Cheryl Schatz

I am going to be bad and respond to Mark’s last comment here.

Yes, I too wish I had a wiggly-waggily dog. My one and only dog had to be put down before we moved and I miss him a lot. He had unconditional love for me and I really liked that.

those who retold the stories

So anonymous people retold the stories by rewriting them and changing them?

While not departing from the essential historical details, the narrator might, nonetheless, choose not to report the ipsissima verba of characters in the narrative because he wants to make a particular point…

So the rewriters were now called “narrators”? These narrators have a “point” that they want to make and they feel free to change the text of God’s word to do that? How did the Jewish people react to an addition to God’s word?

And how did they manage to change all of the copies of God’s word. Did they go and take every single copy and make their changes? How is it that God was not able to preserve any of the original and only the changed copies were preserved? Or are there any of the originals out there that weren’t changed that we can compare these changed copies to so that we can know that this is what was done? Where in history is this recorded? Would it not be a big deal for “narrators” to make additions to the text and there not be a record of such an act?

This is what the Mormons tell me. They say that there was a group of men who decided to change the Bible. They apparently went around and were able to hand change every one of the copies of the Bible. They removed “precious truths” from the copies because they didn’t like these “truths”. They say that the removal of these “truths” has tainted the Word of God.

So you have accepted a view that the first writing of the Bible wasn’t good enough and some narrators had the power to take the protected copies of all of the Scriptures from each book (remember it was not one “Bible” but many books) and without anyone knowing what they have done and without a historical record of their additions, they changed all the words of “God” in all of the books before Abraham and replaced it with YHWH? Really? But of course they made some huge errors in forgetting to change some of the “God” references and they surprisingly left them this way on every copy. They must have had a special memory to know which ones they changed to YHWH and which ones they left as “God”. And they were able to make this switch on every single book and every single copy without getting caught? And these “narrators” must have had a lot of secret help because the books of the Bible spanned many generations so there were secret “narrators” having to collect every copy from every new book to change it so that no one would know what the original said because they apparently feared that God might be proven as a liar and they didn’t want that for Him.

I didn’t believe the Mormon tale of a secret change to the Bible and I don’t believe the fairy tale of secret “narrators” who changed the text of the Scriptures either. What really makes me wonder is why would you believe such a thing? What about this view of changes to all the copies of the original seems appealing to you? This story borders on the incredulous. Why have faith in a secret society of correctors of God’s word when the alternate view that uses a proper grammatical solution to the apparent “contradiction” wasn’t hard for me to find? How did you discard that reasonable solution in order to have faith in the secretive “narrators” who must have felt godlike enough to change the Scriptures? I just don’t get it.

And yes, I believe that it is a pathway to liberalism. For if you can believe that story, then who else tampered with the Scriptures? What else was added and what was taken out? If I believed this, I would believe that God had no Sovereignty at all to get it right in the first place. How should I trust a God that needs editors to correct the mistakes? Or a God who isn’t able to stop people from editing every single document so that none of the original remains. That is way beyond my ability to believe.