13TO’s NDE, #83, 12.09.01, NDERF.org
14C.S. Lewis 1942, 1961, 1996. The Screwtape Letters (New York: Touchstone), 61, Lewis, ix.
15George G. Ritchie, Jr., M.D. 1991. My Life After Dying, Becoming Alive to Universal Love. Norfolk, Virginia: Hampton Roads Publishing. pp 24-25.
16Edward B’s NDE, #252, 04.02.03, NDERF.org
17Jean R NDE, #2932, 01.18.12, NDERF.org
Part III
Bonsai Secrets
According to St. Paul, we see reality through a glass darkly. Our “perfect understanding” is still “yet to come” until we see the truth “face to face”—in Heaven or during a near-death experience. It is why, I believe, considering the translation problems encountered by early Christian scribes, we should weigh all Scripture carefully in our heart. None of us wants to doubt a single word we read in the Holy Book. Walking down this path is a no-win situation. If we begin doubting the words, where do we stop? I am sure many reading this paragraph are nodding in agreement. Still, I would like to find out why people, when they read some of the words in the Bible, feel conflicted in their hearts as to their true meaning. Bearing this convoluted and difficult, scholarly/theological discussion in mind, it is very interesting to see what the Dead Saints have to say on the matter.
— 20 —
The Governing Laws of Religion Are Not Absolute
With every approach to knowledge guarded by the formidable array of experts and bibliographies, the aspirant must possess sharp wits and unnaturally developed skepticism if he is not to fall victim to one or other of the rival schools of dogma, secular and ecclesiastical, which, though mutually exclusive, unite instinctively to frustrate any attempt to avoid altogether the established orthodoxies, defined by Einstein as a “collection of prejudices which are fed to us with a porridge spoon before our eighteenth year. ~John Mitchell, City of Revelation
A few months after I began writing the Chronicles, I fell asleep early one night and within an hour woke up with the words, “The Governing Laws of Religion are not absolute.” In my mind, that phrase was the Word of God. I had no conscious role in creating it. It fell and alighted in my mind like a bird from above. It was a straightforward, direct statement about religion that piqued my curiosity. And since I didn’t rationally “create” the sentence, I wondered. Are the laws governing religion absolute? Without error? Infallible?
In my search for an answer among Scripture and the testimonies brought back by the Dead Saints, it became clear to me: THAT MOST, if not all, of our world religions (especially in the West) have been self-shackled to the words of their own scriptures and self-sentenced to a lightless prison of self-righteous judgment about sin, morality, salvation and the Kingdom.
It’s a heavy subject for any writer to tackle, much less handle in one chapter. A good starting point for understanding the words of religion, their laws, and whether they are absolute, is to take a quick look at how the words in the Bible became cemented in tradition.
~New Year’s Eve 2013. Another day. Another year. Any wise words? The Dead Saint experiences seem altogether wholly consistent with a Biblical worldview with few exceptions. It’s the few exceptions that make the Chronicles interesting. ~Chronicle 201
The Old Testament
Originally, the Old Testament, which included the five books of Moses (in Greek, Pentateuch-five scrolls), the Prophets, and Apocrypha, were Divine revelations, both written and oral, given by God through Moses, some of them at Mount Sinai and others at the Tabernacle. All of the teachings were written down by Moses, or his scribe Joshua, and passed down orally in an unbroken chain from generation to generation, until its contents were committed to papyrus around 700BC (Archeological evidence discovered in 2004, suggests before the Babylonian captivity).
Painstaking care was taken in making written copies of the Old Testament, which is reflected in a statement in Psalm 18:30, “The word of the Lord is tried” pointing to the extreme caution taken with every word, letter, and mark of the Holy Texts preserved during the copying process (counting words and letters to insure accuracy).
The Hebrew priests memorized the Torah word for word. When the Old Testament was eventually written, the text appeared as one continuous set of consonants known as the “Word of God” with no breaks or vowels to separate words, and thus could only be read by priests who had memorized every word. To the uneducated, the unbroken document was incomprehensible.
In 278 B.C, Ptolemy II, the grandson of Alexander the Great, acquired a copy of the Torah for the great, new Library of Alexandria, but initially, was unable to find willing translators for the ancient, Hebrew script. According to tradition, Ptolemy eventually succeeded in convincing 72 Jewish scholars (six from each of the 12 tribes of Israel) to travel from Israel to Egypt to provide a translation from Hebrew into Koine Greek, the common dialect at the time. To guarantee accuracy, it was stipulated that the translators were to be kept in separate cells and deprived of the ability to communicate and compare notes.
Given the ancient obsession with secrecy, it might seem odd the Jewish priests would be willing to make public their Holy Text. According to a legend recorded in the Letter of Aristeas,1 not only was the translation (on the island of Pharos) accomplished in just 72 days, astonishingly, each of the translations matched perfectly. According to tradition, Ptolemy was able to place the Greek translation of the Torah (called the Septuagint) in an honored place in the Library of Alexandra. Within the century following the writing of the Septuagint, the remaining 53 books of the Old Testament, included 14 Apocrypha, were translated separately into Greek.
It is assumed, under the direction of the High Priest Eleazar, the Hebrew scholars were willing to complete the Greek translation because the Hebrew Torah preserved its secrets in each Hebrew character-secrets that could not be translated into Greek.2 What could be translated, was already memorized using three separate codes3 to assign symbols to concepts:
Firstly, Gematria, a system by which all words have a numerical value which corresponds to the inherent numerical value of the 22 Hebrew letters, a code in which any word can be substituted for any other word of the same numerical value in order to disguise its meaning (both Hebrew and Greek letters have numerical value); and secondly, Notarikon (or Notariqon) derived from the Latin word notarius, meaning to write or interpret words according to their first or last letters, so the interpretation is based on abbreviations; and thirdly, the Mazzaroth, a system encoding the astronomical sciences, or study of the planets, stars, and zodiac (for example, Enoch was 365 years old when he was translated to Heaven—an obvious reference to the number of days in a year).
Unless you had the keys to the three systems of translation, you could never understand the deeper meaning of the five books of Moses, the Torah (The Law and history), the literal, written word, the Mishnah (knowledge), the symbolic interpretation of history, and the Qabalah (spiritual wisdom)—the ability to use the heart, not the mind, to interpret the Law, and apply that knowledge for spiritual growth.
This elaborate symbolic triple code written in Greek in the Old Testament, subsequently became the basis for the Latin Vulgate translated by St. Jerome in 382 A.D. for the Catholic Church, (the only authorized version of the Bible allowed to be read by priests and the public for nearly a thousand years). It was believed the Latin Vulgate-only view was necessary because of differences, errors, or corruptions in the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.4
John Wycliffe, the German Gutenberg Bible in 1455, the Tyndale Bible in 1523, and eventually the familiar 1611 King English version of the Bible translated the first complete English version of the Bible in 1382.
Allowing for the immense tangled—and legendary—complexities involved in rendering the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, Latin and then English, it should be absolutely clear the veracity of the Word of God in the Old Testament is problematic at best, without even taking into account the n
umerous deeper symbolic codes embedded within Scripture.
The New Testament
During the first one-hundred years of Christianity, there was no Christian Bible. Different versions of Christ’s story were read aloud to Christian congregations (who were only 15% literate at the time)5 and passed from one to another. By the third century, some thirty Gospels circulated through Christendom including the Gospels of Phillip, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and Judas-discovered in the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of 13 ancient codices containing over fifty texts discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945. All were ultimately proven authentic and dated to the late second century by modern archeologists.
St. Irenaeus,6 Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, (today Lyon, France) was an early Church Father whose writings were formative in the early development of Christian theology. In 170 A.D., he examined all the known gospels in circulation and condensed these into the four familiar Gospels of the Apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John:
The heretics boast that they have many more gospels than there really are. But really they don’t have any gospels that aren’t full of blasphemy. There actually are only four authentic gospels. And this is obviously true because there are four corners of the universe and there are four principal winds, and therefore there can be only four gospels that are authentic. These, besides, are written by Jesus’ true followers.7
Most scholars believe all of the apostles died long before their Gospels were committed to writing, as their stories were anonymous. From the Catholic encyclopedia, “It… appears that the titles [the authors] to the Gospels are not traceable to the Evangelists themselves.”8 Later editors added the attributions, they were not originally signed by their putative authors. If this is true, can anyone believe the words recorded in the Gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the exact, infallible words of Christ.
Citations of early 2nd century Latin and Greek fathers are made to appear as if they support one another, but in reality, the opposite is true:
In the first two centuries nearly all the various readings of the New Testament came into existence; the majority of them by deliberate alteration of text, many for the sake of style, and several in the interests of dogma…Often readings were rejected as falsification of heretics, but often the heretics were right in their counter complaint…every province, every order, every monastery, has a tradition of its own.9
In his best-selling book, Misquoting Jesus, author Bart Ehrman notes the lack of original authentic New Testament documents:
Not only do we not have the originals, we do not even have the first copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later – much later. And in most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another in many thousands of places.10
Church historian, Origen Adamantius,11 in the early third century, describes the copies of the Gospels at his disposal:
The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.12
Richard Simon, a Hebrew Scholar, who published in 1689, A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament, argued all manuscripts embody textual alterations, especially the Greek ones:
There would not be at this day any Copy even of the New Testament, either Greek, Latin, Syriack or Arabick, that might be truly called authentick, because there is not one, in whatsoever language it be written, that is absolutely except from Additions. I might also avouch, that the Greek Transcribers have taken a very great liberty in writing their Copies.13
The point of Simon’s research was to show that while the books of the New Testament provide a foundation for Faith, the books themselves have been subject to interpretation and change as the Catholic Church handed them down over the centuries:
Although the Scriptures are a sure Rule on which our Faith is founded, yet this Rule is not altogether sufficient of itself; it is necessary to know, besides this, what are the Apostolical Traditions; and we cannot learn from them but from the Apostolic Churches, who have preserved the true sense of the Scriptures.14
According to Greek and Hebrew scholars, there are some 200,000 to 400,000 variants, possibly more, of New Testament manuscripts known today. As one Greek professor states:
There are more variations among our manuscripts as there are words in the New Testament.15
The Word of God in the New Testament (except for the Book of Revelation) is not so much a problem of trying to fathom complex variations in translation and hidden meanings of the Old Testament. Rather, it is a problem of verifying the authenticity of Greek and Latin documents which claim to accurately record the words, the life, the death of Jesus Christ, and the acts of the Apostles. Early Greek documents that comprise the 27 books of the New Testament do not have the same degree of perfection as ascribed to the Septuagint. There are no (legendary) 72 scholars to verify the word-for-word translation of Hebrew into Greek. Instead, thousands of Greek and Latin documents which have been altered, changed, and added to in many thousands of places, creating a firestorm of controversy about their word-for-word veracity, or for that matter, their veracity at all.
Even if we can verify them, most of us cannot read the ancient languages to understand the subtle differences in meaning. Bart Ehrman writes in Misquoting Jesus:
If the full meaning of the words of scripture can be grasped only by studying Greek (and Hebrew), doesn’t this mean that most Christians, who don’t read ancient languages, will never have access to what God wants them to know? And doesn’t this make the doctrine of inspiration a doctrine only for the scholarly elite who have the intellectual skills and leisure to learn the languages and study the texts by reading them in the original? What good does it do to say the words are inspired by God if most people have absolutely no access to these words, but only a more or less clumsy renderings of these words into a language, such as English, that has nothing to do with the original words? 16
As a Christian, it is difficult for me to accept such conclusions along with the weight of historical facts, but most Greek and Hebrew scholars will not deny them. They point out most textual differences are minor, but debate (and sometimes turn a blind eye) to certain alterations that completely change the meaning of pivotal, theological concepts. Unavoidable and unresolvable translation problems further complicate and muddy the waters.
As we expand in later pages, subsequent theological changes to mainstream Christian beliefs were ratified at the Fifth Council of Constantinople convoked by Emperor Justinian in 543 A.D. Many Christians are unaware how much of the Bible we read today was determined by Church politics in those early centuries. Today, within the Church, the general belief is the Holy Spirit saw to it the integrity of the Word of God remained pure and inerrant. The Catholic Encyclopedia states:
These Books are Sacred and Canonical, because they contain Revelation without error, and because, written by the Inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God as their author.17
Within this framework of history, how can the laws governing morality, sin, Heaven and salvation, and the words, which govern them, be absolute? If we do not have the original documents, how do we know the Word of God is the Word of God? The argument then follows: Can Scripture be inerrant when the early Christians were rarely, if ever, unanimous in any of their writings?
The Apostle wrote about dilemma of “partial knowledge” in 1 Corinthians 13: 9-12:
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now, we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to fac
e: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
According to St. Paul, (I am paraphrasing): we see reality through a glass darkly. Our “perfect understanding” is still “yet to come” until we see the truth “face to face”—in Heaven or during a near-death experience. It is why, I believe, considering the translation problems encountered by early Christian scribes, we should weigh all Scripture carefully in our heart. None of us wants to doubt a single word we read in the Holy Book. Walking down this path is a no-win situation. If we begin doubting the words, where do we stop?
I am sure many reading this paragraph are nodding in agreement. Still, I would like to find out why people, when they read some of the words in the Bible, feel conflicted in their hearts as to their true
meaning. Bearing this convoluted and difficult, scholarly/theological discussion in mind, it is very interesting to see what the Dead Saints have to say on the matter.
Dead Saint Commentaries about the Bible
Nilda never understood the Bible. Yet, during her NDE, Jesus insisted she would learn that the BIBLE IS SUFFICIENT:
[Jesus] told me, ‘You had been searching a great deal, studying and reading too much, but not what you should have read. Why didn’t you read it?
I asked Him, ‘What hadn’t I read? And He replied, ‘The Bible. All that you should know is there. It is sufficient.’
I said, ‘I tried to read it, but I didn’t understand it. It is too complex for me.’
He said, ‘Now you are going to understand.’18
The Bible is sufficient. It has everything we need to grow spiritually. However, if we don’t understand it, the Word of God can become an obstacle or used as a judgment gavel. It is why I believe Dead Saint “commentaries” from the Afterlife are so important. Their holy experiences help bring clarity and understanding to the Bible.
Scott didn’t find any conflict with his NDE and the Bible:
The Dead Saints Chronicles: A Zen Journey Through the Christian Afterlife Page 32