FLAMES OF IGNORANCE: AN ATTACK ON THE BIBLE

In 213-210 BC China’s Qin Dynasty burnt books and buried scholars

After the First Council of Nicea (AD 325), Roman emperor Constantine the Great issued an edict against nontrinitarian Arians which included systematical book burning.

In AD 640: According to legend, the Caliph Omar burned all 200,000 volumes in the library at Alexandria in Egypt. In doing so, he said: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.” In burning the books, the caliph provided six months’ fuel to warm the city’s baths.

In 1559: For hundreds of years, the Roman Catholic Church listed books that were prohibited to its members; but in this year, Pope Paul IV established the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. For more than 400 years this was the definitive list of books that Roman Catholics were told not to read. It was one of the most powerful censorship tools in the world.

In 1597: The original version of Shakespeare’s Richard II contained a scene in which the king was deposed from his throne. Queen Elizabeth I was so angry that she ordered the scene removed from all copies of the play.

In 1614: Sir Walter Raleigh’s book, The History of the World was banned by King James I of England for “being too saucy in censuring princes.”

In 1624: Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible was burnt in Germany by order of the Pope.

In 1616–42: Galileo’s theories about the solar system and his support of the discoveries of Copernicus were condemned by the Catholic Church. Under threat of torture, and sentenced to jail at the age of 70, the great scientist was forced to renounce what he knew to be true. On his death, his widow agreed to destroy some of his manuscripts.

In 1788: Shakespeare’s King Lear was banned from the stage until 1820 — in deference to the insanity of the reigning monarch, King George III.

In 1859: Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, outlining the theory of evolution. The book was banned from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, where Darwin had been a student.

In 1925, Tennessee banned the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools; the law remained in force until 1967. The Origin of Species was banned in Yugoslavia in 1935 and in Greece in 1937.

In 1998: In Kenya the government banned 30 books and publications for “sedition and immorality,” including The Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

Recently, a Pastor in Uganda ordered his followers to burn their Bibles most especially those which had the word Holy Ghost instead of Holy Spirit. He argued that Ghost was a negative and it carried devilish connotations. The pastor was right in raising the concern of Bible versions and I will come to that later. However, he was wrong in assuming that the word Ghost is a demonic term.

The problem here was that the pastor (like many Pentecostal pastors in Uganda) has issues with the English Language and unfortunately, the educated people in his church did not endeavor to help the man of God. He only focused on the contextual dictionary meaning of the term and constructed a praxis over it.

The online etymology dictionary states that the word: ‘Ghost’ is Old English for gast which means: “breath or spirit; good or bad spirit,” In Biblical use, “soul, spirit, life,” so the brother just needed to be educated on how adjectives modify noun meanings.

The Bible uses two adjectives, one which is Holy and the other which is Evil. So if it is not Holy Ghost it is an Evil Ghost. In linguistics we would say that it was Intralingua rather than Interlingua, i.e., it is another way of saying the same thing in the same language.

Apart from the English problem, the pastor also is not a trained Theologian and he actually has no clue that the Bible in English is just but a translation. And many people do not understand that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek. So it is futile to formulate a conclusion or even a doctrine basing on a translation. Let me give you an example: in the Greek New Testament both Ghost and Spirit are translated from the same Greek word πνεῦμα (PNEUMA). Which means nothing but Breath, Air or wind. This brings me to the history of the English Bible from which we have all other translations in all other languages.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, was originally written almost entirely in Hebrew, with a few short elements in Aramaic. When the Persian empire controlled the eastern Mediterranean basin, Aramaic became the lingua franca of the area, and for liturgical reasons it became necessary for the Jewish communities of the region to have the Torah, or Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), translated into the common language from traditional Hebrew.

The resulting Targums (from Aramaic meturgeman, “translator”) survived after original Hebrew scrolls had been lost. The Hebrew Scriptures were the only Bible the early Christian church knew, and as the young religion spread out through the Greek-speaking world, Christians adopted the Septuagint. In the meantime, many of the books of the Christian Bible, the New Testament, were first written or recorded in Greek, and others in Aramaic.

The spread of Christianity necessitated further translations of both the Old and New Testaments into Coptic, Ethiopian, Gothic, and, most important, Latin. In 405 St. Jerome finished translating a Latin version that was based in part on the Septuagint, and this version, the Vulgate, despite errors introduced by copyists, became the standard of Western Christianity for a thousand years or more.

Historians state that:

The first hand-written English language Bible manuscripts were produced in the 1380’s AD by John Wycliffe, an Oxford professor, scholar, and theologian. Wycliffe, was well-known throughout Europe for his opposition to the teaching of the organized Church, which he believed to be contrary to the Bible. With the help of his followers, called the Lollards, and his assistant Purvey, and many other faithful scribes, Wycliffe produced dozens of English language manuscript copies of the scriptures. They were translated out of the Latin Vulgate, which was the only source text available to Wycliffe.

The Pope was so infuriated by his teachings and his translation of the Bible into English that 44 years after Wycliffe had died, he ordered the bones to be dug-up, crushed, and scattered in the river! One of Wycliffe’s followers, John Hus, actively promoted Wycliffe’s ideas: that people should be permitted to read the Bible in their own language, and they should oppose the tyranny of the Roman church that threatened anyone possessing a non-Latin Bible with execution. Hus was burned at the stake.

In 1415, with Wycliffe’s manuscript Bibles used as kindling for the fire. The last words of John Hus were that, “in 100 years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.” Almost exactly 100 years later.

In the 1490’s another Oxford professor, and the personal physician to King Henry the 7th and 8th, Thomas Linacre, decided to learn Greek. After reading the Gospels in Greek, and comparing it to the Latin Vulgate, he wrote in his diary, “Either this (the original Greek) is not the Gospel… or we are not Christians.” The Latin had become so corrupt that it no longer even preserved the message of the Gospel, yet the Church still threatened to kill anyone who read the scripture in any language other than Latin even though Latin was not an original language of the scriptures.

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses of Contention (a list of 95 issues of heretical theology and crimes of the Roman Catholic Church) into the church door at Wittenberg. The prophecy of Hus had come true! Martin Luther went on to be the first person to translate and publish the Bible in the commonly-spoken dialect of the German people; a translation more appealing than previous German Biblical translations.

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs records that in that same year, 1517, seven people were burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church for the crime of teaching their children to say the Lord’s Prayer in English rather than Latin. Martin Luther had a small head-start on Tyndale, Luther, who would be exiled in the months following the Diet of Worms Council in 1521 that was designed to martyr him, would translate the New Testament into German for the first time from the 1516 Greek-Latin New Testament of Erasmus, and publish it in September of 1522.

Luther also published a German Pentateuch in 1523, and another edition of the German New Testament in 1529. In the 1530’s he would go on to publish the entire Bible in German. William Tyndale wanted to use the same 1516 Erasmus text as a source to translate and print the New Testament in English for the first time in history. Tyndale showed up on Luther’s doorstep in Germany in 1525, and by year’s end had translated the New Testament into English.

Tyndale had been forced to flee England, because of the wide-spread rumor that his English New Testament project was underway, causing inquisitors and bounty hunters to be constantly on Tyndale’s trail to arrest him and prevent his project. God foiled their plans, and in 1525-1526 the Tyndale New Testament became the first printed edition of the scripture in the English language. Subsequent printings of the Tyndale New Testament in the 1530’s were often elaborately illustrated.

They were burned as soon as the Bishop could confiscate them, but copies trickled through and actually ended up in the bedroom of King Henry VIII. The more the King and Bishop resisted its distribution, the more fascinated the public at large became. The church declared it contained thousands of errors as they torched hundreds of New Testaments confiscated by the clergy, while in fact, they burned them because they could find no errors at all. One risked death by burning if caught in mere possession of Tyndale’s forbidden books.

Having God’s Word available to the public in the language of the common man, English, would have meant disaster to the church. No longer would they control access to the scriptures. If people were able to read the Bible in their own tongue, the church’s income and power would crumble. They could not possibly continue to get away with selling indulgences (the forgiveness of sins) or selling the release of loved ones from a church-manufactured “Purgatory”.

People would begin to challenge the church’s authority if the church were exposed as frauds and thieves. The contradictions between what God’s Word said, and what the priests taught, would open the public’s eyes and the truth would set them free from the grip of fear that the institutional church held. Salvation through faith, not works or donations, would be understood. The need for priests would vanish through the priesthood of all believers. The veneration of church-canonized Saints and Mary would be called into question.

The availability of the scriptures in English was the biggest threat imaginable to the wicked church. Neither side would give up without a fight. In 1525: Six thousand copies of William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament were printed in Cologne, Germany, and smuggled into England—and then burned by the English church. Church authorities were determined that the Bible would be available only in Latin.

The Bible had almost become like the Muslim Quran that has also been forbidden from being translated.

Pastor Bugingo raises a very important debate on Bible versions. As Christians, we must be very careful to make intelligent and informed decisions about what translations of the Bible we choose to read. However, the capacity to do so cannot be drawn from people with theological disabilities like Bugingo and many pastors here. It is true that there are heretical new translations that attempt to change God’s Word to make it politically correct.

I have seen major religions coming up with their own translations. The Catholics did theirs, the seventh day Adventists have their version known as The Clear Word, the Jehovah’s Witness have their own Bible version, Pentecostalism came up with the Amplified Bible version, the Mormons, etc.  Recently a new Bible version was produced by the names: Today’s New International Version (T.N.I.V.) which seeks to remove all gender-specific references in the Bible whenever possible! And this was courtesy of the feminist movement.

It is true all translations are not good, and some are very bad but we ought to know that they are translations and not what we call autographs or originals. A pastor must have the capacity to read Greek and Hebrew which are the original (Autographs) languages from which all translations draw.

In the process of translation, there are three main types of Bible translations: word-for-word, thought-for-thought and paraphrase.

A word-for-word translation attempts to translate each Hebrew or Greek word into a corresponding English word. However, some consider a word-for-word translation harder to understand, particularly when it comes to figures of speech that are not used in modern culture.

The thought-for-thought translations seek to express the meaning of each sentence or paragraph from the original language in simple up-to-date English without being tied to translating every word. As such, these types of translations should not be exclusively relied on for doctrinal study.

A paraphrased translation has the primary goal of conveying the Bible in a simple, easy-to-understand language without regard to word-for-word or even thought-for-thought expressions of the original languages. The authors often exercise “poetic license,” leaving great room for personal religious ideas.

We must remember that there were two main purposes of the Protestant Reformation and these were: first to maintain proper Biblical Theology and make sure that the true doctrine would be the Five Solas, and these are:

• Sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”): The Bible alone is our highest authority.
• Sola Fide (“faith alone”): We are saved through faith alone in Jesus Christ.
• Sola Gratia (“grace alone”): We are saved by the grace of God alone.
• Solus Christus (“Christ alone”): Jesus Christ alone is our Lord, Savior, and King.
• Soli Deo Gloria (“to the glory of God alone”): We live for the glory of God alone.

And the secondary purpose, which equally led to the death of many, was to get the Bible out of the chains of being trapped in the intentional Latin language that few could understand and which actually had compromised the word of God in its translation. This was to save the Bible from the Quran Arabic complex.

William Tyndale fought and died for the right to print the Bible in the common, spoken, modern English tongue of his day… as he boldly told one official who criticized his efforts, “If God spare my life, I will see to it that the boy who drives the plowshare knows more of the scripture than you, Sir!”.

In our modern world however, theologians like me are fighting the battle of telling the world that the Bible has been translated, and translated, and translated, translated again and again to the extent that it has lost its original message. Since the Bible is the word of God but in human language, we must understand that; the Word of God is unchanging from generation to generation, but human language is dynamic and ever-changing form of communication with time. We, therefore, have a responsibility before God as Christian pastors to make sure that the word or message of God is not compromised or even lost in translation.

Friends, the Bible says in Hosea 4:6 that: My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children. This scripture emphasizes that ignorance is number one destroyer of people.

Secondly, it warns that whoever wishes to be a priest but is ignorant or refuses to know, he or she is rejected by God to be his priest. My question is; why don’t these pastors with mega churches read books, consult with the experts or even go back to school and explore all there is to know?

The problem with our world today is that it is an information age but with wrong informants. Recently, I did a presentation in which I demonstrated that the celebrated informants on radio and TV, and in churches are people who literally know nothing about what they are saying. Religions pick up the wrong texts, total mistranslations and out of these, they formulate misleading doctrines and beliefs. Because of this attack and abuse on the Bible, we have many religions and every religion has a scripture it hangs upon.

Friends, I am not saying that God uses only the educated, God in his might can use and will use everyone. However, God will not use anyone in every mission. God uses us according to our natural abilities like talents and he also assigns us according to our experiential capabilities like how much education and expertise we have in the field.

God had many prophets and patriarchs in the Old Testament but he could only assign Moses on the task of the Exodus, an event by which we have the Old Testament. The reason for this was because Moses was educated. We have the New Testament because of Apostle Paul, Jesus had twelve disciples who did a great work but none of them was assigned the serious business of establishing Christianity. I just can’t continue.

God bless you, I invoke, Truth, Reason and Faith.

Am Pr. I.T.WHITE

The Appointed and Anointed Gospel Hawker