Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (118 page)

Pope Paul VI of 30th June, 1968, it was once more expressly laid down: that the Catholic Church alone proclaims the infallible truth, that the Catholic Church is necessary for salvation, that the Catholic Church alone is the true heir of the divine promise, that the Catholic Church alone is in possession of the spirit of Christ, that the Catholic Church alone is entrusted with the infallible teaching office, that the Catholic Church alone is in possession of the absolute truth.

On 18th November, 1965 the Catholic Church proclaimed solemnly and most officially in the dogmatic constitution:

that God was the originator of the Bible,

that all parts of the Bible are sacred

that all parts of the Bible were composed under the influence of the Holy Ghost, that everything that the inspired composers of the Bible say must be considered to be written by the Holy Ghost and that what is taught in the Bible is accurate, true and without error.

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,