Some stories

Reading the Bible, I’ve found stories that are obviously found in the Quran too. Some were narrated differently and some were repeated multiple times.

In the Old Testament there are too many details that the stories sound like human writing rather than a divine message. And these details that are way too many could have been added to enhance God’s word or to give more excitement/entertainment to the reader. Here I’ll give you the first of a few that I’ll be posting.

This is one of the stories, unfortunately you won’t read the final part of the Bible’s version as I’m disgusted and ashamed to post it on my blog. But you may search for it if you are willing to do so.
Feel free to comment below or ask any question.

Genesis 19:1-31 (KJV)


Genesis 19:32-38 (censored)

The Rock 15:62-75

And when the envoys came to the family of Lot.
He said, “You are a people unknown to me”
They said, “We bring you what they have doubts about.”
“We bring you the truth, and we are truthful.”
“Travel with your family at the dead of the night, and follow up behind them, and let none of you look back, and proceed as commanded.”
And We informed him of Our decree: the last remnant of these will be uprooted by early morning.
And the people of the town came joyfully.
He said, “These are my guests, so do not embarrass me.”
“And fear God, and do not disgrace
They said, “Did we not forbid you from strangers?”
He said, “These are my daughters, if you must.”
By your life, they were blundering in their drunkenness.
So the Blast struck them at sunrise.
And We turned it upside down, and rained down upon them stones of baked clay
Surely in that is a lesson for those who read signs.

The Elevation 7 :80-84

And Lot, when he said to his people, “Do you commit lewdness no people anywhere have ever committed before you?”
“You lust after men rather than women. You are an excessive people.”
And his people’s only answer was to say, “Expel them from your town. They are purist people.”
But We saved him and his family, except for his wife; she was of those who lagged behind.
And We rained down on them a rain;
note the consequences for the sinners

Hud 11:77-82

And when Our envoys came to Lot, he was anxious for them, and concerned for them. He said, “This is a dreadful day.”
him—they were in the habit of committing sins. He said, “O my people, these are my daughters; they are purer for you. So

fear God, and do not embarrass me before my guests. Is there not one reasonable man among you?”
They said, “You know well that we have no right to your daughters, and you know well what we want.”

He said, “If only I had the strength to stop you, or could rely on some strong support.”
They said, “O Lot, we are the envoys of your Lord; they will not reach you. So set out with your family during the cover of the night, and let none of you look back, except for your wife. She will be struck by what will strike them. Their appointed time is the morning. Is not the morning near?”

And when Our command came about, We turned it upside down, and We rained down on it stones of baked clay.

What about… #29 


















Some people don’t believe in extraterrestrial life, why not?




People of the book – part 19 ( St Pius X society 2)

In 1989 it was revealed that for some 16 years his followers had been harbouring Paul Touvier French Nazi collaborator and war criminal , indicted for his central role in the deportation of the Jews of Lyons to German death camps. Touvier was finally arrested, aged 74, at the Lefebvrist St Francis Priory in nice

The following year Lefebvre was convicted of fostering race hatred when he declared that, as a result of Muslim immigration, “it is your wives, your daughters, your children who will be kidnapped and dragged off to certain kinds of places as … exist in Casablanca”.

The Lefebvre influence extends well beyond the francophone world. There are Lefebvrist seminaries in the US, Germany, Australia and several countries in Latin America (thus Williamson’s congregation in Argentina). Marcel Lefebvre’s antisemitism and anti-Islamism lie firmly in a modern French tradition, from the coarse racism of Gyp’s fin-de-siècle novels to the shrill attacks on Dreyfus in the French press and to the more contemporary pronouncements on the threats to civilisation posed by Jews and Muslims.

At issue is not just monarchism, the Latin Tridentine mass, or even schism within the Catholic church, but the exploitation of religious faith for inhumane social and political policies.

On 16 October 2013, the Society offered to perform a funeral for Nazi war-criminal Erich Priebke. Priebke, had been baptized in a Protestant denomination however, in post-war years, he converted to a form of Catholicism with his wife and had his children baptized.[66] On the occasion of the public audience in front of the Military Tribunal of Rome held on April 3, 1996, he read a letter in the presence of the families of the victims, in which he manifested his grief, deploring the horrible act of obedience that he had had to perform in those circumstances:

“From the depths of my heart I feel the need to express my condolences for the sorrow of the relatives of the victims of the Ardeatine Caves…. As a believer I have never denied this tragic fact; for me the order to participate in the action was a great personal tragedy…. I think of the dead with reverence and I feel united with the living in their sorrow.”

What about … #23

Some of this post is from the National Geographic magazine

Today we’ll travel ten centuries back, at a time when we were anguished to see an oversees  ship approaching our coastlines. It was so long ago, but their traces remained to show us what a powerful and ordinary people they were. They are called the Vikings.

The Vikings were a seafaring people from the late eighth to early 11th century who established a name for themselves as traders, explorers and warriors. From the shores of their Scandinavian homeland, between the Baltic and North Seas, these fortune seekers took to the world stage in the mid-eighth century, exploring much of Europe over the next 300 years and traveling farther than earlier researchers ever suspected. With well built sailing ships and expert knowledge of rivers and seas, they journeyed to what are now 37 or more countries, from Afghanistan to Canada, according to archaeologist Neil Price of Uppsala University in Sweden. En route they discovered more than 50 cultures and traded avidly for luxuries. They donned Eurasian caftans, dressed in silk from China, and pocketed heaps of Islamic silver coins. They built thriving cities at York and Kiev, colonized large swaths of Great Britain, Iceland, and France, and established outposts in Greenland and North America. No other European seafarers of the day ventured so fearlessly and so far from their homeland. They were the only ones able to do what they have done. They discovered the Americas long before Columbus and could be found as far east as the distant reaches of Russia. While these people are often attributed as savages raiding the more civilized nations for treasure and women, the motives and culture of the Viking people are much more diverse.

Many historians associate the term “Viking” to the Scandinavian term vikingr, which means “pirate.” However, the term is meant to reference oversea expeditions, and was used as a verb by the Scandinavian people for when the men traditionally took time out of their summers to go “a Viking.” While many would believe these expeditions entailed the raiding of monasteries and cities along the coast, many expeditions were actually with the goal of trade and enlisting as foreign mercenaries.

The earliest recorded raid were in the 790s until the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. During this time, the reach of the Scandinavian people extended to all corners of northern Europe, and many other nations found Vikings raiding their coasts. The farthest reported records of Vikings were in Baghdad for the trading of goods like fur, tusks and seal fat.

The start of the Viking migration from Scandinavia in 793 was in small island located off the northeast coast of England, in this location was a well-known abbey of learning, famous throughout the continent for the knowledgeable monks and its extensive library. During this raid, monks were killed, thrown into the sea or taken as slaves along with many treasures of the church, and the library itself razed. This single event set the stage for how Vikings would be perceived throughout the Viking Age: savage warriors with no respect for religion or appreciation for learning.

In the years that followed the initial raid, coastal villages, monasteries and even cities found themselves besieged by these sea-based foreign intruders. Due to the frequency of sea attacks, many developments were made in developing fortifications in the forms of walled-in harbors and sea-facing stone walls, defenses that proved to be quite effective at deterring raids. Early raiding parties planned their attacks for the summer months, and they often set out with just a few ships and perhaps a hundred fighters. Bristling with iron weaponry, the raiders struck rapidly and went about the carnage swiftly, setting sail before locals could mount a defense. In France, in the ninth century alone, Viking raiders stormed more than 120 settlements, massacring monks and local inhabitants, stripping churches of their treasures, and enslaving the survivors.

As precious metals flowed back to Scandinavia, young men flocked to the great halls of Viking leaders, eager to swear their loyalty. What began as small raiding forays of two or three ships gradually evolved into fleets of 30 vessels, then many more. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a contemporary annal, hundreds of Viking ships arrived along the east coast of England in 865, carrying a ravenous host that the Chronicle writers called micel here, the great army. Pushing inland along England’s rivers and roads, these invaders began smashing Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and seizing large swaths of land to colonize.

One famous early Irish text records how a woman known as Inghen Ruaidh—or Red Girl, after the color of her hair—led a fleet of Viking ships to Ireland in the 10th century. Bioarchaeologist Anna Kjellström of Stockholm University recently reanalyzed the skeletal remains of a Viking fighter found in the old trading center of Birka, in Sweden. Mourners had furnished the grave with an arsenal of deadly weapons, and for decades archaeologists assumed that the elite fighter was male. But while studying the warrior’s pelvic bones and mandible, Kjellström discovered that the man was in fact a woman. This nameless Viking woman seems to have commanded the respect of many Viking warriors. “On her lap she had gaming pieces,” says archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson of Uppsala University. “This suggests that she was the one planning the tactics and that she was a leader.”

It’s not really known the reason behind these attacks, perhaps the Christian persecution and forced baptism of pagans to reduced agricultural outputs in the Scandinavian region. Many more documented reasons might have prompted these people to leave their cold and harsh homes to seek out the means to survive elsewhere. Yet, despite how unforgiving their homeland may have been, most Vikings still returned to their homeland at the end of each season with treasure, slaves and goods to survive yet another winter.

The modern perceptions of Vikings found their origins through Catholic propaganda. Upon the sacking of multiple Christian facilities and the loss of countless relics and treasures, the Catholic ministry sought to dehumanize them. Until Queen Victoria’s rule of Britain, the Vikings were still portrayed as a violent and barbaric people. During the 19th and 20th centuries, perceptions changed to the point where Vikings were glamorized as noble savages with horned helmets, a proud culture and a feared prowess in battle.

How and why did medieval farmers in Scandinavia become the scourge of the European continent?
Around A.D. 750, Scandinavia was wracked by turmoil. More than three dozen petty kingdoms arose during this period, throwing up chains of hill forts and vying for power and territory. In the midst of these troubled times, catastrophe struck. A vast cloud of dust, likely blasted into the atmosphere by a combination of cataclysms, comets or meteorites smashing into Earth, as well as the eruption of at least one large volcano darkened the sun, lowering summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for the next 14 years. The extended cold and darkness brought death and ruin to Scandinavia, lying as it did along the northern edge of medieval agriculture. In Sweden’s Uppland region, for example, nearly 75 percent of villages were abandoned, as residents succumbed to starvation and fighting.

When summer at last returned to the north and populations rebounded, Scandinavian society assumed a new, more truculent form. Leaders surrounded themselves with heavily armed war bands and began seizing and defending abandoned territory. A militarized society arose in which men and women alike celebrated the virtues of warfare—fearlessness, aggression, cunning, strength under fire. On the Swedish island of Gotland, where archaeologists have found many intact graves from this period, “almost every second man seems to be buried with weapons,” notes John Ljungkvist, an archaeologist at Uppsala University. As this weaponized society was gradually taking shape, a new technology began revolutionizing Scandinavian seafaring in the seventh century—the sail. Skilled carpenters began constructing sleek, wind-powered vessels capable of carrying bands of armed fighters farther and faster than ever before. Aboard these ships, northern lords and their restless followers could voyage across the Baltic and North Seas, exploring new lands, sacking towns and villages, and enslaving inhabitants. And men with few marriage prospects at home could take female captives as wives by persuasion or force.

All of this centuries of kingly ambition, a seeming abundance of wifeless young warriors, and a new type of ship created a perfect storm. The stage was set for the Vikings to pour out of the north, setting much of Europe on fire with their brand of violence. The fleets that carried death and destruction to western Europe also transported slaves and commodities to markets scattered from Turkey to western Russia, and possibly Iran. Medieval Arab and Byzantine officials described convoys of armed Viking slavers and merchants known as the Rus who regularly voyaged along river routes to the Black and Caspian Seas. “I have never seen more perfect physiques than theirs,” observed Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, a 10th-century Arab soldier and diplomat from Baghdad. “Every one of them carries an ax, a sword, and a dagger.”

Many popular myths created through misperceptions, have been shown to be wrong such as the fact that Vikings wore horned helmetst;  they traditionally went bareheaded or wore simple leather and metal-frame helmets with the occasional face guard. Or they were filthy and unkempt; archaeologists find evidence on a regular basis of combs, spoons and other grooming utensils that indicate the Viking people were very keen on maintaining personal hygiene. Or that they spent all their time raiding and warring; while raiding proved an excellent source of income, many of the Vikings held farms back in their homeland that their wives maintained during Viking season. When the men returned home from a raid, they resumed their normal routine of farming. Or maybe that they were a unified army; due to the difficult geographic location, the Scandinavian people were very spread out to conserve limited farmland. In addition, the penetration of Christianity caused many great divisions among the people still worshipping the traditional Nordic pantheon, further emphasizing the divided nature of the people. Or most of all that they were large and heavily muscled;


But the legend of the Vikings, the romance of these intrepid northerners who built great ships and sailed ice-choked seas to a new world and winding rivers to the bazaars of the East, never grows old, never grows tired. It lives on here and across their northern realm, a message from a long-dead world, an enduring spirit of an age.

People of the book – part 18 ( St Pius X society 1)

Marcel Lefebvre (29 November 1905 – 25 March 1991) was a French Roman Catholic archbishop. Ordained a diocesan priest in 1929, he joined the Holy Ghost Fathers for missionary work, first as a professor at a seminary in Gabon, then as the Archbishop of Dakar, Lefebvre spent most of the period from the 1930s to the early 1960s in colonial west Africa. Even at a distance from Europe, he enthusiastically endorsed Marshall Pétain’s Vichy regime for what he termed its “Catholic order”. Indeed, until his death, Lefebvre offered his support to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front Nationale, and voiced approval of the repressive military dictatorship of General Franco in Spain, António Salazar in Portugal, Jorge Videla in Argentina and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. In 1970, in reaction against Pope John XXIII’s Vatican II reforms, Lefebvre established the SSPX order and its seminary in Ecône, Switzerland. He was especially angered by the Pope’s conciliatory gestures towards Judaism, which he saw as a violation of Catholicism’s unique relationship with God.

In 1975, after a flare of tensions with the Holy See, Lefebvre was ordered to disband the society, but ignored the decision. In 1988, against the expressed prohibition of Pope John Paul II, he consecrated four bishops to continue his work with the SSPX. The Holy See immediately declared that he and the other bishops who had participated in the ceremony had incurred automatic excommunication under Catholic canon law, a status Lefebvre refused to acknowledge to his death three years later.

The Society is known for rejecting many of the ecclesiastical reforms both influenced or institutionalized by the Second Vatican Council, and maintaining the Tridentine Mass among its followers.

What about …. #21

We all fall sick once in a while, we have to take what is necessary to get on our feet again, and for that we’ve got two types of medicine, the Chemical and the Herbal. Once someone told me that “every Chemical medicine is natural, because what we call Chemical, comes from nature itself”.

Actually I think that’s true, let’s say for instance that you have a headache, you might take an aspirin (or a paracetamol / ibruprofene, they’re all non inflammatory drugs, in which the major ingredient is the Salicylate found in the brark of the willow tree) which consist of about 90% acetylsalicylic acid, along with a minor amount of inert fillers and binders, or you might drink a decoction of a willow tree’s bark. Both will give you the same result, in approximately the same amount of time. But we must chose between the passion of herbalism and its preparation or the practicity of the drug already in a tablet. Herbal medicine vs Chemical medicine is what we’re going to focus today.

Let’s start with a bit of History: Since the beginning of times people cured themselves with plants; wounds, colds, pains, etc…were taken care of quite easily, obviously not every disease had its cure but most of them had. Greeks and Egyptians were the most renowned for their healing theories. Lots of stories are known from the middle age, the preparations were made by a herbalist which were mostly men at the time. Women who possessed the knowledge were treated as witches in most places till the 19th century when women began to stand up for themselves. Very few women were renowned for their knowledge in the 12th century; there was Dorotea Bucca head of the university of Bologna in Italy and Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen in  Germany.

Still, women couldn’t practice herbalism without apprehension, “The superior learning of witches was recognised in the widely extended belief of their ability to work miracles. The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages… As knowledge has ever been power, the church feared its use in women’s hands, and levelled its deadliest blows at her”. Matilda Joslyn Gage, 1893,

During the 16th and 17th century, all across Europe, in every town and village, women were killed, en masse, as witches. The killings went on for two centuries and touched everyone’s lives. They spread fear, destroyed networks and resistance and did not stop until the population was sufficiently subordinated and the emerging state, capitalist social relations and church had got its claws into the lives and psyches of the people. The beginning of the western medicine started in Iran. The best university of medicine was in Isfahan, at the time of Avicenna in the 11th century. Muslims and Jews students learned together, they spread their knowledge wherever they went. Medieval European medicine became more developed during the Renaissance of the 12th century, when many medical texts both on Ancient Greek medicine and on Islamic medicine were translated from Arabic during the 13th century. The most influential among these texts was Avicenna’s The Canon of Medicine, a medical encyclopedia written in circa 1030 which summarized the medicine of Greek, Indian and Muslim physicians until that time.

Herbalism is a way of curing diseases in a natural way, as all the plants are not harmless, a herbalist is necessary to find the right plants and to prepare them in the right way. The plants are gathered, dried for a few days and then, either they are stored as they are or they are used to prepare the medicine and then stored for further necessities because sometimes it takes up to a month depending on the medicine and taken many times a day. Knowledge, patience and passion are required for the job. But as I said, all plants are not harmless such as these Marijuana, Cannabis and Hashish.

I would say that the chemical medicine (also called drugs) started with Pasteur in the 19th century, this kind of medicine is obtained through extraction from medicinal plants, but more recently also by organic synthesis. Much more diseases are cured, and in a easier way to take. Lots of expenses are needed and it takes years of learning and research to find a cure.

For instance, Sometimes a part of the body can’t make enough of a certain substance, and this can make a person sick. When someone has type 1 diabetes the pancreas can’t make enough of an important chemical called insulin, which the body needs to stay healthy. If the body makes too much of a certain chemical, that can make us sick, too. Luckily, medicines can replace what’s missing (like insulin) or they can block production of a chemical when the body is making too much of it. Many people also take chemical medicines to control illnesses that don’t completely go away, such as diabetes, asthma, or high blood pressure. With help from these medicines, people can enjoy life and avoid some of the worst symptoms associated with their illnesses which can’t be found in the Herbal medicine. Finally, there are important medicines called immunizations, and they are usually given as a shot. They prevent people from catching serious illnesses.

So the pros and cons of these two kinds of medicine are:
I think that for the love of Nature and what has been given to us through those little harmless leaves and roots, it’s better to use Herbal medicine as long as the disease isn’t life threatening, but for much more serious diseases, the chemical medicine is mandatory.  Now the choice is  yours, do you prefer to heal Naturally or Chemically?





In the Middle Ages the town had one of the major mediaeval bridges across the river Tarn. It had 17 spans, but after one poorly maintained span fell in the 18th century, the bridge was mostly demolished. Just one span remains, with a mill that is now an art gallery, as testament to this significant trading route from north to south across pre-Renaissance France.
The Millau Viaduct was completed in 2004, eliminating traffic jams in the town centre. The town is now a tourist centre with one of the largest touring campsites in central France, benefiting from the attraction of the landscapes all around, and the architecturally acclaimed Millau viaduct. It is also a major centre for outdoor sporting activity.

It was designed by the English architect Lord Norman Foster and French structural engineer Michel Virlogeux. As of November 2018, it is the tallest bridge in the world, having a structural height of 343 metres (1,125 ft).

The Millau Viaduct is part of the highway from Paris to Béziers and Montpellier. It was built over three years. The bridge has been consistently ranked as one of the great engineering achievements of all time, and received the 2006 Outstanding Structure Award from the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering.

The highest pylons in the world: 244.96 metres (803 ft 8 in) and 221.05 metres (725 ft 3 in) in height, broke the world record previously held by the Kochertal Viaduct (Germany), which is 181 metres (594 ft) at its highest

Since opening in 2004, the deck height of Millau has been surpassed by several suspension bridges in China, including Sidu River Bridge, Baling River Bridge, and two spans (Beipan River Guanxing Highway Bridge and Beipan River Hukun Expressway Bridge) over the Beipan River.

What about… #20

Is cruelty part of the human nature?

I’ve finished reading the last book of Robin Hobb called Assassin’s Fate, which is the third book of the Fitz and the Fool triology about two weeks ago. And personally I hated a character named Dwalia for her cruelty upon a 10 year old girl (among other victims) and her hartless nature . This Dwalia made me think of all those human beings who suffered and still do by the hands of other beings. 

We all know the story of Cain and Abel, mentioned in the Holy Scripures. The Bible “Genesis”  4.2-16 tells us:


And in the Quran in the chapter “TheTable” 5: 27-32

27. And relate to them the true story of Adam’s two sons: when they offered an offering, and it was accepted from one of them, but it was not accepted from the other. He Said, “I will kill you.” He Said, “God accepts only from the righteous.”

28. “If you extend your hand to kill me, I will not extend my hand to kill you; for I fear God, Lord of the Worlds.”

29. “I would rather you bear my sin and your sin, and you become among the inmates of the Fire. Such is the reward for the evildoers.”

30. Then His soul prompted him to kill his brother, so he killed him, and became one of the losers.

31. Then God sent a raven digging the ground, to show him how to cover his brother’s corpse. He said, “Woe to me! I was unable to be like this raven, and bury my brother’s corpse.” So he became full of regrets.

32. Because of that We ordained for the Children of Israel: that whoever kills a person—unless it is for murder or corruption on earth—it is as if he killed the whole of mankind; and whoever saves it, it is as if he saved the whole of mankind. Our messengers came to them with clarifications, but even after that, many of them continue to commit excesses in the land.

We know the torture that was inflicted on thousands of people in the middle age, i.e burned, chopped, hanged, drowned… it’s almost the same today, but in hidden places where no one witness their atrocities (prisons, rituals, laws)

Some people enjoy seeing a person in pain, but why?  Is it a psychological disorder? Or do they feel more powerful? Here is what I’ve found on Wikipedia: Torture has been carried out or sanctioned by individuals, groups, and states throughout history from ancient times to modern day, and forms of torture can vary greatly in duration from only a few minutes to several days or longer. Reasons for torture can include punishment, revenge, political re-education, deterrence, coercion of the victim or a third party, interrogation to extract information or a confession irrespective of whether it is false, or simply the sadistic gratification of those carrying out or observing the torture. In other cases, the torturer may be indifferent to the condition of the victim. Alternatively, some forms of torture are designed to inflict psychological pain or leave as little physical injury or evidence as possible while achieving the same psychological devastation. The torturer may or may not kill or injure the victim, but sometimes torture results in a deliberate death and serves as a form of capital punishment. Depending on the aim, even a form of torture that is intentionally fatal may be prolonged to allow the victim to suffer as long as possible (such as half-hanging).

Research during the past 60 years, starting with the Milgram experiment, suggests that under the right circumstances, and with the appropriate encouragement and setting, most people can be encouraged to actively torture others.

John Conroy:

“When torture takes place, people believe they are on the high moral ground, that the nation is under threat and they are the front line protecting the nation, and people will be grateful for what they are doing.”

Unfortunately the human being is really complex, we can find the most kind and the most evil in the same city. And the worst of all is that, the first impression someone takes isn’t always what it is. We can’t judge a person by its garments. There is so much evil in this world that I personally don’t trust easily the people I meet. Probably most of us are good, but in this planet where the big fish eats the small one, it’s best to stay focused, so that we don’t get eaten easily. Probably it’s mean of me to think that way,  but it is the way I see the world. I believe that we all lack of Innocence, since our first father and mother, but the difference between us is who strives for the greater good and who doesn’t.

People of the Book – part 3

History of the Bible

Now concerning the authorized version which is the Vaticanus codex, each language has its own translation obviously, and their own versions. In English, the King James’ has been chosen as the good one.
John Wycliffe undertook the project to complete the first English translation of the Scripture in the 14th century. The Wycliffe Bible pre-dated the printing press was circulated very widely in manuscript form.
In 1525, William Tyndale, undertook a translation of the New Testament. Which was the first printed Bible in English. Over the next ten years, Tyndale revised his New Testament in the light of rapidly advancing biblical scholarship, and started translating the Old Testament. With these translations lightly edited and adapted by Myles Coverdale, in 1539, Tyndale’s work became the first “authorized version” issued by the Church of England during the reign of King Henry VIII.
In May 1601, King James VI of Scotland attended the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Burntisland at which proposals were put forward for a new translation of the Bible into English. Two years later, he ascended to the throne of England as King James I.
The newly crowned King James convened the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. That gathering proposed a new English version in response to the perceived issues of earlier translations.
Instructions were given to the translators that were intended to limit the Puritan influence and designed to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of the Church of England. Certain Greek and Hebrew words were to be translated in a manner that reflected the traditional usage of the church. Such as the word “church” were to be retained and not to be translated as “congregation”. The new translation would reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England.
James’ instructions included several requirements that kept the new translation familiar to its listeners and readers.

People of the book – part 2

History of the Bible

Old Testament

The biblical scholars believe that the Torah was given its present after the Exode.

The Genesis is cut into two major elements, the priestly and the non priestly material. The only thing agreed is that the Priestly source is post exilic

It is collected from all periods of Israel’s history. It is entirely from Priestly material that dates from the exilic/post exilic period.

It is from an early Persian period (5th century BC)

Its date has been extended to the early part of the 6th century

New Testament

Gospel of Mathew
There are three strands of evidence that shows that it is from around 80-90 CE:
1/ The setting of Mathew reflects the separation of the Church and Synagogue about 85 CE
2/ It reflects the capture of Rome and destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 CE
3/ It referred to Mark, usually dated around 70 CE, as a source

Gospel of Mark

As there is reference to persecution and to war in Judea, suggesting that it referred either to
Nero’s persecution of the Christians in Rome or the Jewish revolt it is estimated to be circa
60-70 CE

Gospel of Luke
There is evidence that it was still being substantially revised near the end of the 2nd century.

Gospel of John
The evidences show that the upper and lower part of the Gospel was known in the early 2nd
century on an internal reference to the expulsion of Christians from the synagogues. The overall
is circa 90-100 CE

The Aleppo Codex (c. 920 CE) and Leningrad Codex (c. 1008 CE) were the oldest Hebrew language manuscripts of the Tanakh before the discovery, in 1947 of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran. The earliest manuscripts of the Old Testament were in Greek such as Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.
There are over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin and 9,300 in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. Parts of the New Testament manuscripts range from c. 125 the 15th century. The vast majority of these manuscripts date after the 10th century.

The task of copying manuscripts was generally done by scribes. In the 6th century, a special room devoted to the practice of manuscript writing and illumination came into use, typically inside medieval European monasteries. Sometimes a group of scribes would make copies at the same time from the text..

The New Testament books seems to have been completed in the 1st century. The original manuscripts of the books have not survived, they were lost or destroyed a long before. These copies were made centuries after from other copies rather than from the originals.

The earliest manuscript has the size of a business card from the Gospel of John which dates to the first half of the 2nd century. The earliest complete copy of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus dates to the 4th century.

There are a few differences between the manuscripts of the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus:

It is not mentioned the story of the stoning of the adulterous woman “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”.
Nor the words of Christ about his executioners from the cross: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”.

And its Gospel of Mark ends abruptly omitting the 12 final verses.
Gospel of Matthew 12:47, 16:2b-3, 17:21, 18:11, 23:14, 24:35
Gospel of Mark 7:16, 9:44, 9:46, 11:26, 15:28, 16:9–20
Gospel of Luke 17:36
Gospel of John 5:4, (7:53–8:11), 16:15, 20:5b-6, 21:25
Acts of the Apostles 8:37; 15:34; 24:7; 28:29;
Epistle to the Romans 16:24
Some omitted phrases
Matthew 5:44 bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you
Matthew 6:13 For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
Matthew 10:39a Ηe who finds his life will lose it,
Matthew 15:6 or (his) mother
Matthew 20:23 and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with
Mark 1:1 “the Son of God” omitted.

A large number of these differences are due to different variants in transcribing Hebrew names. These two manuscripts were not written in the same century.
So what if important verses concerning the end of times have been omitted?