Vorlage

"Vorlage" is a word not too many people use. It refers to the way a thing used to look. Every now and then we see pictures of ourselves from long ago and we think "Wow! - I sure have changed through the years."

That happened to me this week. Here's a picture of me in 1986. Nancy, an old friend I'd lost track of when I married, posted it to FaceBook. When I first saw it I thought it was somebody else. What seems weird about it to me is, this is probably how Nancy remembered me.

There are some accusations flying around that the Bible did that. It changed over time. Hence the use of the word "vorlage" by professors in bow ties that teach in large universities that have so much grant money available that they have collections of scrolls and museums to keep them in. Really what they want is a better look at the Bible when it was in its youth. Unfortunately, we don't have many pictures of that. What we do have comes through excerpts retained by those of later generations.

So to be more accurate, the word "vorlage" is about how other people used to see something at a certain stage, not how it used to be. The word "be" is complex for the Bible because, like people, it has been many things to many people. And it was made to grow over time.

Or was it? Some people prefer to limit it to the day of its birth. For the Samaritans, for instance, it was just five books. The first five. The Torah alone. And it is imagined by many that all these books were written by Moses and at the latest, compiled by Joshua, the successor of Moses. That way we can account for the recording of the death of Moses and yet claim authorship by him.

Others believe that books known to have been written in subsequent centuries are equally inspired. And that is why we have the Old Testament comprised not of five, but thirty nine or more books, plus another twenty seven books from the New Testament.

Despite the fact that the Bible developed and became different things to different people it is still called "the Bible" and is thought to "be" something. It is what it is, as people like to say. The supposition also still exists that it should be today what it was when it was first written. Or that it is. And everyone wants it to be what it was.

Yes, Bill. What we want to know is what the meaning of the word "is" is. What did "I Am Who I Am" - who never changes - really say? Will the real "I Am" please stand up? And can anyone please show us the Bible in its original form? Is that what we are looking at now?

How much like people this question is! No one ever asks me how I was in my original. They simply ask me how I am. They understand I was made for change and diversity in my relationships. I suppose I was one thing to Nancy and another thing to my seminary professors. Who was right? Any of them?

So here is the challenge. We want to know what it was, so that we can determine what it is. In the case of the Bible, many of us think it is the word of God. And we want to know what God has been saying to us. So we spend hours and hours, and entire lifetimes searching for answers.

But if change is part of what something is then we shouldn't necessarily be looking for an original. What do you want to see? Do you want to see chromosomes?

But "vorlage" doesn't really ask for an "original" so much as a good photograph. Take a picture at any stage and it is accurate from a certain vantage point at a certain time. If you had a bad day "the camera don't lie." (Yuch. Why do people keep requesting that song?)

The problem is we didn't have cameras when the Bible was being written. What we have is a few thousand very old parchments, papyri and fragments with a lot of references made by people writing many centuries ago who quoted earlier versions of what we now have so that we can reassemble what we think may be a more accurate picture of - not an original - but a Bible that someone long ago may have seen.

We know there were differences in the Samaritan version of the Bible because we have a very old copy, (a portion of which is copied above and to the left), which my seminary professors referred to (not very surprisingly) as "the Samaritan Pentateuch." And this one is different than the one we find in the Hebrew Bible of today.

Errr, I'm referring here to the Masoretic text, not the modern Hebrew. The Masoretes were Jewish scribes who copied the Bible in the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th, centuries of the Christian Era (CE) and produced what some modern rabbis and Christians claim is the original unabridged, perfectly preserved Old Testament. And that's what we call the "Masoretic text."

Boy, wouldn't it be nice if we could all just have a version of the Bible that was the real legit original? Well, that is the attitude of many Jews today and from yesteryear, and of many modern fundamentalists - particularly those of the King James Version only camp.

Nifty. But now for the bad news. The "very old" Samaritan Penteteuch is possibly very different from the "vorlage" of Joshua, the successor to Moses, (who is thought to have recorded the words of Moses - the original) and shows signs of "evolution." In fact, practically every old version of the Scriptures we possess - the Hebrew, the Samaritan, the Greek, all of them show signs of change. As a result, there is only one thing we can conclude with certainty. We don't possess any such thing as an original.

Too bad. But unless you are a Samaritan, that really should not be the objective anyway. For the rest of us we are looking for something more human - something that grew. - seeing that God revealed himself over time, not just at a single point in time. Christians, above all, should not have a problem with this. The Logos, as we believe, became flesh and dwelt among us from infancy to adulthood. This is the one set of chromosomes that was revealed.

So we don't possess an original Bible, but we can do the best we can to accurately reproduce earlier stages of Biblical development by comparing the many different versions that we have, figuring out which ones came first, and where they were found, and other such considerations. This is, of course, the work of those men in bow ties and their female counterparts - the scholarettes. Ladies and gentlemen, please connect the dots!

Or one can see it as a camera with a lense that we adjust, trying to get a more accurate picture. If our camera is out of focus we have a picture, just not a perfectly accurate one. So we need those dot-conntectors to help us get a better picture. It is an absolutely valuable endeavor for those who would like to "see Jesus" or for others, who would like to prove that Jesus was not who some say he is. Truth is truth. What does the camera say?

Enter Providence. The twentieth century CE was an exciting one for dot-connectors. Literally hundreds of old manuscripts were found as archeologists, paleontologists, papyrologists, sesquipedalians and a few other lucky people, unearthed find after find, and these found their way into museums and private collections, that a privileged few have had the good fortune to study.

But now the challenge. Making sense of it all. And here is the reality. It is in the hands of people who hole themselves up and who do not share what they have until their articles and books come out so they can make a lot of money and prestige and push their personal theories. The process involves not just producing more accurate versions of the Bible, but if they want to, their own conspiracy theories. And the only "accountability" that exists right now, is something referred to as "scholarly concensus."

Those last two words "scholarly concensus" frighten me. Somebody is paying for those museums they warehouse their stockpiles of Providence in. In the case of Israel it is the Israeli Antiquities Authority. I would not be the first person to suggest that the state of Israel deliberately withheld the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls because they believed it would somehow damage Judaism as a whole, or the number of pilgrimages to the holy land. But they were indeed in charge of selecting those who would ultimately edit and publish them - a project that took nothing short of 47 years. And now after 16 more years (that's 63 total as of this writing) the final volume (#40) is still being produced.

Forty volumes at an average cost of $200 each mean that the Dead Sea Scrolls are now available for anyone with about $10,000. To be sure, the purchase contains not just the transcriptions to a more readable type but the comments of the official editors, appointed by the Irealis.

The Bible has always been expensive. It had to be hidden and protected through the years because it took such a long time to reproduce new copies by hand. We used to have to write on paper we made from trees with a lot of effort. But after the printing press was invented prices dropped and there came a day when almost every house on the planet had at least one copy of the Bible.

We don't have to reprint by hand anymore. Instead we are faced with the power of monopolies to gouge prices combining itself with "neo-censorship." "Neo-censorship" fuses depravation of information with feeding the news. It isn't exactly book burning but comes very close. The net effect is almost exactly like what the effect of dominance by the Roman Catholic Church over the Bible used to be before the printing press was invented. Bottom line - 0nly the very wealthy and the privileged had access. Only the pulpit was allowed to have a voice. The Catholics, in fact, have been accused by some of being involved in the Dead Sea Scrolls delays. Is there anything new under the sun?

I am not so critical of the Catholics as are many others, but be that as it may, 24/7 Scrolls is the solution. Please give as much as you can to this charitable organization, whose mission is to make ancient scrolls available to anyone for free 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Thank you for your consideration!




James Carvin is the founder of 24/7 Scr0lls. The Generations Blog is written to average people to stimulate interest in the scrolls and to highlight the need for universal access without cost.