Codex Sinaiticus

There was an article in Tuesday's (07 Jul 2009) Straits Times about the official launch of a web site featuring the world's oldest copy of the Christian Bible:

http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Tech%2Band%2BScience/Story/STIStory_400035.html

The web site itself is at:

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/

The web site allows users to browse through digitised images of every page of this bible, which is completely handwritten in Greek, as well as displaying its English translation simultaneously. The was very interesting for me because of something I learnt while reading about the history of the bible, which I could now view with my own eyes.

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Although I am not a Christian, I read many of the bible's stories when I was young, and one of the most memorable stories about Jesus is the tale about how the Pharisees, the sworn enemies of Jesus, brought a woman "caught in the very act of adultery" before Jesus. The Pharisees told Jesus that according to the Law of Moses, an adulterer should be stoned to death, but they want to know what Jesus had to say about the matter. Should they stone her or show her mercy? Of course, the Pharisees were laying a trap for Jesus. If Jesus says to let the woman go, he will be accused of violating God's Law. But if he tells them to stone her, he will be accused of dismissing his own teachings of love, mercy, and forgiveness.

Jesus reply was: "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone."

Of course, none of the Pharisees were free of sin. So one by one, they left, finally leaving just Jesus and the woman. Jesus, looking up and noticing that all the men were gone, asked the woman: "Woman, where are your accusers? Is there no one who condemns you?" The woman replied, "No one, my Lord." To which Jesus responds, "And neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more."

(New Testament: The Gospel According to John - Chapter 8 - Verse 1 to 11)

This was a captivating story, which cleverly illustrates the compassion and the brilliance of Jesus. I loved this story when I first read it as a child, as it appealed to me in how Jesus ingeniously outsmarted his enemies.

But a few years ago, I learnt that this beautiful story was actually a forgery.

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Before the printing press was invented by Gutenberg in the 15th century, any book that you want to make a copy of has to be copied "by hand". Thus, when someone wants to make a copy of the bible, he can only do so by copying it manually. In fact, all copies of the bibles produced before the 15th century were handwritten ones painstakingly written out in longhand by scribes.

And interestingly, among all the earliest copies of the Gospel of John, there is not a single mention about the story of Jesus and the adulteress. In fact, this endearing story of Jesus and the adulteress is not mentioned at all in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, either. Indeed, the story does not appear in any other place in the New Testament at all.

According to historians, the story of Jesus and the adulteress did not even appear in any manuscript of John before the 9th century. And then suddenly, from the 9th century onwards, copies of the bible started to appear with this story INSERTED into chapter 8 of the Gospel of John. And it was one of this "tainted" bibles that was translated into English in the 16th century as the "King James Version". And the fabricated story has been carried forward into all subsequent editions of the bible from then onwards.

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Now that the Codex Sinaiticus is available online, I immediately went to the site to look at the section bearing John 7:53 to 8:11. And indeed, as has been described by historians, the entire passage does not appear in the Codex Sinaiticus.

Of course, the Jesus and the adulteress story is not the only fabrication that has been inserted by forgers into the New Testament. In the earliest copies of the Gospel According to Mark, the book ends very abruptly in chapter 16 verse 8. The Mark gospel actually ends when the 3 women (Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, and Salome *) are told to inform the disciples that Jesus will be meeting the disciples in Galilee. However, the women flee the tomb and said nothing to anyone, "for they were afraid."

And as with the story of Jesus and the adulteress, scribes copying the Mark gospel felt that this ending was too abrupt for a gospel. So, somewhere down the line, one scribe decided to add 12 verses to chapter 16 (verse 9 to verse 20) so that the gospel concludes with a "happy ending". And the "happy ending" Mark gospel is the one that got translated into English in the "King James Version", and which is propagated to all subsequent editions.

As before, the true ending of Mark (Mark 16:8) can now be seen from the Codex Sinaiticus web site.

* Note: The 3 women in the Mark Gospel directly contradicts the Matthew Gospel, which states that only 2 women, Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary", went to Jesus' tomb (Matthew 28:1).

"How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer

The most interesting idea that I took away from the book "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer is that when patients suffered head injuries that affected their brains, causing them to lose their emotional faculties but retaining their reasoning ones, these patients end up being unable to make any decision, no matter how trivial the subject.

Without emotional faculties, the patients ended up rationalising everything they are doing. They could not make up their minds on what clothes to wear, what food to buy etc, as their brains constantly seek to evaluate all conceivable choices that could be made, no matter how irrelevant many of the choices would have been. Apparently, humans use their emotional faculties to discard choices. After we have discarded all other alternatives leaving our sole choice, our brains will then use these same emotional faculties to "rationalise" the choice we kept, regardless of how good or bad the choice actually was. Without emotions, the human brain cannot discard even the most remotest of choices, so the person becomes embroiled in a state of "analysis-paralysis".

This was very fascinating because I was not aware of the great impact our emotions had on our rationality. Most of us probably think that the less emotional person will make the more rational decision. Apparently, this is not really the case. In fact, people with strong emotions tend to be more rational in their decision making. It is just that these more rational people tend to also have better control of their emotions. When faced with a crisis, they can usually see both sides of a subjective situation, and maintain great discipline to not yield to the first instinctive emotional response.

Sam Harris - Reconciling science and Christianity

In an exchange between Sam Harris and Philip Ball (both are atheists by the way) about whether scientists should patronise religionists, and acknowledge religion as a worldview that is as robustly supported as that of the scientific one, Harris made a very humorous description of Christianity that I just have to repeat here:

For instance, a reconciliation between science and Christianity (the explicit goal of The BioLogos Foundation) would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions.

In its most generic and well-subscribed form, Christianity amounts to the following claims:

Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven”—where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and sceptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on Mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will (probably) be consigned to a fiery hell for all eternity.

http://www.reasonproject.org/archive/item/what_should_science_dosam_harris_v_philip_ball/

Great quote, Sam!

Introduction to Christianity

A very funny Dave Allen sketch about his introduction to the church:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpVjBBDMOoA

It is absurd that Christians always proclaim themselves to be morally superior to atheists just because atheists do not subscribe to the superstitious beliefs of Christianity. Christians go around proselytising to all and sundry, claiming that the godless and the non-Christians among us need help to be saved from eternal damnation. To respond to these Christian soldiers, nothing beats this quip from Dan Barker, an evangelical preacher who ultimately became an atheist:

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

- Dan Barker (from Losing Faith in Faith)

Blogging The Bible

It took me several days to finish David Plotz's very funny blog, "The Complete Blogging The Bible":

http://www.slate.com/id/2150150

Plotz's posts summarises the stories from the Jewish Bible (i.e. the Old Testament of the Christian Bible) for modern readers. By reading his posts, you get a pretty good précis of many of the bible's stories without having to trudge through them yourselves. The bible stories are written in an archaic and tedious style that most modern readers do not have the patience with. That is the reason why many so-called Christians do not actually read the bible themselves, but are contend with what their preachers tell them every Sunday during church service - if they attend church service. But this is a problem. The preachers only tell the "good" parts of the bible to their congregation, and never the "bad' parts. It is when people start reading the bible stories for themselves that they realised that they've been hoodwinked. The merciful and benevolent god that answers all their prayers is actually nowhere to be found in many parts of the bible. Instead, one often finds an angry, jealous, vindictive god that is so cruel that you might as well believe and pray to satan, if they both exist.

I was previously uninterested in the goings-on of the religious. My philosophy of life is that if you want to believe and pray to your god, it is fine with me as long as you don't force me to believe and pray to your god too. However, 9/11 change all that. Suddenly, I saw that religion KILLS. And it is not with Islam. A more serious reading of history, such as the Christian Crusades, the Burning of Witches, the persecution of Galileo shows that Christianity was just as bad as Islam, except that the barbarism of Christianity has been tempered with the benevolence of the Enlightenment. It takes knowledge and reason in science to clear the superstition and ignorance of religion.

But the bible is a very interesting book of history and literature. It is important for both religious and non-religious folks to read it, especially in light of modern day fundamentalist Christians who seek to overturn the fruits that the Enlightenment has brought to society, and who want to bring society back to a barbaric world where rules of morality are determined in books written by misogynistic and ignorant shepherd folks from 2500 years ago. It is important that Christians read the bible in its entirety, so that they know exactly why non-Christians do not like the morals written in that holy book. It is important that non-Christians read the bible, so that they will know why it is so important that we cannot allow our society to be ruled by religious fanatics who seem to believe in fairy tales like talking snakes and virgin births.

David Plotz's series reminded me of Isaac Asimov's "Guide to the Bible" which I have also read recently. However, Asimov's tome covered both the Old and New Testaments, whereas Plotz's blog posts only covers the Old Testament (the Jewish bible). Also, Asimov covers the bible from a historical context, whereas Plotz's posts are like Cliff Notes summaries. Most people would prefer Plotz's treatment, and to his new book, the "Good Book", which is a fun and light treatment on the same subject which he compiled from the material he garnered while doing "The Complete Blogging The Bible" posts.

In the promotion of his new book, Plotz made the following blog entry, "What I learned from reading the entire bible", which is also an interesting read:

http://www.slate.com/id/2212616/pagenum/all

If you find this post interesting, you should at least glance through "The Complete Blogging The Bible". Many of the entries are informative, and very very funny.