsehoods as truths, and no man contradicted me."

All of this information opens the door to a final question: if the church fathers had possession of the New Testament, upon which no light of day was to shine for centuries, could they¾ indeed would they¾ tamper with it? If the answer to this is yes, then there is one certainty: the New Testament will clearly reflect the Babylonian theology of the "former pagan" church fathers!

We can perhaps understand the questions just raised by approaching the subject from another perspective. There are few scholars who will deny that Ezra, upon his return to Jerusalem, heavily edited what Christians now call the Old Testament.

Without going into the detail of that history, I’ll quote here from Fred R. Coulter’s The Christian Passover: "In compiling the books of Moses into a new lawbook, Ezra was attempting to restore and preserve the knowledge of God’s laws. As part of his work, he made changes in the text to make it more understandable for the Jews of his day." "‘Day after day the reading and translation continued until the task was completed. The great work of Ezra was done. The lawbook of Moses was henceforth accepted as authoritative. Its influence cannot possibly be exaggerated. Whoever may be conjectured as the author of the lawbook, to which in fact many hands through the centuries had contributed, Ezra was rightly considered the second founder of Judaism, inferior only to Moses himself . . ."

If Ezra, a descendant of the last high priest of the family Aaron (before the captivity), and a man who had the authority of God to restore the faith of Israel, edited the "Old" Testament, then I ask if it is unbelievable that such an event occurred with the New Testament by men who equally considered their "contributions" a God-given right?

For now we need only read of one example to know that this is indeed what happened. The Complete Gospels writes: "During the process of copying and recopying Mark’s Gospel, Christian scribes [they mean Catholic monks!] introduced some major expansions into the text, most famously at the end of the story."

Of course, the difference between Ezra and the Catholic Church fathers is that one had the authority of Israel’s Creator through his Aaronic office, and the others represented the founders of a thoroughly pagan religion!

Actually, the many different and ancient "gospel" accounts, now strongly denounced by virtually every Christian Church as spurious, show conclusive evidence that the accepted NT Gospels were by no means fixed in story content. Each of these "spurious" testaments have enough tenets of the final canonized Gospels to cause one to question the entire account of Jesus’ life¾ and they certainly show the now-accepted Gospels as being the product of heavy editing. This explains the reason that the earliest of these gospels have been dismissed and almost entirely forgotten by a religion that now finds them embarrassing to the finished product.

Chief in the denunciation of the "forgotten" Gospels are the Protestant churches, who claim they do so essentially because of the Catholic origin of these books. But, the fact is that the ancient "spurious" Gospels are rejected by Protestants because they were rejected first by the Catholic Church, and the Protestant churches are but daughters of their mother!

However, many Protestants go even further than the so-called "spurious" Gospels, and denounce the oldest known "canonized" New Testament manuscripts as the most corrupt. This is because these manuscripts don’t agree with the more recent "accepted" manuscripts from which the modern Protestant New Testament translations are made.

To put this last observation into some perspective, we need only look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and the discovery of the book of Isaiah.

Because of its age and because it was almost identical to the Masoretic translation of the book now known, the discovery of the book of Isaiah was hailed as a great find. The older book proved the authenticity of the present-day copies. This, of course, is the way it should be! But, quote as an authority the Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Ephraimi, Codex Bezae, or Codex Alexandrinus¾ which are the oldest surviving Greek mss. of the "canonized" New Testament known in the Christian Church¾ and you will be rejected by many Protestant theologians. I am well aware of this fact because such rejections were standard in my former church.

If one approaches the subject scientifically, it would seem to be logical that the oldest should be the standard by which the later mss. are judged. Indeed, this is the rule employed by the Christian Church with the above mentioned book of Isaiah. However, this isn’t the case with the Christian New Testament, even though, to say this again, the above mss. are the oldest extant copies of the New Testament now known! If you think this sounds like a double standard¾ you are right!

One of the reasons these mss. are not accepted is that they contain books that didn’t make it into the official church canon. Secondly, as already noted, they are at variance with the later mss. from which our present NT were translated. Thirdly, these "original" mss. show unmistakable signs of having been heavily tampered with. Imagine, the oldest known mss. of the New Testament show disturbing evidence of having been "worked over" by Catholic monks!

To understand why these oldest of all manuscripts are so controversial, we need only cite several examples. In 1938 scholar T.C. Skeat examined the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus under ultra-violet light. Under the visible text, he found the following verse which had been erased: "Consider the lilies of the field: they neither card nor spin."

Robin Fox writes, "the King James translators have beguiled us with a wrong version; there was growing, no toiling, in what the author wrote. Strictly, there were no ‘lilies’, because they are a very free translation of the Greek; however, the botanists’ favourite candidate for the flower in question (a Sternbergia) would spoil the flow of the saying."

Another example is Jesus’ encounter with the woman taken in adultery. Manfred Barthel writes: "Two passages in this Gospel [John] are not included in the most reliable ancient manuscripts, and stylistic analysis confirms that they were added by another writer."

Speaking of the same story, Robin Fox writes: "‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’; ‘Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more’. The episode is missing from the surviving fourth-century codices which underpin the rest of the New Testament text; it is not known in an early papyrus or any quotation by an early Christian author, although the subject was relevant to so much which they discussed. Its style is universally held to differ from the rest of the fourth Gospel, and in its present place it interrupts the flow of the text."

There is also a problem in the last chapter of John, and that is that it shows unmistakable signs of having been added by another hand. The original text was clearly intended to end the book with the last verse of chapter 20: "But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name." Contrast this with John 21:25, which carries the book on after the above ending.

For another example, most Christians are unaware that there are two versions of the Acts of the Apostles. One is almost a tenth longer than the other. "The shorter, usual text is based on one of the main Greek lines, the Alexandrian, whereas the longer alternative is best represented in a book-text, Codex Bezae, of the fifth to sixth century date which contains the Gospels and Acts in Greek and Latin. Its extra wordings and variant readings are sometimes reflected in early Christian quotations or in early papyrus fragments of Acts’ text. Some of them plainly go back into the earlier second century. ALTHOUGH THEIR TEXT IS USUALLY KNOWN AS THE WESTERN TEXT, ITS USE WAS NEVER RESTRICTED TO THE WESTERN CHURCHES."

With these being only a few small examples of the problems presented by the most ancient Greek New Testaments (there are many others!), is it any wonder they are not accepted by the majority of Protestants as having any validity?

Curiously, however, numerous Bible translators have made use of some of the above manuscripts in their work¾ including the King James Version translators. Even more telling is the fact that they seem to have accepted only the portions that best agree with their own particular doctrine, while rejecting the whole. What this means is that the KJV translators were guilty of selecting piecemeal the scriptures which best suited their own religious doctrines. However, in their defense, we shall soon see that they were only following a centuries-old tradition in their actions.

As to the argument advanced that the very early fragments of old Greek mss., datable to the early second century, verify the integrity of the NT, let’s notice the truth: "Once again, papyri have taken the story further back. No early papyrus contains any complete book of Christian scripture, but their fragments do allow us to peer behind the Byzantine, Western and Alexandrian avenues. So far, we have eighty-eight fragments which are datable before 300, although the number whose handwriting can be firmly dated before c. 180 is extremely small. However, they do give us some contact with Christian texts within a hundred years of their composition." "None of the small errors and tiny differences of wording in the texts, it is also said, affects any major item of Christian belief." "THIS OPTIMISM MAY BE MISPLACED. We have two early papyri which overlap across seventy verses of John’s Gospel, and even if the plain errors of their copyists are excluded, THEY DIFFER AT NO LESS THAN SEVENTY SMALL PLACES."

Forlong’s Encyclopedia of Religion has this to say about the oldest extant complete New Testament mss., including both the Western and Byzantine texts: "There are some 1,760 MSS. to be compared; and the various readings are computed at 150,000. The revisers confess to 100,000 in 1,500 MSS."

The Catholic Encyclopedia clearly states: "It is easy to understand how numerous would be the readings of a text transcribed as often as the Bible, and, as only one reading can represent the original, it follows that all the others are necessarily faulty. Mill estimated the variants of the New Testament at 30,000, and since the discovery of so many MSS. unknown to Mill, this number has greatly increased."

The Complete Gospels, noting that, "Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John are preserved in about 3,500 manuscripts," says, "THE GREEK TEXTS BEHIND OUR ENGLISH TRANSLATION IS A RECONSTRUCTION PRODUCED BY PATIENT AND EXACTING COMPARISON OF THOUSANDS OF DIFFERENCES IN WORDING AMONG THE NUMEROUS COPIES."

Essentially, what we see in the most ancient Greek manuscripts is the evolution, if you’ll pardon the expression, of the New Testament Gospel stories. That this is exactly what these mss. prove has caused no small embarrassment for countless theologians. I have even heard it said that it was unfortunate that the earliest mss. survived to the present because by their contents they serve no useful purpose for the unity of Christianity, especially in regards to the "infallibility" of the New Testament argument. In fact, Dr. D.A. Waite tells the story about Professor L.F. Tischendorf, who discovered the Codex Sinaiticus in a trash basket at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Tischendorf bought the mss. for several hundred dollars from the monks there. Waite quotes Dr. James Qurollo: "I don’t know which of them had the truer evaluation of its worth¾ Tischendorf, who wanted to buy it, or the monks, who were getting ready to burn it!" Waite says: "He had to pay for the trash. It really was that, because of all the heretics’ changes."

The process of evolution in the Christian scriptures reminds me of the Mormon Church and their Book of Mormon. Although I have never had any connection to the Latter Day Saints, or LDS Church, I nevertheless have been bombarded by its teachings since I came to Salt Lake City¾ their world headquarters.

One of the interesting facts about this church is its "inspired" Book of Mormon, which was supposedly given to their prophet, Joseph Smith, by an angelic messenger. However, when Smith first published this book it not only was fraught with problems, it also reflected the poor grammar of his limited education. Additionally this original is also said to contain numerous contradictions with later Smith works, such as The Pearl of Great Price. This is quite a problem considering that Smith’s later writings are on equal ground with The Book of Mormon and The New Testament of Christianity¾ all of which are declared to be infallible.

Significantly, The Book of Mormon has undergone tremendous editing over the past century and a half until, finally, an "authorized" edition is now circulated that is completely cleaned up and somewhat "harmonizes" with other Smith writings.

Echoing Christian tradition, the LDS membership is taught never to question any of Smith’s sacred writings. And, the LDS Church, completely aware of the problems of their early sacred books, has gone on to produced Mormon scholars who have dedicated their lives to researching and explaining the many contradictions of Mormonism.

It is quite interesting to skim through the books of these Mormon scholars because the defense they offer on behalf of Smith’s writings puts one instantly in mind of the excuses NT scholars offer for the discrepancies of the New Testament. What is of further interest to this discussion is that, even though the Mormon Church claims to be Christian, it is denounced by most Christian denominations as a false church. To be expected, these churches are quick to point out all the contradictions of the Mormon Church’s "inspired" scriptures and its theology in their denunciations.

Yet, I maintain, as one who has spent the past year in intensive Bible and ecclesiastical history study, that the history of the Mormon Church and its sacred books is a mirror image of what transpired in the first few centuries of the current era when the Christian Church was taking form.

But, unlike Mormonism, there was never a time that a small select group of ancient church fathers sat down and collaborated to "clean up" the New Testament. The Christian Church was too far-flung for such an enterprise. Actually, in most cases, the churches were essentially cut off from one another for decades, or even centuries at a time, which has proved to be very fortunate for the truth!

Continuing in their criticism of the early NT manuscripts, my former church writes: "None of the modern scholars have thought to look at the bulk of later New Testament Manuscripts¾ 95% of known Greek Biblical Mss¾ which THE GREEK PEOPLE AND ITS CHURCH HAVE ALWAYS PRESERVED AND USED! These later Mss., copied century after century from earlier ones as they wore out, are the fundamental basis of the King James Version (KJV)."

What this author is speaking of are the so-called "Byzantine Texts," which (and he doesn’t mention this) date back only to the seventh century, with complete texts having been written much later than even this. He writes: "The nearly 4,000 Mss. of this Byzantine or Official Text agree so perfectly with each other that the only work of the critic is to weed out individual scribal mistakes in the copying of each Ms. The text is not in question!"

This author never bothered to give any sources for his statements, which is wise considering the evidence previously quoted! In other words, there is absolutely nothing to support his contentions. Yet, I for one would never have questioned such statements in the past. I would have read (and probably did read) this statement in total agreement. Why? Because my natural bias in favor of Christianity led me to accept without question that the NT was indeed the infallible and inspired word of God. Just like 99.99% of all Christians, I had never bothered to research the history of my New Testament! I had grown up believing in the NT infallibility, and that was good enough for me!

The reason the Byzantine Text is so important to this author is that he follows many other Christian scholars in maintaining that the "infallible" New Testament was kept as a sacred trust by the Greeks, who have preserved it in its original form from the first century when, supposedly, it was handed over to them by the very hands of the apostles of Jesus.

For the moment we shall ignore the chronology of such a claim, and go on to notice a fact of history concerning the preservation of NT mss. by the Greek Christian Church, which, by the way, were, until 1054, part of the Roman Catholic Church: they were notorious for their sloppy copying methods, meaning that the work of these Catholic monks could never compare to the care exercised by the ancient Hebrew scribes! This is evident by the recently released Dead Sea Scrolls, where, to mention it again, in the case of the text of Isaiah, it is in almost total agreement with the Masoretic Text which is found in the so-called "Jewish" Bible.

Manfred Barthel writes about this preservation: "The Masoretes [who produced the text still in use for the "Old" Testament] were perfectionists. For example, they painstakingly reckoned the number of verses (5,845), words (79,856), and letters (400,945) in the first five books of Moses." After production of a mss. the Masoretes would count verses, words, and letters to make sure of its accuracy.

You need only go back a few pages and compare the opposite care with which the "preservation" of the Greek New Testament was undertaken.

This now leads to the main point: I had grown up hearing that the Jews had been given the responsibility to preserve the "Old" Testament (although I have long suspected it was actually the Levites among them who had this task), and it was given to the Greeks to preserve the New Testament. WHERE IS THE AUTHORITY FOR SUCH A RESPONSIBILITY TO BE FOUND? Why did the Greeks have this responsibility¾ especially when salvation was to come first to Israel¾ all Twelve Tribes of them¾ and only then to the rest of the world in the end time at the coming of the Messiah? It will be through Israel, the posterity of Jacob, that the Gentiles will have salvation! There is only one answer.

Christians, as their Greek name clearly indicates, have accepted Jesus as their savior and the New Testament as a record of his life and words, and the only surviving manuscripts of this book were all written in Greek! In fact, there are at least 3,500 different ones! What’s more, the majority of these manuscripts are not even ancient in the sense of the above mentioned Western codices, but of comparatively recent origin. They date only from the ninth and tenth centuries of this era.

The main Christian point is this: if the only copies of the New Testament are in Greek, on which our present New Testament rests, then, so men reason, it was given to the Greeks to preserve the New Testament.

Even though by book’s end we shall see the total absurdity of this contention, let me again pose this question: who had possession of these Greek manuscripts? Were they Jews of the first century Christian Church who were from ancient times skilled in careful preservation of sacred texts? No!

These "original inspired" Greek manuscripts, from which the Protestant NT has been produced, were always in custody of the Greek Orthodox Church, which means they were simply in the possession of the Eastern Roman Catholic Church. Additionally, it takes little research to shoot down the theory of those who maintain that the Greek-speaking church preserved the earliest manuscripts, while at the same time denouncing the most ancient of these¾ which were written in Greek¾ as corrupt products of the Western Catholic Church. The fact is all the early church fathers wrote in Greek, which was, of course, the language of scholars in the Roman Empire!

What’s more, many of these early "church fathers" were not Roman, but were from Asia Minor, meaning they were from the very areas of the world wherein the Eastern Greek mss. were produced. In other words, there is absolutely no difference between the people who preserved the Protestant-denounced old Western codices, and those who produced the manuscripts from which Protestant translations are made.

In fact, if you want to hail the attributes of the Greek-speaking Catholic monks who have preserved our New Testament, then you should know that these monks produced and preserved the dozens of so-called "spurious" Gospel accounts (almost all written in Greek!) which never made it into the official Catholic canon.

This might also be a good place to mention something about the "Greek" name by which Christians are taught to call Israel’s Messiah: the Greek name, or title, substituted for Messiah, is Christos and it is pagan to the core! If Jesus were the Messiah, this title, in reality, robs him of his identity! This is a point to consider as we continue our presentation.

Let us now pose another question: how were the original apostles able to write in Greek given their background? We are asked to believe, only because the oldest surviving New Testament mss. were written in Greek, that first century Judean fishermen and other such tradesmen could read, write, and speak Greek. In fact, in the case of specific NT books, the Greek used is that of someone extremely learned in the language.

Needless to say, this assertion doesn’t square with the facts and there is a unanimous consensus among most scholars of every denomination that the language of Jesus and his followers was Aramaic.

However, we find, for example, the Gospel of Luke being written in a Greek style that is "of significantly greater literary value than that of either Matthew or Mark (and indeed the superiority of Luke seems evident to most even in English translations) SO THAT THE AUTHOR IS JUDGED TO HAVE HAD A THOROUGH GREEK EDUCATION. THIS INCREASES THE POSSIBILITY THAT HE WAS A GENTILE . . ."

The New International Dictionary of the Bible writes: "It appears from Luke’s own writings that he was a man of education and culture. He begins his Gospel with an elaborate paragraph, showing that he could write in the sophisticated tradition of the Hellenistic historians, and then lapses into a polished vernacular."

Because these are the facts about the Greek in which the Gospel of Luke is written, they have been used to urge that Luke was a Gentile and not a Jew. First of all, outside the Greek of "Luke’s" Gospel there is no proof to support this claim. If Jesus was trying to "witness" to the Jews of his country, then a Greek Gentile would not have been a wise choice as an apostle! Secondly, and most importantly, there is absolutely no evidence that an apostle named Luke actually wrote a Gospel: in fact, it is certain that he did not and that it was written much later by another hand.

Although we shall get into the question of who actually wrote Luke a little later in this book, the Greek of this Gospel tells us in no uncertain terms that whoever wrote Luke was very likely a Gentile and not a Jew¾ which is of no small importance considering that all of the early church fathers wrote and used the kind of polished Greek for which the Gospel of Luke is specifically noted! Indeed, we shall see, because of the many discrepancies found in Luke, it is almost certain that the author was not only a Gentile, but totally unfamiliar with Jewish laws and customs.

To illustrate this further, I would like to include the following from a Christian book, which was written in defense of the Greek New Testament. In an attempt to prove that Jesus spoke Greek, Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona offers the following observation about the incident of Jesus and the Pharisees debating the tribute to Caesar: "Between 37 B.C. and A.D. 67, not a single coin with a Hebrew or Aramaic inscription was allowed into or minted in Palestine. The text on the coins was Greek, and occasionally—if the money had come via Lyons in France, for example—in Latin. However, in this scene, everything depends on the text on the coin, right up to Jesus’ punch line, which, in any case, cannot be translated into equally effective Aramaic: ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.’ Indeed, such a coin, with a portrait of the emperor Tiberius, was anathema to orthodox Jews—while the portrait itself violated the second commandment, the inscription also included the tile of the Caesar as the son of DIVIUS AUGUSTUS, the God (or the deified) Augustus. This was blasphemy, fully understood as such by all those who handled such coins, which made Jesus’ conclusion all the more telling, of course. And It was fully understood only because it was in Greek."

Of course, the authors are far from proving their point, and, in fact, are actually just giving further evidence that this incident was supplied by a Greek-speaking Gentile, and couldn’t have come from a Jew. This is even more apparent by the following notation found in the same commentary: "Incidentally, in the same incident, Jesus uses a term borrowed from the language of the Greek theater. He calls the Pharisees ‘hypocrites’—indirectly, in the words of St. Mark 12:15: hypokritai!’ (‘You hypocrites!’). The Greek word means ‘actors’—and hence people who pretend, who act a role. We may speculate that Jesus derived this word, rarely used in its figurative sense before his time, from his experience as a theatergoer at Sepphoris."

F. F. Bruce, also working from the opinion that Jesus spoke Greek, writes: "The Christian church was, of course, a new beginning: Christ used the future tense when he said: ‘upon this rock I will build my church’ (Matt. 16:18). But the very [Greek] word that he used for his new community (ekklesia) pointed to its connection with the ekklesia of Old Testament times."

As just noted, most scholars agree that the language of Jesus and his disciples was Aramaic. This is a fact that has given rise to the assertion that the earliest Gospels were necessarily written in this tongue.

Although this would seem quite logical, the Gospels do not bear this fact out. The editors of The Complete Gospels write, "The frequent word-for-word agreements between Matthew and Luke are impossible to account for if both were independently translating from Aramaic." They also note¾ very significantly¾ that most of the quotations or allusions to the "Old" Testament found in the New, "depend upon the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible." (This is a subject which will be discussed below, and is one that has grave implications!)

Not withstanding the above facts, there is a New Testament translation that has been promoted by many as the only reliable text because it is from the "original" Aramaic of Jesus and his apostles.

The translation is known as the Peshitta (reproduced in the Lamsa translation) and purports to have been copied, century after century, from the original Aramaic mss. But, in regards to this mss., history tells us that the earliest version, known as the "Old" Syriac, dates from ca. 160 A.D., and that only quotes survive in place of the entire mss.

The later (late 2nd, early 3rd centuries) copies survive in two mss., namely the Curetonianus and Sinaiticus. These translations are really of little value because they were made from an early Greek text with many "Western" features. Further, they were revised "on the basis of an early form of the Koine, or Byzantine Greek Text; this revision, eventually called the Peshitta, emerged ca. 400 A.D. to become the standard New Testament of the Syriac Churches." Its earliest surviving texts are from the 5th century.

To completely understand the basis for the Peshitta, we need to look a little closer at its pre-history, meaning the works that were an essential influence. This includes a NT version called the Diatessaron, which was essentially a harmony of the Gospels. The compiler of the Diatessaron was, according to Eusebius, a man named Tatian. He was a native of Mesopotamia and a disciple of Justin Martyr, meaning that he received his Christian education and training via the Church of Rome. In fact, he is said to have originally composed the Diatessaron in Latin.

Robin Lane Fox, speaking of the tampering with and rewriting of NT books, specifically the Diatessaron, writes: "This enterprise played havoc with the written text. So did the efforts of another extreme Christian, Tatian, who blended all four Gospels into one during the 170s and changed the text to support his extreme hostility to sex. TITIAN’S ‘HARMONY’ WAS WIDELY ACCEPTED IN THE CHRISTIAN EAST AND MADE A SERIOUS IMPACT ON CHRISTIANITY IN THE SYRIAC LANGUAGE FOR MANY CENTURIES."

In ca. 200 C.E. four different Gospels were translated into the Syriac NT. Two mss. of the 4th-5th century survive: the Sinai Palimpsest, and Cureton’s ms. of the early 5th century.

The Encyclopedia Britannica writes: "The mss. differ considerably in reading, and each has certainly been influenced by the Diatessaron [of Tatian], so that in Syriac-speaking lands about A.D. 400 the Gospel was extant as a Harmony and as ‘separated Gospels,’ . . . the single copies having many discordant readings, just as had been the case in Latin before Jerome. To remedy this, Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411 to 435, prepared a revised edition of the ‘Separated Gospels,’ freely correcting the text from Greek mss. such as were then current at Antioch: this edition he established by authority and suppressed the Diatessaron with such success that no Syriac copy of the Diatessaron survives, and of the unrevised version only Syr. S and C. Rabbula’s revision is now used by both the great divisions of the Syriac-speaking Church: to distinguish it from the elaborate later revision of the (Jacobite) Old and New Testament it is usually called Peshitta, i.e., the simple version . . . The Peshitta has only the value of a post-Nicene revision."

What we find from history, especially concerning the claims of the Aramaic NT, is that if such an original existed there is now little evidence. But even if we had an "original" preserved in some great museum library, the evidence points squarely to its having been filtered through the Church of Rome. All this means is that in every instance when the NT is closely examined, its origins seem to be founded in the classical Greek language of the Roman Christian Church!

Let me again quote from The Complete Gospels: "Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John are preserved in about 3,500 manuscripts . . . THE GREEK TEXT BEHIND OUR ENGLISH TRANSLATION IS A RECONSTRUCTION PRODUCED BY PATIENT AND EXACTING COMPARISON OF THOUSANDS OF DIFFERENCES IN WORDING AMONG THE NUMEROUS COPIES."

To understand just how "original" the Greek is in our Protestant New Testaments, we should first keep in mind that the protesting daughters of Roman Catholic Christianity threw out the Greek behind the Latin Vulgate of Jerome when they left their mother church. Of necessity, they had to find another source for their faith, which, as already noted, was the so-called "Byzantine Texts" of the New Testament.

However, there were thousands of these manuscripts and they were by no means consistent with each other. In other words, the texts had tens of thousands of errors in them. The only solution was to "reconstruct" a new Greek version of the Christian Bible.

The great Catholic scholar, Erasmus was one of the first to try his hand at such a reconstruction. His efforts were produced in a Greek New Testament in Basel (Basle), Switzerland in 1516. Even though Erasmus was thought by some to be a Protestant at heart, his reconstructed Greek NT was simply not acceptable to the majority of Protestant Churches.

The next man to produce an "original" Greek New Testament was one Robertus Stephanus (i.e., Robert Etienne). Called the Regia, his Greek Bible was published in 1550 in Paris, and must have been more to the liking of the Protestant world, because it is now essentially the "original Greek" behind the Protestant New Testaments, which is to say the Authorized Version, or the 1611 King James Version!

Now the fact is that Stephanus relied heavily on the work of Erasmus’ Greek text; in fact, his "translation" is but a repeat of the fifth Erasmian text with variants. But, hold on! Stephanus also used the Greek of The Complutensian Text, which was produced in 1502 under permission of Pope Leo X by Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo, Spain! The good cardinal used both the great codices of the Catholic Church along with a number of Byzantine codices, which tells us immediately the underlying scholarship of Stephanus’ text!

As the centuries rolled by, another "more accurate" version of the "original" Greek was produced, which is known as The Received Text. Although it is principally a reproduction of the text of Stephanus, who borrowed from Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros’ Complutensian Text, to put with what was essentially a reproduction of Erasmus’ text, it is the "original" Greek behind most Protestant New Testaments today.

All of this takes us right back to where we started! Actually, it takes us even beyond this point because instead of one man reconstructing the "original" Greek of the Byzantine Text, we have three.

At any rate, the "inspired" Greek of our modern Protestant New Testament is traceable only to 1502-1516! Who knows how and by what means the above men came to select from the thousands of differing texts the final verses for their New Testament. Furthermore, because the Byzantine Text was primarily used, these "original" mss. themselves, remember, date back just 500-600 years prior to the time of Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, Erasmus, and Stephanus.

As if the state of the NT Greek was not bad enough, it did not get better by the passing of time. The modern New Testament Bible translators use what is called the Nestle/Aland Greek Text, first composed by Eberhard Nestle in 1898. Dr. D.A. Waite, in his book Defending the King James Bible, says about the Nestle/Aland translation: "The fact that there have been TWENTY-SIX EDITIONS IN EIGHTY-ONE YEARS (a new edition every 3.1 years) would give you the DISTINCT impression that these men, and their followers, who put confidence in their editions, have NO ASSURANCE WHATEVER of what ARE and what ARE NOT the very and the exact GREEK WORDS OF GOD in the New Testament!" Dr. Waite goes on to mention that the 26th edition of the Nestle/Aland Greek Text was edited by Kurt Aland, who was agnostic, Matthew Black, whom he says was also an "unbeliever," Carlo M. Martini, a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, Bruce Metzger, who, as Dr. Waite says: ". . . is from Princeton, a man who demonstrated his apostasy as editor of the Reader’s Digest Bible, and Alan Wigren, who is also labeled as ‘an apostate.’"

Now, with the background just presented, I ask you to consider whether or not the religious beliefs of the NT Greek composers, from the time of Stephanus to

those just mentioned, had any influence on their choice of manuscripts to use in the piecemeal arrangement of our present-day Protestant New Testament?

Robin Fox writes: "When the English translators produced their fine King James Bible in 1611, they used this Byzantine Greek text without question. Unfortunately, they were mistaken. Individual scholars began to contest the Byzantine text’s sole use in the later seventeenth century, and since 1881 its supremacy has been universally rejected. Three earlier types of Greek text were gradually identified beside it, and their readings are often preferable. At first they were explained as the differing texts of different regions of the Christian world. Since then, their number and identity have undergone changes to and fro, and the theory of their local origins has had to be abandoned. At least two types [of Greek text] are now universally recognized beside the Byzantine: the so-called ‘Western’ and ‘Alexandrian’ texts whose form goes back to c. 200 and perhaps slightly earlier."