The First Verse of the Bible
B UT let us read the first verse of the first chapter:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Indeed! The text could not be more childish if it read: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the moon." Is not the moon, or the earth, a very small part of "the heaven" and included therein? Why separate the earth, or the moon, from the rest of the universe? How would it sound to say: "In the beginning God created the earth and the Sandwich Islands?" or "the earth and a grain of sand"? But our next comment will show that if the writer of this first verse of the first chapter of the bible was pitiably ignorant of his subject, the translator of it was even worse than ignorant—he was, I am sorry to say, also a falsifier.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
I hold my breath! The very first verse shows deliberate manipulation and tampering with the text. The Hebrew word which has been rendered into English as "God," is "Elohim," which means gods, not God. The singular of Elohim is Eloah—the dreaded one. But the Hebrew text reads Elohim, not Eloah, that is to say, the plural and not the singular form is used. Had the translators of the bible been free from sectarian prejudices, the first verse in the bible would have read: "In beginning (not in the beginning) the gods created the heaven and the earth." But the priesthood, which had the bible in its custody, desired to prove by it the dogma of monotheism. Yet, the first verse of the first chapter of the bible proved polytheism—more than one god. Whereupon, the translators quietly dropped the letter "s" from the word gods, and made it to read God, thereby suppressing the fact that the supposed inspired writer of the opening chapter of the book was a Pagan, with more gods than the translators themselves believed in. It does not require much effort to see what the consequences would have been had the first verse of the bible been truthfully rendered into the modern tongues. "In beginning the gods created the heaven and the earth" might have relegated the bible to the limbo of other mythological compositions. "The gods" would have made the exclusiveness of Christianity or Judaism impossible. The history of European religions would have been different had not that one letter "s" in the first verse of the first chapter of the bible, and the very first time the deity is mentioned, been killed by the translators. Of course, finding manipulation in the very first verse, we will begin to suspect that other texts, too, have been "doctored."
The very name of the book—Holy Bible—shows manipulation. By what, or by whose authority is the book called "holy"? It is nowhere stated in any of the manuscripts translated that the writings are "holy." The words Holy Bible, then, represent nothing more than the opinion or guess, or, at best, the judgment, of the English translators of the book.
But there is a more serious example of manipulation on the title-page of the Bible. Instead of admitting that the translation has been made from Hebrew and Greek copies, not originals, for there are no originals (and, therefore, there is no way of telling how true the copies are, since they can not be compared with the originals), the words Translated out of the original Greek is inserted on the title-page of the New Testament. This, I am compelled to say, is an indefensible misstatement. The truth is that the originals, if they ever existed, are lost. The bible as we have it is not quite two hundred and fifty years old, and the most ancient manuscript in existence of the Old Testament is not a thousand years old. This is the Codex Petropolitanus, which is in the library of St. Petersburg. But where are the originals? Why were they lost? Why were they "inspired" if they were not to be preserved? But how can men who do not hesitate to state in print that they possess the "original Greek" of the New Testament when they do not and never have possessed it, pose as the moral teachers of the world? If the translators of the bible wished to confine themselves to the truth, instead of saying "Translated out of the original Greek, which is not so, they would have said this on the title-page of their work:
A Collection of Writings