As Salaam Alaykum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuhu,
This is the story of the Codex Sinaiticus, which maybe the oldest Bible in existence. If not the oldest it is certainly one of the oldest. This Codex is being digitised by the British Library in a £1 million project and will be available to anyone with an internet connection. Of course this is exciting for anyone interested in the Bible and Christianity and it will not be surprising if this Codex differs significantly to the modern Bible.
The online Codex can be found here:
The Codex Sinaiticus
Here are a couple of links of related articles for those interested:
Oldest Surviving Christian Bible to be Launched Online
BBC Magazine – The Rival to the Bible
And here is a video that quotes extensively from the BBC article but also includes an invitation to worship God and follow the perfectly preserved Book of God, the Quran.
I know that many Christians will dismiss this just as they dismiss other evidence of the corruption of the Bible, but let those with thinking minds contemplate on why God did not see fit to preserve the Bible in its original form if it was meant to be a guidance until the Day of Judgement.
A few days ago I was researching the Christian concept that good deeds are worthless, which naturally brought me to Isaiah chapter 64. While reading Adam Clarke’s commentary (as is my custom when researching the Bible), I came across this interesting passage in regards to the forth verse of the chapter:
Under these difficulties I am at a loss what to do better, than to offer to the reader this, perhaps disagreeable, alternative: either to consider the Hebrew text and Septuagint in this place as wilfully disguised and corrupted by the Jews; of which practice in regard to other quotations in the New Testament from the Old, they lie under strong suspicions, (see Dr. Owen on the version of the Septuagint, sect. vi.-ix.;) or to look upon St. Paul’s quotation as not made from Isaiah, but from one or other of the two apocryphal books, entitled, The Ascension of Esaiah, and the Apocalypse of Elias, in both of which this passage was found; and the apostle is by some supposed in other places to have quoted such apocryphal writings. As the first of these conclusions will perhaps not easily be admitted by many, so I must fairly warn my readers that the second is treated by Jerome as little better than heresy.
Some of the other verses in that particular chapter do not fair any better. In the fifth verse Adam objects to the phrase, ‘bahem olam venivvashea’ saying that, ‘I am fully persuaded that these words as they stand in the present Hebrew text are utterly unintelligible’ and later writes, ‘In this difficulty what remains but to have recourse to conjecture?’.
Is the Bible the inerrant Word of God? I wouldn’t be placing my hope in the hereafter on it and I recommend you don’t either.
