REBOOTING THE BIBLE – Product Release Monday, December 17, 2018

Announcing the Availability of the Latest Book by
S. Douglas Woodward
December 17, 2018 on Amazon

REBOOTING THE BIBLE

Synopsis of: Rebooting the Bible

For five hundred years, the Church used this Old Testament Bible. Its Apostles quoted this Bible almost 300 times when they created the books of the New Testament.  We know this Bible as the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

Its Pentateuch was created about 280 B.C. in Alexandria, Egypt, only 200 years after the Hebrew Bible had been assembled by Ezra in Jerusalem. Translators added the remaining books over the next 150 years.  Once finished, Greek-speaking Jews throughout the world relied on the LXX as the Hebrew language grew increasingly unfamiliar. The Church Fathers (e.g., Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr) quoted it extensively since they did not know Hebrew. However, after the Latin Vulgate became the accepted Bible of the Western Church during the fifth and sixth centuries, and Greek ceased as the “lingua franca” of the world, the LXX receded into the background. Only the Eastern Orthodox Church retained it as its Bible.

By the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, both Latin and Greek Bibles were inaccessible for many reasons, but chiefly because commonpeople did not read or speak these languages. Consequently, translators such as Martin Luther and William Tyndale created Bibles in their native tongues. Coupled with Guttenberg’shistoricinvention of the printing press, Protestant Bibles spread across Europe and soon, entered the New World.

What Protestant leaders didn’t know was that the source of their Bibles, the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) had been altered from the original Hebrew text that the translators creating the Greek Bible used. Attempting to quash the growth of the burgeoning Christian faith, the original Hebrew was alteredby second-century rabbis. This corruption of the original Hebrew text occurred in two areas: First, alteringand obscuring Messianic prophecies (plus passages that spoke of the Messiah seeking out the Gentiles) and secondly, compressing the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 by almost 1600 years. So, why did these revered men besmirch their Holy Scriptures? They found it necessary to survive. The rabbis hoped they would thwart the swirling evangelistic claims that Jesus was the Christ. Their altered Hebrew Bible, created within the generation after the destruction of Herod’s Temple, served as the basis for three new Greek Bibles, created almost 400 years after the original Septuagint. These recensions supported by the rabbis, were finished during the remainder of the second century. They became alternate Greek Bibles created by Aquilla, Symmachus, and Theodotion. They sought to replace the “Old Greek” Septuagint (OG/LXX) that, by then, had become “the Christian Bible” and which threatened to influence Jews worldwide to convert to Christianity.  This altered Hebrew Bible transmitted by the Talmudists and later the Masoretes for almost 1,000 years.  The first complete Hebrew Codex, the Codex Leningradensis, dates to 1008 A.D. There are three Septuagint extant codices dating approximately 600 years earlier.

When Protestants created native-language Bibles, particularlythe English King James Version (1611), the Old Testament in these translations carried the altered Hebrew Masoretic Text forward, with the alterations inserted by the second-century rabbis. Many conservative Evangelical churches today argue that their King James Bible is flawless, the only fullyinspired text available, superseding the original Hebrew and Greek in accuracy and authority. Additionally, the corrupted chronology set forth inGenesis 5 and 11 of the MT cause conflicts between the Bible and archeological findings in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Furthermore, the popular MT chronology made famous by Bishop James Ussher has unfortunately become intertwined with “Young Earth” science and conservative theories on biblical infallibility, which seeks to prove a creation date of 4004 B.C. However, the LXX, the original Christian Bible, adds over 1,600 years to the biblical primevaltimeline. As for the two major events we know as the Flood of Noah and the Tower of Babel, they are now dated to the fourth millennium B.C. rather than the third. This additional millennium added to biblical history enables the Bible’s timeline to be much more closely reconciled with secular Archeology and Egyptology. In so doing, Christian apologetics can now overcome frequent objections harming the believability of the Bible while stimulating a vital, widespread acceptance of the Christian faith.

The paperback book, 450 pages, will be available on Amazon.com, December 17, 2018.