Reincarnation

55 2.0 Historical development 2.1 Is the bible the WORD of GOD? This question is answered by the Catholic Church in its dogma, with the audacious assertion: “They (all the books from the Old and New Testament) originate from the mouth of CHRIST or are entered by the HOLY GHOST and have been preserved uninterruptedly by the Catholic Church. But whoever doesn’t recognise all these books as holy and canonised and whoever despises consciously and with awareness these traditions that we talked about, shall be excluded.” – [4. Council of the General Church-Congress in Trient (1546)] During the same Council of Trient (1545-1563) the Church contradicts itself this announcement with the following statement: “The canonised worth of a document as an element of the New Testament does not depend on its authenticity.” The assertion, that these writings were preserved in an “uninterrupted sequence”, has been scientifically disproved! We could save us all these troubles, if we were in possession of the original writings of the editors of the New Testament. These easily obliterated pieces of papyrus have crumbled long ago, as in those days, nobody really thought about preserving them. Even the original manuscripts were, according to present bible research, written at the e a r l i e s t , 20 years after the crucifixion of JESUS CHRIST and therefore, n o t o n e word handed down of JESUS of Nazareth, can be a u t h e n t i c a t e d . As early as the year 383 A.D. no two paragraphs of any length corresponded exactly in two different Latin bibles! Bishop Damasus from Rome engaged Hieronymus from Dalmatia, to compile a Latin bible of u n i f o r m text. Hieronimus, as papal secretary, changed the wording in the copy of the four gospels he was using as a basis for his “adjustments”, in about 3,500 places! Hieronymus himself writes: “ Even those who revile me as a blasphemous forger, have to admit, that one cannot talk about the truth anymore, where what is supposed to be the truth, varies from each other. The extend of the confusion caused by this ever since, can be illustrated clearly with a few examples:  There are no less than 800 handwritten gospels of the New Testament from the 2nd to the 13th century. The number of deviations and differences in the circa 1,500, more or less complete texts, is enormous.  There is not one single manuscript, that coincides with the others. Theologians count from 50.000 to 100.000 variations.  In 1957, one knew 4,680 Greek manuscripts from the New Testament, and from those no two offer the exact same text.