This treatise is part of a larger discussion of mine about Aliens on Earth. It is presented separately here for those who might not be interested in what the Bible may or may not say about extraterrestrial aliens. Most of this discussion is taken from the on-line version of the Encyclopedia Britannica about The King James (Authorized) Version and others. Except where otherwise noted, Bible references are from the online New American Bible, Revised Edition.

The bible which we use today comes from various sources. It is not so much a book as it is a compendium of literature, by which a Semitic people and those who followed them preserved and transmitted their cultural heritage. These people, of course, became known as the Jews, and their culture and heritage are today preserved in the religion known as Judaism and in the books of the document we know as the Holy Bible.

The origins of the events related in the Bible are lost in antiquity. We know from archeological evidence that by the year 3300 BC, cities were being built in Mesopotamia. Cities are artifacts unique to human beings. Although there are many species which build hives, such as ants, termites and bees, the hive is a natural product of a reproductive biology in which one animal, the queen, produces all its members. The queen lays the eggs in one spot, where they must be cared for until the adults emerge to carry on the work of the hive. The ants or termites or bees cannot survive for long outside the hive; they have no choice in their lifestyle.

But human cities are cultural artifacts which require the willing cooperation of those who are bound to it as a matter of choice. The city allows a large number of people to work together for common purposes, quite apart from their biological requirements. In fact, the city is possible only if the commonalty of purpose is already firmly established, for it requires commerce and trade with the surrounding agricultural region to sustain its members. A city dweller cannot feed or clothe himself; he must produce some good or service which is made possible, or at least greatly encouraged, by the closeness afforded by the city, and which the farmer desires or needs. The farmer, on the other hand, must produce more food and other agricultural goods than he and his family need, to provide trade goods for the city dwellers. So the artifact of the city can arise only in a culture in which people have already learned to live and work together for the common good.

The price of living in a city, of course, is freedom. The city dweller is not free to do what he wants, he has to conform to the requirements of his occupation, and the social restrictions imposed by living so closely with other human beings to whom he is not related. The psychological toll is enormous, as the incidence of urban crime and psychological disorders attests even today. In addition, ancient cities were dirty, smelly, disagreeable places, with primitive or non-existent means of disposing of sewage, garbage and trash. So although city living had its advantages, it had its disadvantages as well. Small wonder, then, that early cities were small, and were surrounded not only by the farms on which they depended, but also by nomadic tribes who preferred the freedom of the wide open spaces to the restrictions of city or farm life.

Nomadic life and farm life do not mix well. The farmer or rancher resents the incursion of foreigners on what he considers his private land. The nomad, on the other hand, moves with the herds, and considers the boundary of the farm or pasture a restriction on the freedom he prizes. A large part of the Bible is devoted to the friction between cities and their supporting farms, and the depredations of neighboring nomads.

Such was the situation in what is today southwestern Iraq, near Kuwait, when the kingdom of Sumer, whose capital was the city of Ur, was invaded by desert nomads from Saudi Arabia. These nomads interrupted the fragile balance of agriculture and trade on which the city of Ur depended, and the people of Ur began to starve. Seeing the weakness of their old enemy, the nomadic hill people from Iran attacked and defeated Ur around the year 2000 BC. The battle ended the kingdom of Sumer which had survived for 1000 years, but itself lasted, on and off, for about four times that long. The most recent major battle involving the United States of America and its allies was in the First Gulf War. The present civil strife in Iraq is just the most recent manifestation of this ancient conflict.

But the head of the Persian Gulf, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers known as Mesopotamia, is a good place for a city, and it wasn't long before Ur was rebuilt by the descendants of the original inhabitants and the desert and hill people who had conquered it. But it never regained its former glory, for by this time the city of Babylon had been built. Surrounded by fertile land and located along prosperous trade routes, Babylon became a center of art, science, commerce and industry which was to last another thousand years. In Babylon, we find the laws of the city written for the first time, by the great king Hammurabi. We also find another great idea, that of a chief God, to which all other gods were subordinate.

But the city of Ur was to remain famous because of one of it's most famous citizens, a descendent of the conquering nomads named Abram, later Abraham. He was known to worship the "Most High" god (Genesis 14:20), whoever that was. (The Koran claims that Abraham's father was an idol worshipper, but he himself was not.) Abraham grew tired of city life and returned to the nomadic life of his ancestors, traveling to the west as far as modern Egypt. He finally settled at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea within the Egyptian empire in the land of Caanan. Abraham was to have many adventures among the people of the lands of Egypt and Caanan. The story of his life was so fascinating that it was passed down from father to son in oral tradition, which bound Abraham's progeny in a special way to the cultural heritage of their ancestors.

Oral history is particularly well suited to a nomadic culture, especially when even a written short story involves lugging around huge amounts of stone or clay. Even today, telling stories around the campfire at night is a popular tradition. And so the story of Abraham became the story of a people and a culture. It is within this culture that we find the first concept of not a major god, but the one God, "the God Most High, creator of heaven and earth (Genesis 14:19)," to whom the King of Salem, Melchisedek, offered a sacrifice of bread and wine (Genesis 14:18) in thanksgiving for Abraham's victory over the evil kings who had imprisoned his nephew, Lot, and their kinsmen. The Bible names this God only much later (Exodus 3:14), but Abraham may have known Him as "Marduk." Islam calls him "Allah."

In the time of Abraham's great grandchildren, there was a famine in the land of Caanan, and the descendants of Abraham's grandson Jacob traveled to the fertile Nile valley of Egypt itself, where they were welcomed by their long-lost brother, Joseph. Many stayed in Egypt, and became so prosperous and numerous that the Egyptians, fearing an ethnic takeover, enslaved them. The culture of the nomads thus became the culture of slaves, hoping for deliverance and restoration of their free ancestral way of life by the God worshipped by those same ancestors. But as slaves, they had little power or hope of salvation until a strange event occurred that was to influence the entire future culture of the western world.

The event was a murder. The murderer was the adopted grandson of the pharaoh named Moses, and the victim was an Egyptian apparently known and loved by the pharaoh. Moses had hoped to keep the murder a secret, but word of the deed reached the pharaoh and Moses had to flee for his life. While in exile, Moses had a vision in which the God of his ancestors instructed him to return to Egypt and free his relatives from their slavery. Moses returned as he had been instructed, and after many adventures finally led his people out of the rule of Egypt and into freedom in the imperial outskirts of Caanan, the land of his ancestor Abraham.

A literal reading of the only available historical literature of the time, the Book of Exodus, suggests that these people were "Jews" living only in the Nile valley among "Egyptian" oppressors, and that they migrated in a physical journey lasting over forty years from Egypt into Caanan (a distance of about 300 miles), where they displaced the local inhabitants by force and conquest. While it may well have seemed that way to some of the people involved, archeological evidence suggests that Exodus can also be interpreted as liberation of slaves throughout the Egyptian empire coincident with the chaotic collapse of Egyptian cultural and political influence (possibly because of the natural disasters reported in Exodus 7:14 and following). It may be that the "exodus from" Egypt was not so much a physical journey of people from one country to another as it was the spread of Jewish (relatively) monotheistic culture that displaced established Egyptian polytheism. The Israelites who "left" the "bondage" of Egypt may have been more like the American revolutionaries who "left" the "tyranny" of the British Empire, than the later immigrants who "came to America" from elsewhere. Either way, the People of Israel, slaves who (preferentially) worshipped the One God of their ancestors, found themselves freed of the profane culture in which they had felt disadvantaged, helpless and oppressed.

But this posed a problem which only one trained to be a king could have solved. By now the descendants of Abraham had adopted a slave mentality. They viewed themselves as mere chattels, of no intrinsic worth and therefore having no responsibility for their actions or their effect on their fellows. The Book of Exodus shows an unsophisticated and self-centered rabble which even God himself characterized as "stiff necked." (Exodus 32:9) Clearly what was needed was not just deliverance, but culture, education and the establishment of a strong sense of community and personal honor. And the source of all this was readily at hand; the oral tradition of their folklore. And so, drawing upon his years of upbringing among writers, historians, bookkeepers, poets, scholars and accountants, Moses commissioned the story of the Hebrew people to be committed to the permanence of writing. By the time of his death, tradition had become history. The first part of the history of God's interaction with mankind, the first pages of the Holy Bible, had been written.

This history, reasonably enough, begins at the beginning. The first book is, in fact, the Book of Beginnings. Here we see the beginning of the earth, the sky and the sea. The beginning of plants and animals is portrayed in the candid simplicity of the contemporary unsophisticated and uneducated peasant concept of the world. We find the beginning of the family and of mankind's domination over nature. We also find the beginning of rebellion, of sin, of disobedience, of failure to discharge one's sacred obligations, and (the moral of the story!) the beginning of the terrible consequences, not only for oneself but also of one's children and their progeny, of choice of self over the dictates of honor and fidelity to one's duty and one's God.

There is, of course, one beginning which we do not find, the beginning of God. And that is the first great lesson of the Book of Beginnings, that God has no beginning. It is the eternal God who has created man and his environment. Man is of intrinsic value, not only because he is God's handiwork, but because among all the creatures of the earth, he is the image of the ever-loving God. In man we see the godlike qualities of free will, of consideration of alternatives, of exercising dominion over all the earth and bending it to his will.

These concepts are presented not as cold, hard facts, but in the setting of a grand epic having all the elements of drama, suspense, romance, intrigue, mystery and pathos which are rewarded today by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with the Academy Award, the Oscar. ("The Ten Commandments" was in fact nominated for an Oscar for best picture in 1956. It lost to "Around the World in 80 Days.") The psychological impact of this story is so striking that it stands out as the most memorable book of the Bible. It is not surprising, therefore, that any idea which appears to threaten this work is met with violent opposition, even by criminal prosecution in a country in which the basis of its laws and government specifically proscribes any law "respecting an establishment of religion."

But what does the Bible actually say? How are we to interpret it, here in a place and age where we take for granted wonders which not even Moses himself could possibly have imagined?

To answer the first question, we have to understand the language in which the Bible was written. And that, unfortunately, is something we cannot do. Not only the language, but even the concepts on which the language was based are lost in the mists of time. Although most (but not all) biblical scholars accept the basic Mosaic authorship of the Book of Genesis, the Old Testament narrative shows a plurality of style and a disjointed character that strongly suggests that even the oldest texts we have today bear the imprint of many writers, copiers and translators. But even this book, as well as later ones, was preserved for posterity only during the Babylonian Captivity, eight centuries or so after it was begun. The first compilation into what we now know as "The Bible," was probably done by the priests who were interred in Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar after the sack of Jerusalem in 597 BC. "The book of the law of God" referred to in Nehemiah 8:8 and following after the return to Jerusalem may be the first complete compilation of the Torah ever written. In addition, the Bibles used by modern peoples, like earlier ones, are written in their own language, using their own concepts and ways of understanding things, which disconnect us from the culture of the people for whom these books were originally written.

For much of the Bible's history, new editions of the Bible were essentially copies of prior works, so that all the difficulties of understanding and interpretation were present in the new versions as they were in the old. In recent times, however, new discoveries have made it possible to arrive at a better understanding of the content of the Bible and of the ideas it presents. In particular, the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran have provided modern scholars with an extensive body of knowledge of Hebrew culture and philosophy contemporary with the lives of Jesus and the Apostles. Computer analysis has also influenced speculation on the origin and authorship of some texts. New translations are therefore thought to be more accurate and informative than previous translations. Work to develop an even better understanding of the Christian and Jewish bibles is an ongoing task for many researchers.

The Jewish Bible is logically divided into three parts. The first part, known as the Torah or "the Law," consists of the five books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These five books are known as the Pentateuch, which means, literally, "five books." The Pentateuch, can be seen as the account of mankind's development until the time that Israel became a nation and entered the Promised Land.

The Nevi'im, the "Prophets" continues the story of Israel in the Promised Land, describing the establishment and development of the monarchy and presenting the messages of the prophets to the people. The Ketuvim (the "Writings", or Hagiographa) include speculation on the place of evil and death in the scheme of things (Job and Ecclesiastes), the poetical works, some additional historical books, and a few biographies of folk heroes thrown in for good measure.

These divisions were in common use at the time of Jesus, who talks of "The Law and the Prophets" in Matthew 7:12, Luke 16:16, and in several comments on "the Law of Moses," and teachers and doctors of "The Law."

The Bible used by the Jews and early Christians was what is today known as the Septuagint, so named because of the legend that there were 72 translators, 6 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel, who worked in separate cells, translating the whole, and in the end all their versions were identical. In fact there are large differences in style and usage between the Septuagint's translation of the Torah and its translations of the later books in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, the earliest extant Bible is this Greek translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew, presumably made for the use of the Jewish community in Egypt when Greek was the predominant spoken language. Analysis of the language has established that the Torah was translated from older texts near the middle of the 3rd century BC and that the rest of the Old Testament was translated in the 2nd century BC.

The Septuagint was the Bible used by the early Christians, and it is from this source that Luke and Paul draw their discourses on the prophesies fulfilled by Jesus. The idea that there should be an addition to the Septuagint, gathering the teachings of Jesus and the history of the early Church, seems to have arisen in the middle of the first Century AD, and resulted in the gathering together of the Gospels, Acts, the various Epistles, and Revelation, written in Greek, into what we know today as the New Testament.

The use of the Septuagint by Christians, and the need to chronicle events which occurred after the Septuagint was compiled, encouraged the Jewish teachers to abandon the Septuagint in favor of a Hebrew translation which more completely met their needs. The Christians, on the other hand, revised the Septuagint and included the books which are known today at the "apocrypha" and appear in Catholic Bibles, but not in the Protestant.

The Bible used by Protestants has come to us by a parallel route. In 1534, King Henry VIII was refused a divorce by Church authorities from his child bride, Catherine of Aragon. In retaliation, he initiated a series of acts of parliament which separated the Christian church in England and made King Henry, and subsequent monarchs, the head of the English, or Anglican, church. To be fair, it must be noted that a number of abuses had crept into the administration of the Catholic Church which made it ripe for reformation. The tradition of the king as the head of the church was upheld by Henry's only son, Edward VI, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 16, and his 15 year old cousin, Lady Jane Grey, who was the reigning monarch for 9 days. But Edward's older half-sister, Mary, Catherine's daughter, overthrew Jane's supporters and consolidated her reign by having Jane beheaded. She then attempted to restore Roman Catholicism by force, earning herself the nickname, "Bloody Mary." Plagued by ill health and palace intrigue, Mary died 1n 1558, leaving the crown to her illegitimate younger half-sister, Elizabeth I, who restored the Church of England. This religion is the official Christian church of the United Kingdom today, with the king as its head.

In 1603, the "virgin" Queen Elizabeth died without an heir, and James VI of Scotland, the grandson of Elizabeth's first cousin, James V, became King James I of England. James was the son of Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, the ancestress of all subsequent British Monarchs. James was baptized a Catholic, but was raised as a Protestant in the absence of his mother, who had been imprisoned and ultimately beheaded by Elizabeth. He fancied himself as something of a literary scholar, and he even wrote (bad) poetry. Realizing that the Protestants needed their own Bible, and greatly desiring to rid himself of any vestige of "papism" from his mother, he commissioned the first Protestant Bible. He created a commission of 54 advisors to review available doctrinal literature to create not only a new scholarly translation, but one which would be as edifying by the style of its Shakespearean language as by the content of its message. The idea was to avoid the criticism regarding the language of plowboys by writing the Word of God as the most beautiful expression of the English language possible. The King James Version was finally published in 1611, and, with minor revisions, is the Bible Protestants in the English-speaking world (and most everywhere else), use today. It is perhaps the only work of art ever created by a committee.

Luke Chapter 2, Verse 7, King James Version: "and she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn."

The term "inspired" comes from a Latin term which means literally, "to take in breath." "Breath" in Latin is the word "spiritus," from which we get the word "spirit." Ancient peoples noted that living men and animals breathed, whereas dead ones did not. In addition, the last living act of a person was often an exhalation, by which the breath left the body, never to return. The natural conclusion is that breath is the essence of life, at least for beings with lungs, and so we find this concept in Genesis 1:2 "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," and again in 2:7, where "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

The "spirit of God" is of course the wind, which often comes whistling down the Jordan river valley. The all-powerful life of God is therefore immediately obvious, and must have been a persuasive argument to early peoples for the existence of its presumed possessor. The idea of inspiration, then, is based on the concept of the life of God coming into or somehow infusing the life of the writer, so that the natural function of animal life, purposeful activity, and in this case the purposeful activity of writing, comes not from the life of the man, but from the life of God. Since words are formed with the breath, and are the medium by which the ideas of one living individual are communicated to another, the words written by the inspired writers can truly be called the Word of God.

Modern peoples, of course, know that the breath of man is nothing more than the means by which he consumes oxygen and expels carbon dioxide. If oxygen can be gotten into the blood and waste products removed some other way, people don't need to breathe at all. None of us do it for the first nine months of our lives. So the idea that the Bible is the Word of God needs some explanation, and the various explanations offered comprise a great deal of what separates the various sects of Christians from each other and from our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters.

It is clear that the development of the Old Testament up until their compilation into the Septuagint, was one of evolution, with new books being added and old ones revised as time went on. There are probably as many flavors of modern Judaism as there are of Christianity, and modern Jewish thought runs the gamut from regarding each word of Scripture as being personally dictated by God (or written, as in the case of the Ten Commandments), to regarding them as essentially the cultural history of an old and venerable ethnic minority in a hostile world. What is said of the various Christian ideas of Scriptural inspiration is therefore probably true of at least some groups of Jews also.

Probably the most conservative view, so much so that it is held by only the rightmost tail of the bell curve of believers, is that each word of the King James Version (or, in the case of the Jews, the Hebrew text) was directed to be written by an act of Divine will. The Bible is, according to this doctrine, grammatically and literally the Word of God, who speaks the language of 17th Century English poets and playwrights. This view admits of no possibility of interpretation whatever. It concludes that God, Adam, the snake in the tree, Moses, Jesus, the Apostles, and St. Paul of Tarsus all spoke 17th Century English. This view, of course, rejects completely any assertion which would question the literal reading of the Bible. A natural consequence is that the Bible as the only absolutely true literary work and virtually all science and history is either mistaken or deliberately misleading. In this view, the entire universe actually consists of a "firmament," or "dome," that "divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament" (Genesis 1:7) and the sun and the moon are "light in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth." (Genesis 1:15).

A more liberal view, held by a rather larger number of believers, is that the Bibles today are the products of dedicated, conscientious and exacting scholars, who translated earlier works which were directed to be written by God. Here the opinions diverge, one extreme being that the original writers were merely automatons, the motions of whose hands and pens were personally directed by God. The other end of this spectrum is a belief that the original writers were somehow motivated by God to write down what they personally knew or believed to be true, and that their writings were preserved for later translation and edification of the faithful of all future time by Divine Providence.

This view admits of some possibility of error, not on the part of the original writers, but on the part of later copiers and translators, so that the Bible is the literal word of God, perhaps imperfectly translated and therefore imperfectly understood today. The continuing task for biblical scholars, according to this view, is to determine ever more precisely what the original writers wrote, and to compare modern translations with evidence from other sources, such as archeology and history, to arrive at a more perfect understanding of the modern versions.

With such a view, it is difficult to interpret the Book of Genesis as anything but literal history. It is a considerable stretch of the imagination to assume that conscientious translators would have inadvertently left out a preamble or commentary which would indicate that this is a work of fiction. Therefore, believers in this viewpoint conclude that the world really did begin essentially as it is today, that man was created by a direct act of Divine will, and that Adam and Eve had no parents and, therefore, no navels.

Anglican Archbishop James Usher (or Ussher), Primate of Ireland between 1625 and 1656, determined the age of the universe according to the this interpretation. Working backward from known historical dates and using the terms "year" in the KJV to indicate an actual period of 365.25 days, arrived at the date of creation as the evening before the morning of October 23rd (a Sunday) in the year 4004 BC. According to Archbishop Usher, there is simply no human history before that date, and nothing in the universe is any older. Other scholars, using essentially the same methods, have arrived at similar (but not identical) conclusions. Bishop Usher simply ignored a total of about 13,399,999,648 years of unspecified duration between the few periods the durations of which are specified. This includes the 360,000 years or so that elapsed between when "God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1) and "there was light" (Genesis 1:3), and about a million and a half years that elapsed between the time that "man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7) and "God planted a garden eastward in Eden" (Genesis 2:8). Nevertheless, many fundamentalists still firmly believe that "the Bible says that the universe is 6012 years old," even though they can't find the date of creation anywhere in the Bible. (Incidentally, this makes the day upon which God "rested, Genesis 2:2, a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, not Sunday.)

More liberal Christians and Jews maintain that the original books of the Bible, however perfectly or imperfectly translated, were written by various persons, using many different sources, and only, at the time, for specific purposes and audiences. Thus the Torah was written for the instruction and education of Jews entering the Promised Land, the later books for later ages, the gospels for Christians, Ephesians for Ephesians, Corinthians for Corinthians, and so on. This view does not assert that even the original words of scripture, whatever they may have been, are to be taken as literally true. They admit the possibility of the use of what we would today call "poetic license," or even a less than perfect memory (or understanding) of actual events, on the part of the original writers.

The concept of inspiration in this view is limited to a kind of behind the scenes activity of God to arrange, in some way imperfectly understood by humanity, that these books were written in the first place, and that they were preserved and eventually incorporated into a body of literature to be distributed to all mankind. In this view, Genesis is not a history, but an allegory, an attempt to explain fundamental, but essentially mysterious, truths in a way which would not only be understandable, but acceptable and uplifting to the people for whom it was written.

This view is reconciled with the mainstream of scientific thought by the assertion that there is a hierarchy of truths, some of which are absolutely and irrevocably true, such as the existence of God, and some of which are true only because that there are the best explanation of all observed phenomena, such as the nature of the top quark or cosmic strings. From this viewpoint, Adam and Eve, whoever they were, probably had non-human parents, the universe is in fact as old as it appears to be, and the first mate of the son of the first man ("Mrs. Cain") was undoubtedly his mother, sister or a non-human female.

The difficulty with this view, of course, is that it is too loose. Anyone can read a passage of the Bible and interpret it any way he likes. Interpreted this way, the Bible teaches nothing.

There are two ways out of this problem. The first is to assume that, although an individual can read the Bible and not know what it means, there are people who, through study, prayer and the gift of grace, can read the Bible and know more precisely what it means, at least as well as necessary for instruction of the faithful. Most Christian ministers fall into this category, as do many rabbis. They encourage individual reading of the Bible, but admit that any confusion or misunderstanding on the part of the reader can be explained by someone who knows more about it.

This does not resolve the problem, it just removes it one step from interpretation by individual readers. The problem of interpretation therefore falls on the learned scholars, who quite obviously can't agree much more on what the scriptures mean than the common layman. For the Bible to be an infallible teacher, therefore, there has to be an infallible interpreter, one who has the final authority to teach what the scriptures really mean, at least to the extent that such knowledge is necessary for belief by the faithful. By necessity, this final authority must be a single individual, from whom there is no appeal, and who is incapable of officially teaching error. (A committee, such as the United States Supreme Court, could possibly fail to reach a unanimous decision.) There are two Christian traditions, the oldest and one of the youngest, which today which claim to have such a position; in the Mormon church he is called the First President, and in the Catholic church he is called the Pope. Both are elected to their awesome duties by high-ranking members of their congregations.

The second way out of this problem is to assume that the Bible is the direct medium of contact between the reader and Almighty God. In this view, if I think a certain passage conveys some particular idea and you think the same passage conveys the opposite idea, we are both right; God is speaking to each of us in a way which is tailored to our individual knowledge and experiences. The function of biblical scholars in this understanding is to provide historical and cultural information about the Bible, and to propose, for our acceptance or rejection, various opinions about particular passages. But the final interpretation is left to the reader and his individual conscience, not the scholars. This opinion is held by a large proportion, perhaps by most, Protestants, and by a growing number of Roman Catholics (but not, it must be noted, by the Catholic Church itself).

A slightly more liberal interpretation is that the Bible is essentially the same as any other body of folklore, differing only in that it is folklore of the People of God, and therefore worthy of more respect than other literature. What it teaches is not absolute truth, but a way of looking at things which inspires the mind and uplifts the imagination to focus on God as the author of all being and the entity to whom we are all ultimately responsible, whatever our various beliefs.

Finally, at the left tail of the bell curve, there are those who maintain that the Bible is nothing more than the collection of interesting, edifying and historically significant works which describe a history of the growth of religious tradition from Abraham to the writer of Revelation. Genesis is seen in this view as primarily folklore, written for the same reason as Aesop's Fables, and having essentially as much, or as little, historical or spiritual significance.

As we have seen, the Bible (whichever edition of it you choose) does not attempt to prove the existence of God, but rather takes belief in God as given. In fact, in the King James version, the phrase "There is no God" appears 12 times (Deuteronomy 32:39, 1 Kings 8:23, 2 Kings 1:16, 5:15, 2 Chronicles 6:14, Psalms 14:1, 53:1, Isaiah 44:6; 8, 45:5; 14, and 45:21). The phrase, "There is a God" appears twice (1 Samuel 17:46 and Daniel 2:28), and the phrase "God exists" doesn't appear at all! The idea of a single deity was already well established in Jewish culture by the time of Moses, who used the language and concepts of his people, including the concept of one "most high" God. Modern Judaism, Christianity and Islam have built on this foundation.

Proof of the existence of God is based on much more fundamental principles than something written in a book, however revered the book might be. It doesn't have anything to do with how we feel about it, either. Take a look around. We see automobiles, airplanes, digital watches, television sets and pocket calculators. You can either assume that these are made things, or that they condensed spontaneously out of a cloud of hydrogen gas, which itself spontaneously arose out of nothing. To claim that they were made by intelligent human beings who condensed out of the gas merely introduces an intermediate step. You either start with nothing, and end up with Sony color television sets and Guess jeans, or you start with an uncreated creator, which neatly explains everything else. Carl Sagan called the imposition of order on the universe Cosmos. Bible believers call it "God".

(Incidentally, the currently popular cosmological idea that "the universe created itself" refers to the space-time anomaly at the moment of the "Big Bang," and not to a creative process. Cosmologists are talking, logically enough, about creation, not the Creator.)

Another scientific demonstration of the existence of an intelligent creator consists of measurement of a quantity called entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder in the universe, and it always increases in any physical process. It defines the direction of our perception of the flow of time. For example, we might knock a cup of coffee off the table. The cup falls to the floor, breaking into scores of pieces and spattering coffee all over with a resounding crash. The energy which the cup had by being above the floor is converted into kinetic energy as it picks up speed in the fall. At the instant it hits the floor, this kinetic energy is converted into kinetic energy of the coffee, energy required to break the bonds that held the cup together, and sound energy, a very small proportion of which is intercepted by the eardrums of the people in range. Eventually, the sound energy is dissipated as heat. The physics of the situation are well understood, even by children.

But physically, the process is reversible. There is no physical reason why a bunch of random sound waves could not spontaneously come together, scoop up the last drops of coffee out of a soggy carpet (and elsewhere), reassemble pieces of a shattered cup, and make the whole mess jump up neatly into the saucer onto the table with the coffee at rest within it. But, as we know, this never happens. In any physical process disorder increases. The universe, in effect, is winding down.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that if the universe is winding down, it must have been wound up in the first place by something outside, which imposed its primeval order on it. Call it what you want; the theologians call it "God."

Although it is possible to construct a mathematical model of a universe with no beginning or cause, we never observe anything like that. In all observed phenomena, physical processes are caused by other processes, with physical objects as the mediators. "Cosmos," as Carl Sagan pointed out, is the source of order in the universe. This is science, not religion. Cosmos, whatever it is, is the reason the visible universe exists, and contains things like people, black holes, computers, and viruses. This is as far as science can go. Of course, the existence of something which is simply the uncreated cause of everything that exists is a far cry from the personal God of the Bible (and the triune God which is unique to Christian belief). Science gives us no indication whatever that they are the same. At this point, the question is one of faith.

A more rigorous approach to this question was taken by Aristotle, a pagan writing in the middle of the 4th century BC, before the Septuagint was translated, who was almost certainly unfamiliar with Jewish writings. Aristotle came to the conclusion that all existing things must have an unmade maker, the essence of which is simply to be, essentially "that which is." Since Aristotle was a pagan, and a Greek pagan at that, the Roman Catholic Church put his writings on their list of forbidden writings and threatened anyone who would read them without authorization with eternal damnation and, for a time, with a slow and excruciatingly agonizing death. The Muslims figured that anything that the Christians hated so thoroughly couldn't be all bad, so they preserved and published Aristotle's writings, by which means they found their way to the Muslim communities in Spain, and were thereafter smuggled into France. There they received the attention of one Thomas Aquinas, an Italian scholar at the Dominican university in Paris. Because he was already dedicated to God, Thomas had the Church's security clearance to read the forbidden books. He noted that "that which is" was equivalent to "I am that I am," precisely the name of God revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14. This so blew Thomas' mind that he set about to write an encyclopedia of everything which it was possible to know about God. This work, which he failed to complete, the Summa Theologica, nevertheless stands as one of the most fundamental treatises on God of the Catholic Church.

Thomas, of course, was predisposed to conclude that Aristotle's "that which is" was the same being as "I am that I am," which is the Hebrew name (Yahweh) of the God of their ancestors. This is where the search for the nature of Cosmos leaves the realm of science and enters the realm of religion, for there is no scientific evidence for a being who (or which) writes books, gives laws to people on mountains, sent his son to die for the sins of mankind, or made Mohammed his chief prophet.

Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. While it is not possible to scientifically prove the existence of Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, or any other god, it is not possible scientifically to disprove their existence, either. Belief in god is like belief in the visible universe. It is an act of faith on the part of the believer, based on the evidence available to him and his acceptance and interpretation of it.

So where does that leave us as scientists and fans of science?

Well, it leaves us at the beginning of the twenty first century, in which mankind is divided into the Judeo-Christian and several other equally ancient traditions. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the common trunk comes to an abrupt end with the death of Jesus of Nazareth, with Jews going one way and Christians another, and Muslims branching off from Judaism about 600 years later. There are today three main versions of ancient Judaism, one which is known as modern Judaism, one which is known as Christianity, and one which is known as Islam. Modern Judaism has branched into essentially three main twigs, the Orthodox, Conservative and Reformed traditions, while Christianity is loosely separated into Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox. Islam is divided into the Shiite and Sunni traditions. It has, however maintained its essential identity by staunchly refusing to translate its defining scripture, the Koran, at all. Converts to Islam must learn to read Arabic, which is probably why there are so few of them in the western world. This is also the basis for the intuitive belief that God speaks Arabic, which implies on a very basic level that anything un-Arab is essentially ungodly as well. But Muslims accept the Old Testament as of subordinate value to the Koran, and are not overly concerned with its interpretation.

Interestingly enough, it is Islam, much more than Christianity or Judaism, which has propelled the advance of science. The dispersion of the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD required them to either be assimilated by other cultures or be annihilated by such atrocities as the Spanish Inquisition which began in 1492, and the Holocaust, which is the shame of the most recent century. Christians sacked the Library of Alexandria in 389 AD, beginning the decline in learning which eventually became known as the Dark Ages. The Catholic Church, with its emphasis on itself as the custodian of all truth necessary for salvation discouraged, and for a time actually opposed, scientific inquiry.

Muslims were under no such restrictions. Beginning in Saudi Arabia in 630 AD, Islam took the world by storm; in 100 years there was a Muslim empire which spread literature and learning from the borders of China and India to Spain. Requiring a means to find their way in the desert and to determine the direction to Mecca and the precise dates of holy days, Muslim mathematicians perfected the astrolabe, invented a numbering system which is used throughout the whole world today, made astronomy into a science, and named most of the major stars. "Algebra," "almanac," "cipher," "zenith," and "zero" are all Arabic words. The numbers from 1 to 9 are Arab inventions, and Arabs were using the decimal system, including the concept of zero, for five hundred years before Christian Europe caught on to the idea.

The reign of Queen Elizabeth had succeeded in imposing a high degree of uniformity upon the church in England, but the Anglicans still used the same bible, the Vulgate, that the Catholics did. This, of course, was intolerable to the Anglicans, for whom anything smacking of "papism" was cause for alarm. Accordingly, a conference of Anglican churchmen in 1604 requested that the English Bible be revised because existing translations "were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original." King James, realizing the political clout associated with an exclusively Anglican bible, immediately set about to create one.

By June 30, 1604, King James had approved his list of 54 revisers, although records show that only 47 actually participated. They were organized into six companies, two each working separately at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge on sections of the Bible assigned to them. The King James Bible was finally published in 1611.

This Bible was a monumental work, fully as daunting as the development of the Septuagint almost 1900 years earlier. The actual work of translation was managed by adherence to an elaborate set of rules to reduce the differences in grammar and style which would have otherwise resulted from the contributions of so many different translators. The writers attempted to make the writing more popular and familiar by incorporating commonly-used terms and language usages of the day.

The translators tried hard to render the actual meaning of the Scripture into English. For this reason, they relied heavily on the Hebrew bible, even copying, to an extent, its rhythm and style. Two editions were actually printed in 1611, later distinguished as the "He" and "She" Bibles because of the variant reading "he" and "she" in the final clause of verse 3:15 of Ruth, which is resolved in the New American Bible, Revised Edition by the translation: "he himself left for the town." Both printings contained a large number of typographical errors. The "Wicked Bible" of 1631 left out the word "not" in verse 20:14 of Exodus, so that the verse read, "Thou shalt commit adultery." The printers were fined 300 pounds sterling for their blasphemy. The "Vinegar Bible" of 1717 contained a misprinting of "vineyard" in the heading of Luke, chapter 20.

The King James Bible was not perfect, however. In spite of their obvious concern for precision, the translators were not all world-class scholars, and the Greek text they used was not as good as it was to become later, when subsequent discoveries about the ancient Greek language made translations from that language into English more exact. Therefore, a committee established by the Convocation of Canterbury in February 1870 (shortly after the American Civil War) recommended revising, but not retranslating, the King James Version. Two companies were formed, one for the Old and one for the New Testaments. All the major Christian denominations were invited to participate. The Catholics, however, regarded the whole activity as "erroneous" and refused to attend. Because of the differences in English between the United Kingdom and the United States, a separate committee was formed in this country to make recommendations and revise the United States version to conform to American usage.

Luke Chapter 2, Verse 7, Victorian English, 1833 Webster: "and she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling-clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn."

Because of differences in language between the two countries, the Americans decided to publish an appendix to the English Revised Version. This was done in 1900. The Old Testament, but not the Apocrypha, was added in 1901. But by that time, a number of "unauthorized" English revisions had become popular, mainly in the United States, which many thought were superior to the "authorized" version. In 1928, the copyright of the American Standard Version was acquired by the International Council of Religious Education so that churches representing 40 major denominations in the United States and Canada now had the exclusive right to publish it. A new publication was authorized in 1937, but, because World War II intervened, it was not until 1946 that the new revision to the New Testament was printed. The complete Revised Standard Version (RSV) was published in 1951. It represented the work of 32 scholars, one of them Jewish, drawn from the faculties of 20 universities and theological seminaries. A decision to translate the Apocrypha was not made until 1952 and the revision appeared in 1957. It was the first to make use of the information obtained from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The RSV was not a new translation, but a revision, as the name implied, of the American Standard Version. Because it was intended to be used mainly for worship, as opposed to scholarship, it retained some older forms of English which sounded more "pious," such as using "Thee" and "Thou" when addressing God.

Many Jews in English-speaking lands found the Old Testament of the King James Version and the Revised Version adequate to their needs, based as they were on the Hebrew Bible. However, the English translations bore the imprint of having been translated exclusively by Christians, using specifically Christian beliefs and concepts. The Christians also left out Jewish commentary which was necessary for an appropriate Jewish interpretation of the Pentateuch. The Jews also needed a Bible in which it was easy to mark the appropriate readings for Sabbaths and other holy days, a concern which was simply not addressed by the King James Commission. To meet these needs, many rabbis took it upon themselves to provide English translations for their individual congregations. However, in 1892, the Jewish Publication Society of America decided to publish a Jewish Bible in English. This publication was a very strict translation of the Hebrew Bible, based on the best Jewish scholarship available, although it used English very much like that of the original King James Version. It was the most popular Jewish Bible in the English speaking world up until 1955.

In that year, a committee of translators, three professional biblical and Semitic scholars and three rabbis, began a retranslation of the Hebrew Bible and issued the Pentateuch in 1962. In 1969, a single volume containing the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, and Jonah was published. Isaiah and Psalms appeared in 1973. A second committee worked separately on the rest of the Hagiographa (Ketuvim). The format of the new publications made them easy to use for worship in the synagogues.

The New English Bible got its start in 1946, under a joint committee of American and English Protestants, who invited, and received, Catholic observers. This committee published the New Testament in 1961 and the Old Testament and Apocryphia, with revisions to the New Testament, in 1970. It was an instant commercial success, selling at a rate of 33,000 copies a week in 1970. A completely new translation, it abandoned the tradition of "biblical English" and, except for the retention of "Thou" and "Thy" in addressing God, was essentially modern English.

The King James Bible and its subsequent revisions were intended specifically for Protestant Christians. As a result, differences in Catholic (and Jewish) and Protestant interpretations were resolved in favor of the Protestants. This left English-speaking Catholics with the Latin Vulgate, which precious few of them could read, as their only source of Sacred Scripture. To resolve this problem, William Cardinal Allen and other exiled English Catholic scholars decided to publish an English translation of the Vulgate. The resulting New Testament was published in Rheims, France, in 1582. The Old Testament was published about 18 years later in Douai. The combination has come to be known as the Rheims-Douay Bible. This translation contained a number of inclusions which pointed out the difference between Catholic interpretation and Protestant "heresies." Bishop Richard Challoner attempted to make the English more understandable with a series of revisions from 1749 to 1772, and subsequent editions were based upon this revision well into the 20th century. In 1849 an Irish-American archbishop, Francis Patrick Kenrick, began an 11-year task of additional revisions, and Ronald Knox published his version of the New Testament in 1945, the Old Testament in 1949, and a complete revision in 1955. None of these were "official Catholic" translations.

The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine issued a clear English translation of the Vulgate New Testament in 1936. The Old Testament revision was interrupted by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which decided in 1943 to encourage modern vernacular translations from the original languages instead of from the Latin Vulgate. Accordingly, both the Old and New Testaments were respectively retranslated into modern English from what remained of the Hebrew and Greek originals. The resultant Confraternity Version (1952-61) was later issued in 1970 as the New American Bible (not to be confused with the New English Bible, which is essentially Protestant). Another modern version, more colloquial, is the Jerusalem Bible (1966), translated from the French Catholic Bible de Jerusalem (one-volume edition).

Luke Chapter 2, Verse 7, Modern English, New American Bible, Revised Edition: "and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn."

The Masoretic Text, from Hebrew masoreth, meaning "tradition," is the traditional Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible, meticulously assembled and codified, and supplied with diacritical marks to enable correct pronunciation. This monumental work was begun around the 6th century AD and was completed about four hundred (!) years later by scholars at Talmudic academies in the area which now includes Iraq, Jordan and Israel. Their goal was to reproduce, as far as possible, the original text of the Hebrew Old Testament. Their intention was not to interpret the meaning of the Scriptures but to transmit to future generations the literal Word of God. To this end they gathered manuscripts and whatever oral traditions were available to them. The Masoretic text that resulted from their work shows that every word and every letter was checked with care. In Hebrew or Aramaic, they called attention to strange spellings and unusual grammar and noted discrepancies in various texts. Since texts traditionally omitted vowels in writing, the Masoretes introduced vowel signs to guarantee correct pronunciation. Among the various systems of vocalization that were invented, the one fashioned in the city of Tiberias, Galilee, eventually became most popular. In addition, signs for stress and pause were added to the text to facilitate public reading of the Scriptures in the synagogue.

When the final codification of each section was complete, the Masoretes not only counted and noted down the total number of verses, words, and letters in the text but further indicated which verse, which word, and which letter marked the center of the text. In this way any future emendation could be detected. The rigorous care given the Masoretic text in its preparation is credited for the remarkable consistency found in Old Testament Hebrew texts since that time. The Masoretic work enjoyed an absolute monopoly for 600 years, and experts have been astonished at the fidelity of the earliest printed version (late 15th century) to the earliest surviving codices (late 9th century). The Masoretic text is universally accepted as the authentic Hebrew Bible.