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Bart Ehrman wrote in his book, , Misquoting Jesus, “Texts are interpreted (as they are written) by living, breathing human beings,who can make sense of the texts only by explaining them in light of their other knowledge, explicating their meaning, putting the words of the texts “in other words”. Say what?

Simply reading a text involves interpreting a text!

For way too long in life I bought into the “every single word in the Bible is true” paradigm. How silly. Since we have no original autogragh, and since the oldest manuscripts that we have are multiple copies of copies, Bart Ehrman’s quote above is critical. In other words, the Bible that you hold in your hand is someone’s interpretation of what it was that they read, which was what someone else thought of what they read, ad infinitum.

And to think how much time I spent not just exegeting a word (that might not even be a word- that Jesus spoke), but I spent hours upon hours in the back of my KJV looking at what Spiros Zodhiates had to say about the tense, syntax, and grammatical construction of a sentence, which I find out later might not even exist, or was put there in error. Ahh, but God uses everything, everyone, doesn’t He!

And there it is! Which translation is God’s inerrant, infallible word? Do you know?

There are LITERALLY (tongue in cheek) hundreds of translations of the Bible. So, is it the archaic work by Desiderius Erasmus that has great Old English prose, but is dreadfully inaccurate? That would be the King James Version which was pulled together from the Textus Receptus. How can anyone claim inerrancy or infallibility when one translation is missing hundreds of verses that another translation has? Looking at John 8:1-11 would be a good example. It’s in many translations, not in others, and in the ones that it is in, there’s usually a footnote of explanation.

Examples in how women are so treated can be viewed by clicking here.

Now, if you’re hearing that I’m DESTRUCTING the Bible, then you need to come this Sunday or at least listen to the podcast because that’s totally not the point. The Bible is the most SACRED book in the world to me. I cherish it, am spending my life to the study of it, and try to model my life after the living Word who it speaks of- Jesus Christ. What I am doing is DECONSTRUCTING concepts that need better examination. Thus Sunday, the message is “Destruction Or Deconstruction”?

Why do intelligent men (and fewer women) fight the obvious?

We want what the prophets of old spoke. We want PEACE, PEACE! In other words, we want it to be so. We don’t want to have to STUDY the Word! My God, what could that lead to? In other words what we’re saying is we want to believe our little simplistic mental constructions. And we certainly don’t want to have to spend our precious time relearning what we learned wrongly. And you know, you don’t have to. God loves you regardless. You’re just missing out on so much joy, excitement, and illumination.

Why would you want to stay in that state?”