The originals are gone, darling.

Pretty hard to believe all of the time that has passed since I last blogged. So many things has happened in my life I hardly know where to begin to catch up. I'd like to catch it up, for my own clarity and not so much for anyone else's. I see the last time I blogged was in August of last year. It was also interesting to me that I mentioned nothing of my cancer. Probably because it was at least secondary in my priorities then. My emergent priority in my life has become very clearly the acquisition and understanding, as well as can be ascertained at this point, what are the original scriptures and how do they impact us in the present. In the midst of all this research into what scripture scholars have written about the ancient manuscripts I have had to maintain my own faith and grasp of what God and salvation means to me personally.

While I want to know the deeper sola scriptura as scholars call it, I am convinced it is not necessary for salvation because God in his omnipotent wisdom has managed the thousands of changes and errors to not impede or invalidate the message that has come down to us today. Even though it is very obvious to those who are willing to examine the manuscripts through the ages that the scriptures we have in hand today are quite different than the scriptures mankind began with. But the more important issue is that most Christians do not have the inclination to dig very deep into the scriptures. Today's Christians are much more inclined to be of an instant gratification mindset which is a product of the fast pace lifestyle we lead. We want things now, and we want it with minimum effort and input of our own resources. We are so used to fast results in every part of our lives, having to spend considerable time in reaching goals is something akin to alien to us.

But the greatest lesson I have learned in my 35 or 40 year journey down this path is that nothing I learn is handed to me. It takes digging, considering, cross checking, verifying, proving and careful understanding of words, terms and concepts I have not known before. I do all of my research with several resources at hand to help me grasp what I am reading. I have even had to abandon books and articles until was able to shore up my foundation in that particular venue or vernacular. I sometimes find myself ordering books or finding articles that bring my understanding up to a level that permits my understanding of the topic I had begun.

It has been a arduous journey thus far, and I find now I have only begun to scratch the surface of the knowledge base that is in print already. I am hopelessly behind and can never live long enough to catch up. But I am pleased to find I am absorbing enough to be able to move within topics that a few years ago I would have been dumbfounded with.

Romans 11:33 NLT reads “Oh, how great are God's riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways!”

So for all that I learn, I also am aware that it is an impossible task to mine the depths of the scriptures. One of the interesting things about scripture that stays in my mind as I search is the fact that all of the ancient manuscripts have been massaged and interpreted by the thousands of scribes and scholars who's task it was to copy the manuscripts. Some of them did great good in combining, realigning and merging the fragmented and often misaligned documents into more understandable, reliable and meaningful text, but others, consciously and often unconsciously, rendered documents invalid and thus ineffective by misinterpreting earlier words and phrases.

But through all of the changes, good and bad, the essential message of the scriptures have remained the same. When examining the scriptures in today's world, we have to separate what are essential to salvation and what isn't. Way too many groups are putting far to much emphasis on scriptures that are so dissimilar from the original manuscripts they are no longer meaningful.

I have been carefully reading a book by religious scholar Bart Ehrman titled “Misquoting Jesus.” The subtitle is “The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.” If you are one of the multitudes who ascribe to modern day translations as being correct to the originals I would invite you read this book carefully. How anyone can claim in this enlighten time that we might have printed material that is faithful to the denotation of the original writings of the Bible escapes me. I would love for you to tell me that with a straight face. If you can, you are miserably mistaken.

There is no possible way any of the original texts from the Bible authors are still in existence. And even what we have shows problems within itself. I would direct your attention to the two completely different stories of creation we have in nearly every modern translation, including ALL forms of the King James Version. Look at the first two chapters of Genesis if you doubt it. Chapter 1 has the full creation story laid out in day by day sequence. Chapter two repeats the creation story but claims different events on different days. So which one is correct? I am confident to say neither is completely correct. Both narratives leave out an incalculable amount of creative events, transitions, and sequences because the writers had no grasp or understanding of them. They could not speak to things they knew not of. And this is only one of thousands of examples.

Let me illustrate one concept that Christians want to sidestep in order to make the Biblical creation story fit their own ideas. Suppose I describe to you something very old in it's lifespan, something like, say a car. The Hudson Motor Car Company produced automobiles from 1909 through 1957 in Detroit, Michigan. In 1954 the Hudson Motor Car Company merged with the Nash-Kelivnator Corporation to form American Motors, but the Hudson name was carried through the 1957 model year then dropped.

If I was to produce a paper describing the 1917 Hudson Phaeton in great detail, you still would be hard pressed to see it in your mind's eye without any pictures or drawings. But if I found a 1917 Hudson Phaeton buried somewhere in a field, pretty corroded and rotted away, I could recover it and you would then have a much better idea about what the automobile looked like in 1917. Sure, it would not be in great shape, and parts may be entirely gone due to rot and corrosion, but you would have much better understanding of how beautiful and magnificent the 1917 Hudson Phaeton was.

But Christians want to reject all of the remains of ancient animals, humans and plant life and pretend they are not real or representative of real living creatures and creations. I am saddened when Christians reject fossils and remains discovered in the earth and call them all kinds of things other than what they are. They are the remains of real, living creatures who actually occupied our earth thousands and yes millions of years ago.

But instead of believing in real remains and impressions of remains Christians want to reject them and hold to an extremely incomplete story of a 144 hour process because they have the idea that by laying aside an elementary story of creation they will somehow invalidate the creator and the rest of the Bible.

To quote the last words of an old altar call song we sang ½ billion times, “Oh how sad.”

I wish I could find then afford a restored 1949 Hudson sedan. In Burgundy, yes, a 1949 factory color.