So that they can defend this exclusive property to the vast community of believers, Theologists, unaffected by the results of their biblical research, base themselves on the evangelists, the epistles of the apostles and the miraculous 'original text' of 'the Holy Scriptures.
But none of the evangelists was a contemporary of Jesus and no contemporary wrote an eyewitness account. Nothing was written down about Tesus and his followers, until after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Titus (A.D. 39-81) in the year 70. And if the year 30 is accepted for the death of the Son of God, then Mark, the first author of the Bible, wrote his gospel at least forty years after the crucifixion of Jesus. Dr. Johannes Lehmann [2], co-translator of a modern edition of the Bible, says on this point: 'The evangelists are interpreters, not biographers; they have not illuminated what had grown dark with the passage of generations, but obscured what was still light. They have not written history, but made history. They did not want to report, but to justify.'
The 'original text', so frequently, consulted and so abundant in theological hairsplitting, do not exist at all. What do we possess? Transcripts that without exception originated between the, fourth and tenth centuries A.D. And these transcripts, some. 1,500 of them, are transcripts of transcripts, and not a single transcript agrees with another. Over 80,000 (!) variations have been counted. There is not a single page of the 'original texts' without contradictions. From copy to copy the verses were understood differently by sympathetic authors and their functions transformed to suit contemporary needs.
The biblical 'original texts' teem with thousands and thousands of easily provable and well-known errors. The most prominent of them the Codex Sinaiticus - written in the fourth century A.D., like the Codex Vaticanus - was found in the Sinai Convent it 1844. It contains 16,000 corrections, which are supposed to go back to seven correctors. Many passages were altered three times and replaced by a fourth 'original text'. Friedrich Delitzsch [3], author of a Hebrew dictionary and a first-rate scholar, established about 3,000 copying mistakes in the 'original text'.
This business of the 'original text' is a symptom of the sublime art of theological description. Every normal mortal connects the concept 'original text' with the very first version, an undisputed and undisputable document. What would the Christian layman say if he was told openly from the pulpit that an original text in this sense did not exist?
It is staggering that the fairy tale of the Bible as 'God's word' has endured so long - there is no comparison in the 7,000 years of human history. But the fact that the 'original texts,' which teem with contradictions and falsifications, are still publicized as 'God's word' borders on schizophrenia. I know that 'falsification is a harsh description, for falsification means nothing more or less than being intentionally misleading. But even the Fathers of the Church of the first centuries A.D. agreed that, though they might quarrel about the culprits, the 'original texts' were falsified; they still spoke openly of 'interpolations, profanation, destruction, improvement, corruption, erasing' - but that is long ago and then as now the hair-splitting does not alter the objective fact of falsification.
Christian theologians, naturally enough, do not like to hear anyone talk about falsifications. They take the forgers under their black wings and whisper about 'conscious alterations', they wrap the correctors in verbal cotton wool and claim that' they acted in the interests of the true word of God - to which they must have had access long after Christ.
Dr. Robert Kehl [4], Zurich, writes in connection with the falsifications: 'Frequently the same passage has been "corrected" in the opposite sense by another, depending entirely on which dogmatic view had to be defended in the relevant school. At all events, a completely chaotic text and irremediable confusion has already arisen owing to individual "corrections", but even more so to deliberate ones.'
And the priest Jean Schorrer [5], for many years spiritual adviser to the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre, Geneva, came to the conclusion that the theory of the total inspiration of the Bible and the idea that God was its author were untenable: this idea clashed so fiercely with the most elementary knowledge of healthy human reason and is refuted so clearly by the Bible itself, that it could only be defended by ignorant evangelists and a flock devoid of any kind of general culture.
In some recent editions of the Bible - for example, in the popular edition of the Zurich Bible - it is at least admitted that some passages were added by a later hand. But even this is only a very hesitant indication of the massive manipulation to which the biblical texts have been subjected. In the series Die Religion des modernen Menschen [6], Dr. Robert Kehl gives a sketch of what really happened. I quote: Most believers in the Bible have the naive credo that the Bible has always existed in the form in which they read it today. They believe that the Bible has always contained all the sections which are found in their personal copy of the Bible. They do not know - and most of them do not want to know — that for about 200 years the first Christians had no 'scripture' apart from the Old Testament, ana that even the Old Testament canon had not been definitely established in the days of the early Christians, that written versions of the New Testament only came into being quite slowly, that for a long time no one dreamt of considering these New Testament writings as Holy Scripture, that with the passage of time the custom arose of reading these writings to the Congregations, but that even then no one dreamt of treating them as Holy Scripture with the same status as the Old Testament, that this idea first occurred to people when the different factions in Christianity were fighting each other and they felt the need to be able to back themselves up with something binding, that in this way people only began to regard these writings as Holy Scripture about A.D. 200.
In other words, there is nothing there about inspiration by a spirit, not even by the Holy Ghost. 'God's word' sneaks in as if by a secret ballot in which black and white balls are used. Those are facts. It would be more convincing if the world organizations which claim to be guardians of the ultimate and only truth did not limit themselves to dealing with historical facts in discussions that are dialectically perfect, but unintelligible to a layman. What they should do is use a first-class public relations system to bring the facts to the 'common people' in generally intelligible language! Do they lack the courage of their convictions? Are they worried lest the business basis, the paid-up capital as it were, be taken away from their 'limited company' if it were admitted that the, Bible is not 'God's word', because it cannot be so according to the proven way in which it originated?
How long are the leaders of the Church going to persist in the error that the faithful can be kept in a state of Christian humility and ingenuousness? How long do they think they can describe contradictions and falsifications as 'willed by God', 'for the salvation of the faithful' or inspired by the
'Holy Ghost'? If that is the way facts are treated, what has theological scholarship to do with knowledge? Nevertheless theology is allotted a special faculty in the universities: it is financed by the taxpayer, who usually calls himself a Christian. I assume that straight-forward scientific knowledge is imparted to the theological students in these faculties. What kind of distortion takes place between academic teaching and what is preached from the pulpit? Where does the 'brain-washing' take place that caused the facts to be forgotten, and the old song of the Bible as the true word of God rung out once more from the pulpit?