posted on Oct, 16 2004 @ 10:34 PM
Hi Menagerie:
The biggest problem of thinking that there is a "bible code" in the so-called Old Testament and the so-called New Testament canons of "Bible
scripture" is the actual Texts of these books themselves.
In a word: none of the "original text versions" match each other very closely from which one may derive any kind of coherent coding system. The
systems that ARE in place don't match each other either (i.e. the dates of the length of years wandering in the wilderness, or the spaces of years
between Abraham and Moses, and between Moses and Solomon, or between Solomon and the Exile and between the Exile and the Macaabbean Revolt etc. are
all different in the various text families.)
And BOTH the Old and New Testaments come in several families of manuscript groupings/hand copies which DO NOT MATCH EACH OTHER.
For example, it was a shock to the Rabbis and to the Vatican (who quickly moved to monopolise access to them) to find out that the Dead Sea Scrolls
showed so many textual variations with the once "sacred" text which they use (the socalled Leningrad Codex from around 890 AD from Russia, which is
the socalled Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Scriptures with one set of vowells added).
Even the proto-Masoretic Great Isaiah Scroll (the closest thing to our present book) had another version lying right next to it in another cave which
DID NOT MATCH OUR VERSION by about 25% of the time !!
The Dead Sea Scrolls as a whole, when it copied out "biblical books" we know today showed examples of copies of a proto-Masoretic version family of
Hebrew MSS sitting happily along side variation texts, e.g. the Hebrew underlay Vorlage to the older Greek version of the OT-LXX (the Septuaginta or
LXX around 430 BC) which was itself sitting right next to a third Palestinian version of the Torah known as the Samaritan Pentateuch---all of these
different text familes differ from each other by about 25% on average---so which one is the inspired one by YHWH the clan god of Israel?
By definition, they all can't be right, sinfe they contradict each other so much !!
So...in other words, there is not ONE SINGLE text to say: this one contains a SECRET CODE that YHWH the clan god of the Israelites stuck in there (the
same clam god who hates pork, and the wearing of cotton and linen together, and all those nasty Jebusites and who wants ALL the Amalekites
genocided...that one).
The New Testament text problem is actally even worse, with literally hundreds of contradictory Greek manuscripts and very well attested and old
quotations by various Bishops (e.g. Clement of Rome) prior to the year 200 AD which UNFORTUNTALEY DO NOT MATCH anything known to be in our familiar
New Testament today...
Also there is the problem of CANON (which EXACT texts got voted in as canonical or "authoritative").
The words placed into the mouth of "Iesous" (R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean seditionist who was crucified during the reign of the Emperor
Tiberius in c. AD 36) in the Gospels, for example, seem to paraphrase- re-quote (in Greek!) from one of many Aramaic Targums of the Old
Testament---addiing yet another difficulty in ascertaining a CODED TEXT of the word of YHWH...rather than from the text of the MT that Rabbis would
recognise today....
And of course he often quotes snippets in his teaching from Jewish Scrolls that are NOT in the Old Testament canon anymore, like the book of Jubilees
or the Books of Henoch the Righteous, or the Wisdom of Ben Sirach, or the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs (e.g. in John chapter 4 "The Salvation of
Israel shall come from the Judaeans..." from the Testament of Naphtali 13:9) all of which were found in the Dead Sea Scroll Llibrary.
So maybe we should look for "Bible" codes in the books which "Iesous" actually considered to be THE BIBLE back in his day (the actual books of
which which was actually not voted upon by the Rebbes at Jamnia until AD 90----a full 20 years AFTER Israel was destroyed in AD 70 and a full 55
years after R. Yehoshua was crucified !)
Notice (for example) how the Book of Jude quotes I Henoch chapter 1:17-20 in Jude 1:14 as scripture? He does the same thing with the Assumption of
Moses a few verses later....yet these books are NOT in the New Testament canon of Scripture....
These are the kinds of REAL difficulties one comes across when one has to ascertain a "SINGLE bible text" from which one may obtain BIBLE CODES,
which one would have to do, by definition, in order for the CODE to work...
Clear as mud? Well, think about these things anyway!