Errors in the New Testament

Errors In The New Testament?

By Ben Mordechai

Every person that I have ever met who defines him or herself as a Christian or a Catholic, or by any of the sub sects and derivations such as Coptic and so on, takes the Old and New Testaments as the literal words of God. That’s fine, but what if the actual copy of the New Testament that he or she has and uses and relies on for guidance and support and moral clarity is misprinted by a publisher? How many people do you know check their Bible for errors or even know how to?

As a matter of fact, in 1631 CE, King Charles I of England ordered 1,000 Bibles from an English printer who accidentally left out the word “not” in the seventh commandment (concerning adultery). This edition of the New Testament became known as the “Wicked Bible,” and the few copies that have survived are worth a sizable amount of money but that is not my point, my point is that it has happened and this example illustrates that it is not the first and only time that the New Testament has been less than 100% accurate.

As I have demonstrated with the case of the “Wicked Bible”, removing or adding letters to the Bible can quite easily change the meaning of entire passages of the Bible and therefore affects major theological concepts and matters of morality and ethics that affects millions of believers around the world. Now before I go on any further you may be thinking that a word or letter missing or added here and there is just not that serious of a matter to be concerned about and so to further illustrate just how important perfect accuracy is in regards to the Bible, let’s take the famous Biblical phrase and moral tenet Thou Shall Not Murder, it is four words or eighteen letters and removing a word or letters changes the statement to mean something else entirely, and that’s using English, however the Hebrew Bible was not given to Moses by God in English but rather in Hebrew. In Hebrew, Thou Shall Not Murder transliterates into English as: Lo TeerTsach, which in Hebrew is only two words or six letters. A missing letter and or worse and entire missing word in Hebrew can really have massive implications.

Errors in the New Testament

Now let’s take New Testament Matthew 28:19 for example : “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”. Mathew 28:19 is the textual source for two major theological pillars of Christianity / Catholicism, the concept of the Catholic trinity and the concept of baptism to Protestants. Notice that it says “in the name” as opposed to “in the names.”? The addition or the subtraction of one letter in this case, the “s”, or or in other words, pluralizing the word name, is the entire Protestant – Catholic debate into the two concepts that I mentioned. One of the reasons for this theological debate is because there exist multiple versions of the book of Matthew that totally contradict one another. Some copies have NAME written and others have NAMES and nobody knows which is truly the more original source and which is the copy and you can be sure that the Church has been working overtime to reconcile this debate and settle it once and for all.

I’ll go into the existence of different versions of the book of Matthew later on in this article but my points so far are that firstly, removing or adding a single letter to the Bible has massive ramifications that affect the world and secondly that the New Testament simply cannot be claimed by anyone to be the literal word of God, or perfect, or without error as it is claimed by many to be, simply based on the fact that there exists contradictory copies of the Gospels. In fact the King James Version (1611) is not considered authoritative anymore by most scholars and theologians in leu of the discovery of entire insertions into the text are present which are not found in any older, more authoritative versions and translations.

So how did the Christian Bible become corrupted? Who corrupted the New Testament? Was there some sort of conspiracy? Is there anyone to blame? Can the New Testament be fixed? To answer those questions we need to go through the chronology and the story of how the New Testament came into being in order to illustrate just how complicated getting the answers to these questions is. But to repeat what I wrote earlier, from my experiences most self-proclaimed Christians and Catholics and members of the sub sects that I have ever and had the pleasure of being acquainted with and befriending do not know about the history of the New Testament whatsoever to the point of deliberate ignorance, yet they all define their morals and ethics by it. It is a good thing that it does not say in the New Testament: “if your priest commands thee to surrender all of your wealth to him and to jump in a lake upon his command, you must comply”!

Allow me to present to you the simple chronology of how the New Testament came to be according to researcher Austin Cline who compiled this. It is not perfect time-line, but it is certainly a very good approximation that you can easily verify yourself.

———————————————————————–

c. 8 BCE Jesus of Nazareth born in Roman Judea, not Palestine as many Academics erroneously label the region (by some estimates).
6 Herod the Great deposed by Augustus.
14 – 37 Tiberius I, stepson of Augustus, became emperor of Rome (b. 42 BCE).
18 Caiaphas became high priest in Jerusalem (until 36).
c. 24 – 26 Jesus is believed to have begun his ministry.
26 – 36 Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea.
27 – 28 John the Baptist wandered and preached. Jesus would have been baptized. [Luke 3:1-2] (15th year of Tiberius).
28 John the Baptist was executed on orders from Herod Antipas.
c. 30 Jesus of Nazareth is believed to have been crucified in Jerusalem.
c. 31 Saint Stephen became the first Christian martyr when he was stoned to death for blasphemy. One of those present at his execution was the Pharisee Saul.
c. 34-35 Saul of Tarsus, formerly a rabbi and enemy of Christianity, converts to the new Christian faith and became known as Paul. [Acts 9].
c. 37-40 Paul first visited Jerusalem as a Christian.
37 – 41 Gaius Caligula, nephew of Tiberius, became emperor of Rome and declared himself a god. In the year 41 he would be assassinated and Claudius, a crippled son of Tiberius, would take command.
40 Paul went to Jerusalem to consult with Peter [Gal 1, 18-20].
c. 40 – 51 Paul traveled to Asia Minor and Cyprus, establishing churches and writing the earliest epistles which would became part of the New Testament canon.
43 Romans under Aulus Plautius invaded Britain. London was founded.
44 James, brother of John, was executed by Herod Agrippa I [Acts 12, 1-3].
47 First recorded use of the term “Christian” occurred in Antioch, Syria, home of one of the earliest Christian churches .
47 – 48 Paul and Barnabas were on Cyprus [Acts 13, 4-12].
48 – 49 Council of Jerusalem, 1st Christian Council, doctrines on circumcision and dietary law was agreed to by apostles and presbyters, written in a letter addressed to “the brothers of Gentile origin in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia” [Acts 15]
c. 49 Paul composed his epistle to the Thessalonians – the earliest known New Testament writing
49 Emperor Claudius ordered all Jewish Christians expelled from Rome.
c. 51 Paul wrote epistle to the Galatians.
54 Empress Agrippina had Emperor Claudius murdered and installed her 16-year-old son Nero as the new emperor.
c. 55 Paul wrote epistles to the Corinthians.
c. 55 Peter traveled to Rome where his leadership over the church of Rome established the tradition of the papacy. He has come to be regarded as the first bishop of Rome (pope).
57 Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem [Acts 21].
58 Paul was arrested and imprisoned in Caesarea [Acts 25:4].
c. 60 Paul wrote the epistle to the Romans.
61 Human sacrifices in religious celebrations were prohibited by Roman law.
62 Paul was held under house arrest in Rome, but then was allowed to resume his travels.
64 Roman emperor Nero (37 – 68) accused the Christians of having started the fire which destroyed large sections of Rome, initiating widespread persecution.
65 Famous and influential Roman philosopher Seneca committed suicide on orders from Emperor Nero.
c. 65 Q was possibly written, (German: Quelle, meaning “source”) a hypothetical Greek text used in writing of Matthew and Luke.
66 Jews revolted against Roman government (through 70).
c. 67 Nero ordered the execution of both Peter and Paul.
68 Qumran (Essenes?) community was destroyed by Rome. The site of their “Dead Sea Scrolls” would be found in 1949.
69 Vespasian, a Roman general, attacked to Rome in order to quell a Jewish uprising. A coup by other generals causes him to be made emperor.
70 Titus, son of Roman emperor Vespasian, captured and destroyed Jerusalem and suppressed a Jewish revolt, destroying the Temple in the process.
c. 70 Mark, earliest known gospel, was probably composed.
73 Masada, last remaining stronghold of Jewish Zealots, fell to Roman assault.
79 Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae.
c. 85 – 95 Gospel of Luke and Book of Acts were probably composed.
c. 90 Old Testament books, called “The Writings,” were established as part of Christian canon: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Chronicles.
c. 95 Book of Revelations was probably composed.
c. 95 Clement of Rome (c. 30 – 100), one of the earliest popes, wrote a letter arguing that church leaders possess a divine authority inherited from Christ and his apostles.
c. 95- 105 Composition of the “Pastoral Epistles,” falsely attributed to Paul: Hebrews, I and II Timothy, Titus, and I Peter.
c. 80 – 100 Gospel of Matthew was probably composed.
98 – 116 Trajan was emperor of Rome. Around this time the Roman empire reached maximum size.
c. 100 Christian churches were established in Greece, North Africa, Italy, and Asia Minor.
c. 100 – 125 Gospel of John was probably composed.
100 – 165 St. Justin Martyr lived and was one of the first Christian apologists to offer a defense of Christianity.
c. 100 The Romans built the first London Bridge across the Thames.
122 Roman emperor Hadrian visited Britain and began construction of a wall and fortifications between northern England and Scotland.
132 Shimeon Bar-Kokhba and Rabbi Akiba Ben-Joseph led Jews in a revolt against Roman rule. They captured Jerusalem and created an independent state of Israel.
135 Julius Severus, formerly governor of Britain, crushed a revolt in Palestine. Final Diaspora (dispersion) of the Jews occurs.
c. 140 Shepherd of Hermas was written, describing a highly developed system of bishops, deacons, and priests.
c. 144 Marcion founded an influential Christian sect which argued for the existence of two gods (one good, one evil) and for the rejection of the Old Testament.
c. 150 The four “canonical” gospels were collected together.
c. 150 The School of Alexandria was founded in Egypt, quickly becoming a major center for both Christian theology and Greek philosophy. Among its prominent teachers were the theologians Clement and Origen.
166 Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius sent gifts to Chinese Emperor Huan Ti.
c. 180 Irenaeus (125 – c. 202), Catholic theologian, wrote Against Heresies in an attempt to fight the spread of Gnosticism. He claimed that “every church must agree” with the church of Rome because of its apostolic authority.
180 First African Christians were martyred at Scillium.
190 Christian council established “official” date of Easter.
197 First recorded usage of the term “catholic” appeared in the writings of Apollonius in reference to 1 John.
200 New Testament canon was mostly fixed in currently known form.
268 Goths sacked Athens, Corinth, and Sparta.
286 Emperor Diocletian divided the empire – he ruled the east and Maximilian ruled the west.
301 Armenia became the first country to make Christianity its state religion.
303 Diocletian ordered a general persecution of all Christians.
312 Constantine, emperor of the Eastern Empire defeated and kills Maxentius, emperor of the Western Empire. Constantine converted to Christianity after being inspired by a vision of a cross in the sky and the words: In hoc signo vinces.
325 First Ecumenical Council of Nicea was convened by emperor Constantine: established the Nicene Creed as the fundamental statement of Christian faith.
336 Arius, priest at Alexandria and founder of Arianism, died. Arianism was one of the most widespread and divisive heresies in the history of Christianity.
350 Christianity first reached Ethiopia.
351 Emperor Julian attempted to reintroduce paganism in the place of Christianity.
367 Festal Epistle of St. Athanasius offered earliest known list of the New Testament canon in its current form.
372 Buddhism was introduced into Korea.
380 Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire under the reign of Theodosius I.
381 First Council of Constantinople. Convened by Theodosius I, then emperor of the East and a recent convert, to confirm the victory over Arianism, the council drew up a dogmatic statement on the Trinity and defined Holy Spirit as having the same divinity expressed for the Son by the Council of Nicaea 56 years earlier.
395 The Roman Empire was divided again between East and West, setting the stage for the eventual division of the Christian Church. Latin Christianity was based in Rome under the leadership of the popes, while Eastern Orthodoxy develops in the east in Constantinople under the leadership of patriarchs.
401 Innocent I became Pope (until 417) and claims universal jurisdiction over the Roman Church.
c. 405 St. Jerome completed the Vulgate – a Latin translation of both the Old and New Testaments. This remains the Latin Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.
410 Lead by Alaric, the Goths sacked Rome.
418 British monk Pelagius was excommunicated. Pelagius denied original sin and the need for baptism, asserting that if God asked men to do good, then they must be capable of doing good on their own. He was condemned by Augustine.
431 Ecumenical Council of Ephesus denounced the teachings of Nestorius (d. 451), who argued that Christ had completely separate human and divine natures.
433 Attila became ruler of the Huns (until 453).
451 Attila invaded Gaul but was repulsed by joint forces of Franks, Alemanni and Romans at battle of Chalons. Attila invaded Italy the next year.
c. 1380 John Wycliffe began the first English translation of the Bible.
1520 Martin Luther created his German translation of the New Testament.
1526 William Tyndale created his English version of the Pentateuch.
1560 The Geneva Bible was created. This version was the one used by Shakespeare and also by the Pilgrims who came to the United States on the Mayflower.
1582 Douay Version of the New Testament (English translation) was completed. After the Old Testament translation was completed in 1610, this became the first English translation of the Bible authorized by and for Roman Catholics
1604 King James (1566 – 1625) of England commissioned the “King James” translation of the Bible

——————————————————————————————————-

If you bothered to go through the chronology above then you may have noted and or figured out a few very important details such as:

• The exact dates of Jesus’ life and his death are not known exactly.
• The New Testament was not written by Jesus whatsoever.
• Of all of the people that Jesus may have met and had an impact on, no where is he mentioned by anyone or any of the sects that exist at the time.
• The entire New Testament was written down many, many decades after Jesus lived and died in fact not until after 125 CE.
• Some of the writers never met Jesus and in fact lived long after Jeus was dead and that their Gospels are based on stories of Jesus that were told to them by others.
• It took the church over two hundred years of fighting (sometimes bloody) over the doctrine of the trinity before this baptismal formula came into use.
• Multiple differing translations of the New Testament exist going back to the third centuries.
• Different streams of the Christian world use differing copies from one another.
• None of the Christian streams and sects agree on a final 100% accurate version of the New Testament.
• The words or terms Christian and Catholic were invented after Jesus’ life and did not exist even during Jesus’ lifetime.
• During the entire history of Christianity starting from the time of it’s earliest ministries there have been seriously deep and bitter schisms and disagreements in the Christian Church. These disagreements resulted in the Roman Latin Church and the Greek Orthodox Church separating from one another and then later on the split of the Protestant Church from the Catholic Churches.
• All of the original copies of all of the ancient books are long, long gone and so there is no way of verifying anything until new evidence that can shed some light on the matter is found.

So how did the Christian Bible become corrupted and when did it happen?

It can be argued that the Vatican actually did indeed add text, or in other words, invent words that Jesus said, which I will discuss at the bottom of this article about Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew.

How come more sources and proofs don’t exist?

In the time Jesus, it was a tumultuous time in the history of the world. In the first one hundred and fifty years CE, the entire nation of Israel fought two, messy, bloody and destructive revolts against the Roman occupation only to finally lose and be enslaved and deported en masse to the farthest reaches of the Roman empire. Rome itself was undergoing multiple internal upheavals and political dramas.

On a historical but relevant sidenote, that is why there are Jews scattered across the globe today and they are not located in Israel. It was not by their choice to be scattered to the four winds and for many centuries in the last one thousand years they were even prevented from returning to their homeland. Now the absurd thing is that the ficticious, so called Palestinians are being given what will surely be a Muslim, terrorist state when in fact Christian and Judaic history shows that they never had one ever nor were they even a people in history before this century. So, if the world has lost it’s collective mind regarding granting the so called Palestinians a State in the land of the Jesus and the Apostles where no such thing ever existed before, then it is not too far out to accept that we do not have the first copies of the gospels in our possession thus resulting in corruption in the text of the New Testament.

During those first one hundred years though, Christians were not accepted or welcomed by both the Roman occupiers and the majority of the Judeans from all of the various sects that existed at that time. The Judeans themselves were politically fighting amongst themselves anyways so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for smaller groups at that time to be bullied. This made maintaining and creating a movement very difficult as the early Christians had to kind of scurry about in society in order to just to survive. The first Christians were all Judeans, or Jewish in other words, not gentiles, which may be a surprise to you, and they were very poor and could not afford an institution for record making and record keeping. Whatever words or information about Jesus that anyone happened to have written down was likely not on quality parchments and the ones that were made were likely copied in terrible conditions by less than quality scribes and translators.

Sadly scholars today posses very little information about the early Christians or about many other groups alive at that time in that region. All everyone has been able to do is piece together the history based on a multitude of sources such as from the Gospels, historian Josephus and Greek writer Philo for examples. The Jewish Talmud has information pertaining to the life of Jesus however both the Vatican and scholars dismiss it entirely.

Can the New Testament be fixed? This is a problem which the Christian world has been working on for almost two thousand years, but on the other hand the Vatican’s position is that the New Testament is not in error whatsoever so therefore how can they possibly fix something that they perceive as unbroken? On a side note, the Vatican is the repository of all of the remaining wealth and knowledge that was plundered by the Romans and the Church over the last two thousand years. Sitting in it’s basement vaults is…

The dishonesty of the Vatican? The Vatican will deny that there are any errors in the New Testament and boast humbly that they truly do have the next best thing to the original copies of the gospels, however this is just not true as many academic scholars can prove to the contrary and what is astounding about this is that the Vatican refuses to acknowledge even the possibility. Furthermore, located in museums and vaults around the world are a multiplicity of copies of the texts of the New Testament in different languages that date from within a couple of generations of their writing. In total, there are approximately 200,000 variants of the New Testament. Of those 200,000 variants, there are hundreds of serious grammatical and textual problems that have caused havoc for scholars and theologians for a long time and then about fifty serious textual problems that are hugely important theological matters and concern.

You may be wondering and even worrying then just how many errors there must be in the Hebrew Bible which is older and the answer to that is simply and utterly astounding, even miraculous. There are approximately 181,253 words in the New Testament depending on which translation you use and in what language. There are exactly 79,847 words in a Torah scroll, and 304,805 letters, and in the early decades of the State of Israel when members of the Tribes of Israel began streaming in from all parts of the planet, from Russian and Morocco, from Yemen and from Britain, their Torah scrolls were examined closely for comparison. What scientists and clergy discovered to their total and utter amazement was that all of the scrolls were exactly the same, letter for letter with the exception of scrolls from Yemen, and then only by exactly nine letters. The Dead Seas Scrolls further confirmed the Hebrew Bible’s accuracy and consistency despite the horrible persecution that Jews endured over the last two thousand years.

Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew.

The Shem Tov Matthew is the Gospel of Matthew written in the Hebrew language and it is a serious thorn in the side of the Catholic Church that they have desperately tried to dismiss. The version is preserved within a work named Eben Bohen, which was written by a Jewish physician living in Aragon, Spain, named Shem Tov ben Isaac ben Shaprut (Ibn Shaprut), and after whom the manuscript is named. The text of Eben Bohen is preserved in a number of manuscripts, although the manuscript of Matthew that it quotes is lost. It is alleged by many Protestants, not Jews interestingly enough that the Catholic Church has known that the Jews had preserved a copy of the original Gospel of Matthew in the Hebrew language, if not other Gospels as well and they contend that Shem Tov Matthew is indeed a copy of original Matthew and not a copy of a translation of the original.

Irinocally it is the Catholic Church’s history which supports the Protestant claim:

“Matthew wrote the words in the Hebrew dialect, and each one interpreted as he could”
(Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 3.39). The Wycliffe Bible commentary: Matthew, Pfeiffer, C. F.

Papias (Eusebius, H.E. 3.39.16)
“Matthew collected the oracles (ta logia) in the Hebrew language, and each interpreted them as best he could.”

Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.1.1
“Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews n their own dialect while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and laying the foundations of the church.”

Origen (Eusebius, H.E. 6.25.4)
“As having learnt by tradition concerning the four Gospels, which alone are unquestionable in the Church of God under heaven, that first was written according to Matthew, who was once a tax collector but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, who published it for those who from Judaism came to believe, composed as it was in the Hebrew language.”

Eusebius, H.E. 3.24.6
“Matthew had first preached to Hebrews, and when he was on the point of going to others he transmitted in writing in his native language the Gospel according to himself, and thus supplied by writing the lack of his own presence to those from whom he was sent.”

Epiphanius (ca. 315-403), bishop of Salamis, refers to a gospel used by the Ebionites (Panarion 30. 13.1-30.22.4). He says it is Matthew, called “According to the Hebrews” by them, but says it is corrupt and mutilated. He says Matthew issued his Gospel in Hebrew letters. He quotes from this Ebionite Gospel seven times. These quotations appear to come not from Matthew but from some harmonized account of the canonical Gospels.

Jerome also asserts that Matthew wrote in the Hebrew language (Epist. 20.5), and he refers to a Hebrew Matthew and a Gospel of the Hebrews-unclear if they are the same. He also quotes from the Gospel used by the Nazoreans and the Ebionites, which he says he has recently translated from Hebrew to Greek (in Matth. 12.13).

The importance of Hebrew Matthew is that it not only contradicts Greek Matthew in numerous places, but the famous, classic sentence describing the trinity, the pillar of Catholicism is not even mentioned at all which supports the Protestant claim that the Catholic Church itself corrupted the New Testament and gravely sinned by putting words in the mouth of Jesus and selling it as God’s word for two thousands years.

In conclusion.

I am not suggesting that the entire New Testament is worthless or unusable, just that if we are really seeking truth in this world and truly trying to be with God then the weight of the evidence shows everyone that: the NT is not perfect as millions of ignorant people around the world presume and take for granted, nor is it a word for word document from God, nor can it be trusted 100% because men very well may have added to it or subtracted from it. If someone finds Gospels from before 125 CE, a lot of the problems will be clarified but until that day comes we are all stuck in doubt and shrouded by lies. If any of this has made an impression upon you then you have a duty upon yourself to pursue this to see where it will take, the worst that can happen is that you learn more about the world that you live in and about history.

With love of Israel

Ben Mordecchai