Is the Bible Inspired by God?
People today mostly say no. A remnant, mostly Christian, say yes. Christians are following Luther's interpretation of Second Timothy 3:16, all scripture is God breathed. We started as Presbyterians and accepted the conventional Luther era answer. Our position has now changed, but not as you might expect. Keep reading to understand why.
Bible Time
Our first project, Bible Time, uses the text of the Bible to inform the schedule for most key modern headlines. How? The trunk timeline of the Bible repeats within itself, and across history, at various times and at various time scales. For you mathematicians, time in the Bible is 'fractal.' So human history is pre-ordained and continuing to accurately follow the timing of stories found in the Bible.
This includes such headlines as the split of Rome, the Christianization of Russia, the Protestant Reformation, and World War II.
The Bible informs many day accurate headlines too. One such series started in 1974 with the resignation of then US President Richard Nixon. Nixon, a prophetic Adam, and Henry Kissinger, Nixon's prophetic Eve, ate of the forbidden fruit.
How? Kissinger and Nixon had traveled to the Forbidden City, just north of Tienanmen Square in central Beijing, and opened China to trade. Of course, finishing their prophetic story, the national symbol for China is the serpent, or dragon.
Nixon claimed later this was his most important accomplishment. But, with the Garden of Eden story as a timed prophetic match, we get commentary unavailable anywhere else. Nixon and Kissinger should never have done this.
The prophetic consequences to American workers follow from the story of being cast out of Eden. From that point forward, only by the sweat of their brows, would American workers earn a living. A high school diploma would no longer be enough to support a family on a single income. American workers now had to compete directly with poorly paid, mostly untaxed, Chinese peasants.
New Testament commentary adds more detail to the Garden of Eden story. What good is it to gain the whole world, but loose your soul? Every country who has tried to rule the world, as Nixon tried with China, is eventually doomed to self destruction in the attempt.
Other Examples
Other recent predicted dates include the First Persian Gulf War, a Chinese decision to go to war with the USA, 911, the 2008 financial collapse and Covid. Besides simply being accurately timed, each of these events has strange and unexpected commentary as to what is really going on.
The Bible's prophetic schedule also points forward, to a nuclear war in 2029, likely a continuation of Nixon's opening of China. It also points to recolonization of Mars starting later this century and then even more human history into future centuries and future generations.
With many accurately predicted headlines to our defense, we claim the Bible is inspired. God has his hand on human history. Those who refuse to remember it are still condemned to repeat it.
But...
Certain Bible stories never see matched headlines. Sodom and Gomorrah is perhaps the best known example. Some headlines match timed Bible stories but they cannot be clearly understood. This became acute with the election of US President Barack Obama. Commonly available Bibles contorted the prophetic story. Hidden from normal readers of English language Bibles was a key explanatory reference to Obama's religion.
After Obama's election we knew we had to turn our attention to the problems of the text itself. We were thinking we needed an 'audited' translation of the original language texts. We at least needed a translation with a different set of promises than used by normal translators.
Our ideal translation needed strict promises on English word selection and it needed to strictly respect a seven layer model of communication. In effect, we needed a translation suitable for use in the Hard Sciences, a STEM Bible, if you will.
This is an immensely difficult problem. There are problems at all stages in the journey from original inspiration down through history and then into the English language. Different problems along the way manifest as different problems in available texts.
We began our journey towards an audited Bible with our Bible Research Bible project. By holding our own editable, English language, text of the Bible we gained the ability to at least experiment with and fix translation problems as we found them. We still maintain that project, making changes regularly, and we use that same BRB text for our more recent projects.
The Alphabet
Early in this journey we also took lessons in Hebrew. The first term in that series of classes dealt with the alphabet itself. The key point our instructor hounded was that inspired word meanings were driven by the inspired spelling.
Each letter is a term in a letter based language. This was important to us because if there are choices when selecting English words, then the letter based word definition might inform which English choice is better.
After that class, yet another journey began. Eventually expressed in our Ezekiel's Bones project where we have recovered the original, exact, inspired letter forms and letter definitions. Roughly half of the definitions we were taught turned out to be wrong, and we can prove why.
The inspired alphabet was carved into stone tablets by the finger of God in Moses' day. That alphabet was lost to Hiram, king of Phoenicia, in Solomon's day. These days, we can prove every single stroke in every single letter in the Phoenician alphabet. We usually restate the ancient texts passed to us back onto that recovered alphabet. We call the recovered alphabet Paleo, a precise definition of Phoenician.
Edited
In early 2016 we found the text of the Bible deals with itself as a subject. Both Old Testament and New Testament writers knew and wrote about how the text of the Bible had been edited. So that initial question, Is the Bible inspired? Has a twist.
If you accept the Bible as inspired, as we did, and read it carefully, as most don't, you find passages written by those same inspired writers that say not all content in the Bible is inspired. This is a strange, 3rd, possible answer. Only certain parts of the Bible are inspired and those same inspired writers explain how to distinguish between those parts.
Those inspired writers gave future readers what we call Rules of Additions that show what Bible material, categorically, can never have been inspired. The inspired writers essentially demand that future readers of the Bible apply their rules before applying the Bible's text to life. This until such a time in their distant future as the letter perfect inspired text is made available again.
Remember Luther's interpretation of Second Timothy 3:16? All scripture is God breathed? The inspired author of that passage meant that only scripture is god breathed, not the entire Bible. Luther equated the Bible to scripture for his own political ends against the corrupt church leadership of his day. Luther himself was corrupting the inspired intent of the author of Second Timothy.
This is why some Bible stories never replay as modern headlines. Some Bible stories were never inspired by God himself. Some stories only replay in strange and unexpected ways. Why? Those Bible stories have been tampered by editors in strange and unexpected ways.
A Big Bible Study
Once we knew the rules of additions, we could undertake the largest of all possible Bible Studies. We could apply those rules to the entirety of the text as passed by history.
We began in the Bible Research Bible and added markup and notes. We identified what rules make us believe any given passage could never have been inspired. Those notes still remain, for anyone curious.
With time, though, that markup surprised us. Our awareness of additions became quite extensive, ruling out several entire books as well as many, many specific passages.
We needed a different set of tooling to understand what was going on, so The Testimony project was born. In this project we produce a new literary work. We keep only what remains from the Bible after applying those rules of additions.
Once we started looking at the problem this way, it was apparent that some system once drove the general textual organization. The Table of 400 is our main project for studying and recovering that now lost structure of the inspired text. We eventually added the Sabbath Reads project as it became apparent that a weekly reading plan was part of the inspired structure.
Yet another project, the Qu Map merges lessons from the alphabet recovery, geography, and many stories from within the text. It, too is helping with recovery. It will remain a key tool for understanding application of the text out into the world.
With these projects we could finally approximate the inspired text. It calls itself The Testimony Of Joshua. It represents about 1/5th of the Bible as we know it. It replaces the Bible as a basis for communities of faith.
Theology
The Testimony of Joshua has a very different theology than we find taught in regular Church. God is no longer far and distant, but close and personal. He inspired the writers to explain how to lead successful lives. Lives with the potential of success that match the lives of Enoch and Elijah.
God inspired those same writers to explain what he hates about the kings and priests who edited the text and who still rule the world. Amongst other things, their edits to the text effectively prevent people from being taken up like Elijah at the end of their life on earth.
The story of Nicodemus explains the same point in reverse. Even if you know the entire edited text completely, the best that can happen is you enter a mother's womb again and are born again, life after life after life. This is what the editors caused, a trapping of souls on earth.
Specific Editors
The text identifies 6 specific editors. They were Solomon, Ahab/Jezebel, Nebuchadnezzar, Mordecai, Ezra and Ananias. This list starts with kings. It shifts near the end to priests who carry authority delegated to them from kings. Each editor introduced some uninspired topic. Those topics gave those kings and their priests ungodly power over some rulership problem faced in their day.
Across time, they created most of the content of the Bible. Matthew 13 calls their collective work 'tares,' sown among the inspired seed.
Their collective composition began to take form under Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled when it was originally composed, about 2600 years ago. The Bible takes its name from Nebuchadnezzar's empire. He was gathering and compositing sacred texts from each kingdom as he conquered them.
That system of rule was portrayed to Nebuchadnezzar as a statue in a dream. His political heirs have used these same editor principles to conquer successively larger parts of earth ever since.
Divine Name
In the New Testament, the Greek based divine name is Jesus. This is a hellenized form of the Semitic name Joshua, as in Joshua son of Nun. Once we leave Greek, and use any Semitic language for the New Testament, we find the same spelling for Jesus as is used for Joshua son of Nun.
So in our Bible Research Bible, which we audit against the Peshitta, the divine name Jesus is rendered as the divine name Joshua. The spellings are the same, and Joshua, in English, is a better transliteration than Jesus. This is still not perfect, but it follows the conventions used for all other biblical names in English.
OT Divine Name
The Old Testament, with a different textual history and a different religion using it, has a different set of problems. These problems existed before the New Testament was written. In Acts 4, for example, the inspired writers explain there was only ever 1 divine name.
By making this key point, the inspired Acts author means that our villainous editors also performed certain key vocabulary word substitutions. Including, but not limited to, the divine name.
English translators seem to know this, and paper over the problem by using various capitalizations on the word 'lord.' This is deceitful, and a convention we do not follow.
Instead, in the Bible Research Bible only, we use 'Master' as the Old Testament divine name. This is because the Aramaic OT does not use a name at all, but word that at times is simply translated as master. This maintains a 1 to 1, auditable, map from original terms to English.
TT Divine Name
In The Testimony and our other related works, you will find the Old Testament divine name rendered as 'Joshua.' This following the direction of Acts 4. We use this name throughout Old Testament based material instead of Master.
This substitution causes Joshua of the New Testament to be seen visiting Abram in the Old Testament. Joshua, in the New Testament, said he did this in Abram's day. But, that meeting does not happen in standard Bibles. In our working drafts of The Testimony, this meeting is seen in both places.
This substitution also means Joshua of the New Testament interacts with and knows every key prophetic person in the Old Testament. Including Noah, Abram, Moses, Samuel and the other prophets.
We use Joshua as the divine name in all of our writing, and in our regular conversations with him. Throughout this website and most of our related apps we use the divine name Joshua. Do not be surprised. Do not be offended.
Jesus answers prayer to him by the name Joshua should you address him by that name. What we know about Jesus, though, is quite different than what we know about Joshua. This is why he prefers being addressed as Joshua.
Letter By Letter Recovery
With Acts 4, word level changes, and the reality of whole cloth additions, can the text ever be perfectly recovered, letter by letter? Matthew 13 is one passage that suggests so. We think we know how, and are working on the problem.
The instructor in the class we took years ago taught us much about the history of letter level changes that are known to have happened in the text across the centuries. Two systems are known to have been employed to keep the text current to changes in pronunciation.
We know from the timeline, and Wikipedia, that the whole Roman world went through a series of pronunciation changes in the late first and second centuries. This was a timed prophetic event, replaying the spoken language changes last seen at the time of the Tower/Roll of Babel. It was a curse, for having received Ananias' edited New Testament.
Manuscripts important enough to be kept current across that era underwent spelling changes as needed to keep up with pronunciation.
Our instructor did not see these manuscript spelling changes as a malicious act. We now think those changes did provide cover for changes to inspired intent.
In any case, we were taught what had to be ignored when understanding the meaning of words. This includes all vowel pointing. It also meant we had to learn to spot, and ignore, added vowels.
So taking our Testimony work, which explains roughly which 1/5th of the Bible to start with, and using the known history of spelling changes, we have a starting point for letter by letter recovery.
But, there is more. The inspired text was written with a system functionally similar to the parity and check sum systems used in computer communications. Using such systems allow receivers of defective messages to identify certain types of defects and reconstruct the perfect message without requesting a retransmission from the sender.
In the case of the inspired text, this was an in-band system, hidden in the letter patterns themselves, it was not out-of-band as used by modern computers. So the original process of inspiration was so letter perfect as to include an error detection and correction system within the inspiration itself.
The system used appears able to correct errors across as many as maybe 12 defective letters. So changes of whole words, say the divine name, appear recoverable at the letter level.
This letter perfect Manuscript Recovery project is ongoing for us. The Spice Bible project is our critical edition text that we are building as the input to the computerized recovery process. We will report more on this aspect of our work when we have more to share.