Multiple Choice Modern Christian Bible Quiz
After reading the story about the rich young ruler in mathew 19, what should you do with your money??
A. Sock it away in the stock market but only invest in Christian Businesses
B. Just increase your business by putting fish logos on your checks and windows
C. Don’t do anything but pray till you get a peace inside your heart
D. Just trust that you have the Holy Spirit.
E. Try to find examples in the Old Testament of people who had lots of Money
F. Ask your begging Pastor what to do with it.
The way a woman should respond to Paul’s instructions to women regarding modest apparel should be…
A. Buy the latest VOG magazine to find out how to dress.
B. Completely ignore , because Paul was a male chauvinist pig.
C. Ask your daughter what you should do. (-I know a sincere woman here in Peru who actually did #C)
D. Ask your begging pastor what you should do.
E. Don’t do anything but pray until God gives you a peace inside your heart.
F. Ask the Lady at the checkout counter of JC Penny if what you bought is appropriate.
After Reading Paul’s teaching about Women keeping silent in the Church in I Corinthians 14 and I Timothy, a woman should only get up and preach if and only if …
A.The men are too cowardly to oppose them.
B. If she thinks her husband is too stupid to preach.
C. She’s equal to a man because God cant tell the difference between a man and a woman.
D. She grows a beard and looks like a man.
E. Everyone feels a warm peace inside when she preaches.
F. If her begging pastor gives her permission.
After reading that Christ taught ¨Whoever would divorce his wife and marry another commits adultery¨ in Mark 10 , the counsel you should give someone that is divorced and remarried should be that…
A. Jesus really didn´t mean what he said here because he was just trying to trick us ... What he was really was aiming at was getting people to cry harder about thier sins at alter calls so they would feel really saved afterwards.
B. Jesus meant what he said but it really doesn’t matter because you can live in adultery and still get into the kingdom of heaven.
C. Just pray a believers prayer.
D. Fast and pray real hard until you get a peace inside or some sort of warm feeling.
E. Give more money to charity or you´re begging pastor to appease your conscience.
F. Answers B, C , D, and E.
After reading Christ’s warning about false prophets in Mathew 7 , the fruits by which we can tell if a Preacher is of God is if...
A. He only tells you the good side of everything without Judging, condemning or criticizing.
B. He’s got a 5000 member ponzi scheme that he calls a church.
C. He lead a prayer at president Obama´s inauguration.
D. People fall over backwards when he puts his hand on their forehead.
E. You get a peace inside your heart when he tells you that your saved.
F. He can lead someone in the believers prayer.
After reading about Christ’s teaching in Mathew 5 that ¨if a man looks upon a woman to lust after her he commits adultery in his heart¨ We can interpret Christ teachings to mean..
A. Jesus wants women to dress immodestly because it gives men the opportunity to exercise self control.
B. Its Ok for a woman to dress immodestly if her motives are for men to only look upon her heart.
C. If a man looks upon a woman to lust after her he wont go to hell as long as the woman’s heart was in the right place.
D. A woman can publicly dress in a way that attracts a mans attention only on special occasions.
E. A woman doesn’t need to worry about men looking and lusting after her if she had peace in her heart.
F. A woman should follow the example of her begging pastors wife regarding how to dress.
After reading John 3 where Jesus spoke about being born again the best thing to do would be to…
A. Wait 6 months before having someone sprinkle water on your head.
B. Repeat a prayer your pastor told you to say.
C. With everyone’s head bowed and eyes closed slip your hand up.
D. Find a ¨Chick¨ tract and follow the steps on the last page.
E. Ask your begging pastor what to do.
F. Pray until you feel a peace inside.
After reading the passage about ¨If we don’t forgive others, God wont forgive us¨… When you ask God forgiveness and you are struggling to forgive someone else you should…
A. Call your Christian Psychologist.
B. Call your Lawyer.
C. Ask forgiveness anyways and just pretend God forgave you.
D. Join the armed services.
E. Pray for your troops instead.
F. Ask your begging pastor what to do.
When Jesus said in Luke 14 ¨Unless you deny yourself , take up your cross and follow me you can´t be my disciple¨ He wants us to…
A. Buy a new bible cover with a cross on it.
B. Buy a gold necklace and matching cross earrings
C. Eat fish for 4 weeks in February
D. Just watch the ¨Jesus Film¨
E. Watch ¨The Passion¨ and then donate $10.00 to Mel Gibson.
F. Ask you begging pastor what to do.
We hope that you couldn´t find any suitable answers presented as choices in our quiz. As humorous as it might seem, this quiz sets forth in multiple choice the ridiculous answers commonly presented in modern day churches. If we just step back and take a common sense look at what´s being passed of as ¨The Gospel¨ in today’s churches , we find nothing more than utter absurdity as this quiz exposes.
The Septuagint was the Early Christians Bible
Quotes From the Early Christian that come from the Septuagint
“…And the Lord is pleased to cleanse Him of his stripes. If ye make an offering for sin, your soul shall see a long-lived seed. And the Lord is pleased to relieve Him of the affliction of His soul” Clemente of Rome quoting Isaiah 53:10-11 from the Septuagint.8
This is an important verse to take note of because our Masoretic text says the exact opposite “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief.” In Isaiah 53:10
The early Christians also understood the atonement of Christ’s sacrifice in a way that agrees with how the Septuagint reads. That is Christ’s death on the cross was a ransom paid to deliver us from Satan rather than a payment made in order to appease an angry God. Christ’s death to the early Christians was a heroic death inflicted by Satan rather than God.
Mark 10:45: "For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."
Origen wrote: "The payment could not be [made] to God [be]cause God was not holding sinners in captivity for a ransom, so the payment had to be to the devil."
This understanding is better known today as the “Classical” or “Ransom” view of the Atonement as opposed to the modern view known as “The satisfaction theory”. (For more on this see my blog post on “Christ’s Sacrifice: Satisfaction or Ransom A Comparison of two views of the Atonement”)
“Do not be a stretcher forth of the hands to receive and a drawer back of them when it is time to give” Didache yr 100 quoting from Sirach4:3
When you can do good defer not because “Alms delivers from death” Polycarp yr 135 quoting from Tobit4:1010
“…The assembly of the wicked surrounded me; they encompassed me as bees do a honey comb…” “…Woe to their evil soul because they have counseled an evil counsel against themselves, saying -Let us bind the just one for he is displeasing to us-…” Barnabas yr70-130 quoting from Psalm 22:17 and Wisdom2:12 11
Who discredited The Septuagint
How the Early Christians maintained The Septuagint while the Unbelieving Jews rejected it.
Now that we’ve seen how important the Septuagint was to the first believers lets now answer the question pertaining to what happened to the Septuagint. We’ll look at the history leading up to the exclusion of some of the books originally included in the Septuagint and why our scriptures today are translated from a different Hebrew Text than the Hebrew text the Septuagint was translated from.
According to Justine Martyr a believer of the second century the unbelieving Jews were rejecting the Septuagint along with some of the books it contained because there were valuable prophecies of Christ to be found in them…
“But I am far from putting reliance in your (Jewish) teachers, who refuse to admit that the interpretation made by the seventy elders (i.e. The Septuagint) who were with Ptolemy [king] of the Egyptians is a correct one; and they attempt to frame another (i.e. The mesoretic text). And I wish you to observe, that they have altogether taken away many Scriptures from the translations effected by those seventy elders who were with Ptolemy, and by which this very man who was crucified is proved to have been set forth expressly as God, and man, and as being crucified, and as dying;” Justine Martyr yr 160 12
David Bercot also recognizes this in his book “Common Sense” where he states “The writings of the Apocrypha were not officially shut out of the Jewish canon until the close of the first century. There is no doubt in my mind that the Jewish religious leaders rejected those works primarily because Christians were using them so successfully to convict the Jews. For example the descriptions of the heavenly Son of God in the book of Wisdom were too obvious to ignore.
Furthermore, could those religious leaders deny that the Book of Wisdom had prophesied about Jesus and his confrontation with their forefathers, the scribes and the Pharisees, when it said:
He professeth to have the knowledge of God: and he calleth himself the child of the Lord.
He was made to reprove our thoughts. He is grievous unto us even to behold: for his life is not like other men's, his ways are of another fashion. We are esteemed of him as counterfeits: he abstaineth from our ways as from filthiness: he pronounceth the end of the just to be blessed, and maketh his boast that God is his father. Let us see if his words be true: and let us prove what shall happen in the end of him. For if the just man be the son of God, he will help him, and deliver him from the hand of his enemies. Let us examine him with despitefulness and torture, that we may know his meekness, and prove his patience. Let us condemn him with a shameful death: for by his own saying he shall be respected-Wisdom 2:13-20
That’s an incredible prophecy! No wonder the scribes didn’t want the Jews to read from that book anymore! And since that book was part of the Septuagint, is it any wonder that the Jewish leaders quickly dumped the entire Septuagint as well?
Who were the Jewish leaders who effectively closed the Book of Wisdom and other books of the Apocrypha out of the Old Testament canon? Why none others than the spiritual sons of the scribes and Pharisees, whom Jesus called “blind guides”, “fools”, hypocrites”, “whitewashed tombs”, and the “sons of those who murdered the prophets” (Matt.23:13-31). These were the very same men who murdered and imprisoned the early Christians.
Do we Protestants realize what we have been doing? In the selection of our Old Testament canon and text, we have been siding with the unbelieving scribes and Pharisees-the “Brood of vipers-against our faithful Christian brothers and sisters of the first and second centuries. What bitter irony! Maybe it is we who are the blind guides!”13
This is exactly what the primitive believers testify to. Here is Justin martyr again yr 160 writing to unbelieving Jews.
“I have not attempted to establish proof about Christ from the passages of Scripture which are not admitted by you (Jews) which I quoted from the words of Jeremiah the prophet, and Esdras, and David; but from those which are even now admitted by you, which had your (Jewish) teachers comprehended, be well assured they would have deleted them, as they did those about the death of Isaiah, whom you sawed asunder with a wooden saw.” 14
Origen in order to counter the attacks on the Septuagint made being made by the unbelieving Jews prepared a six fold parallel edition of the Old Testament including the Hebrew text, A Greek transliteration of the Hebrew, and four Greek translations including the Septuagint. The Hexapla showed where the other translations either added to or took away from what the church was using.15
“Wherefore I think no other supposition is possible, than that they who had the reputation of wisdom, and the rulers and elders, took away from the people every passage which might bring them into discredit among the people. “ –Origen yr 240 16
Jerome: the beginning of Catholic adherence to Masoretic text 17
We’ve already seen how the content of the Septuagint was unfavorable to unbelieving Jews who opposed Jesus and His disciples. By the end of the first century the Septuagint had become such a threat to the Jewish leaders that they decided only to use a Hebrew text known today as the Masoretic text. They went so far as to declare that the Septuagint be discarded. By the end of the second century the Jews had two new Greek translations made to replace the Septuagint which they declared a faulty translation.
The Jewish Scribes had strict guidelines they followed in copying new scrolls from the ones that began to become old and worn out. Their practice involved making a careful translation from an old scroll and then completely destroying the old scroll by burying it in the ground to decay.- So once the Jewish religious leaders declared that the Masoretic Hebrew text was the only valid text it was only a matter of time before all other texts would eventually be discarded without any more copies being made. By the second and third centuries the Jews began to argue against the Christians by claiming that the Septuagint was a sloppy Greek translation of the Mesoretic text , not recognizing that the Septuagint was a translation made from an entirely different Hebrew text than the Masoretic text. Although the Hebrew text the Septuagint was translated from is no longer in existence today some of the Dead Sea scrolls attest to Hebrew texts other than those on which the Masoretic Text was based. In many cases, these newly found dead sea scroll texts agree with the LXX version.
It wasn’t until the about year 400 That the Catholic church under Bishop Damisis authorized a man named Jerome to make a Latin translation which became known as the Latin Vulgate. Everyone thought that Jerome would translate the Bible from the Septuagint. To do his translation Jerome traveled to Bethlehem where he was influenced by the Jews. He was eventually persuaded by the Jews to use the masoretic text for his Latin translation instead of the Septuagint. It is important to note however that the Latin Vulgate translated by Jerome did retain the works known as the apocrypha in spite their being excluded by the unbelieving Jews. However Jerome through this Jewish influence did come to the conclusions that…
1. The Septuagint was a sloppy translation of the Hebrew text.
2.The translators of the Septuagint both purposely and carelessly added things to the text and left things out.
3. The Jews were still in possession of the original Hebrew text that the Septuagint was translated from.
4. Jesus and His apostles recognized the Septuagint as a corrupt text.
5. Origen wrote the Hexapla because he was unsatisfied with the Septuagint.
6. He would improve the western church with his new translation The Latin Vulgate.
Unfortunately these myths that Jerome initiated are still held today by many Bible scholars.
Jerome argued saying “Now let my critics show that there is anything in the New Testament which comes from the Septuagint but which is not found in the Hebrew and our and our controversy is at an end.”
We’ve already seen plenty in the New Testament that comes from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Masoretic text so according to Jerome himself the controversy is at an end. This is why It should have been no surprise when the vast majority of churches refused to use his new Latin translation known as the Latin Vulgate.
Although The Latin Vulgate was at first unanimously rejected by the Churches, the fact that Jerome had been commissioned by the Pope gave the Latin Vulgate some acceptance which eventually lead to it’s use in the conversion of the European Germanic peoples. That’s why by the middle ages the Latin Vulgate became known as the Bible of Western Europe.
-Luther and the reformers maintain the error of the Catholics
By the time of the reformation the reformers blindly accepted the six myths regarding the Latin Vulgate and the Septuagint originated by Jerome. Like many other errors of the Catholic church which Luther and the reformers never departed, Jerome’s error was no exception. The reformers and those who followed in their foot steps continued to use the Masoretic text Jerome’s Latin Vulgate came from for their new translations. This is why Jerome’s error is reinforced today in popular translations such as the King James and others. This is also the reason why many Bible scholars today still maintain Jerome’s myths.
-Protestant Evangelical exclusion of the Apocrypha
Because of Jerome’s mistakes the Septuagint never was passed on to western Christians. However there were aspects of the Septuagint that continued to be included in the western Bibles even until the eighteen hundreds. Some of those aspects include the Old testament books that are found in the Septuagint but not found in the Masoretic text. Today these books are referred to as The deuterocanonical books or the apocrypha. Both of the terms given to these books are misleading. The word deuterocanonical is misleading since it comes from the Greek meaning 'belonging to the second canon' and indicates the hesitation with which these books were accepted into the canon by some. However the term does not mean non-canonical. Many who do not accept these books as part of the canon of Scripture designate them instead by the term “Apocrypha which simply means hidden. For simplicities sake we’ll simply refer to these works as the Apocrypha in our discussion. 18
It is important to take note of the place the apocryphal works retained during a time in which the church was moving further and further away from what the Primitive Church held to. The Apocrypha continued to have a place in the translations made by the reformers. Even the King James translation originally contained these works although their value was minimized due to their exclusion from the Masoretic text. There were however groups during the reformation that esteemed the apocrypha on the same level as scripture as Peter Hoover points out in His book “The Secret of the Strength”. “The Anabaptists had no clear position on the "canon of Scripture." They accepted, and freely quoted from all the books of the Apocrypha, including the third and fourth books of Ezra and the third book of the Maccabees.” 19
It wasn’t until long after the reformation that the Apocrypha began to be omitted from the Authorized Version when Puritans and Presbyterians began to argue for the complete removal of the Apocrypha from the Bible. In 1825 the British and Foreign Bible Society got involved in the controversy. From that time on, the Apocrypha has been eliminated from practically all English Bibles.
Conclusion
Don’t stop here.
My intentions are not to give the idea that all of the Bible translations like the King James version we are familiar with are worthless translations that should be discarded. I continue to use the King James version both for my personal reading as well as evangelism. For the most part I don’t think the differences are significant enough to become a key salvation issue. However I do believe that the contradictions found in the Mesoretic text are significant enough to be a stumbling block to new sincere truth seekers. Hopefully this discussion would serve as a sufficient introduction to what is for many unexplored territory. So let me encourage you not stop here but to make your own rediscovery of the bible that Jesus and the apostles used.
Sources of information
The following sources of information are provided to allow you to do your own investigation and even dig a little deeper…
Foot notes
1. David Bercot “A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs” -Septuagint
2. “Ante Nicene Fathers” Vol1 pg228-279 Justine Martyr
3. “Ante Nicene Fathers” vol.1 pg.451-452 Irenaeus
4. “Ante Nicene Fathers” vol.8 pg.759 Melito
5. “Ante Nicene Fathers” vol.7 pg 505
6. “Common Sense” David Bercot Ch.13 pg.88
7. “Common Sense” David Bercot Ch. 12 pg.80
8. “Apostolic Fathers” pg. 37
9. “Apostolic fathers”
10. “Apostolic Fathers”pg. 128
11. “Apostolic Fathers”pg.169
12. “Ante Nicene Fathers” vol.1 pg243 Justin Martyr
13. “Common Sense” David Bercot ch13 pg.89-90
14. “Ante Nicene Fathers” vol.1 pg 259
15. David Bercot “A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs” Hexapla
16. “Ante Nicene Fathers” vol4 pg389 Origen
17. David Bercot “Why don’t we use the same Bible the Apostles used?” audio
18. Wikipedia –Apocrypha , Deutrocanonical books
19. Peter Hoover “The Secret of the Strength”
