[Gale]

A very good reason to take the Bible seriously.

Humans because of our present level of technology can answer questions that have plagued scholars for millennium. Questions asked of Ezra about three millennium ago can now be answered. Questions asked of him such as, "Go, weigh for me the weight of fire, or measure for me a blast of wind, or call back for me the day that is past … or show me the picture of a voice … if you solve one of them for me, then I will show you the way you desire to see … You cannot understand the things with which you have grown up; how then can your mind comprehend the way of the Most High?"

Since we can now answer these questions and we can now comprehend, there is a responsibility that accompanies this comprehension. That also makes us responsible for being able to understand the message.

Of course we can answer these very technical questions today!

Fire by BTU's. Wind by anemometer.

Voice modulation wave. Like a .wav file.

Recall a day, would you want that on DVD, or VHS?

The Latin Vulgate, Great Bible (1539), Douay Bible (1609-1610), Moscow Patriarchate (1956), Geneva Bible (1560), Bishops Bible (1568), King James Version (1611), Revised Standard Version (1957) and the New Revised Standard Version (1989) all contain those questions posed to Ezra.


An excerpt from the Preface of Edgar J. Goodspeed, The Apocrypha, An American Translation, published October 1938 and The Complete Bible, An American Translation, October 1939, which may explain why some people have not heard of The Second Book of Esdras, but are well advised to obtain a copy and start studying.

The Apocrypha formed an integral part of the King James Version of 1611, as they had of all the preceding English versions from their beginning in 1382. But they are seldom printed as part of it any longer, still more seldom as part of the English Revised Version, and never at all in the American Standard Bible.

This is partly because the Puritans disapproved of them; they had already begun to drop them from printings of their Geneva Bible by 1600, and began to demand copies of the King James Version omitting them, as early as 1629. And it is partly because we moderns discredit them because they did not form part of the Hebrew Bible and most of them have never been found in any Hebrew forms at all.

But they were part of the Bible of the early church, for it used the Greek version of the Jewish Bible, which we call the Septuagint, and these books were all in that version. They passed from it into Latin and the great Latin Bible edited by St. Jerome about A.D. 400, the Vulgate, which became the Authorized Bible of western Europe and England and remained so for a thousand years. But Jerome found that they were not in the Hebrew Bible, and so he called them the Apocrypha, the hidden or secret books.

It must not be supposed, however, that Jerome gathered them into a group and put them at the end of his Old Testament version. On the contrary, they are scattered here and there through the Vulgate, much as they are through the Greek Bible. They are also scattered through the versions made from the Vulgate – the Wyclif – Purvey English translations and the old German Bible, both products of the fourteenth century. It remained for Luther to take the hint Jerome had dropped eleven hundred years before, and to separate them in his German Bible of 1534 from the rest of the Old Testament, and put them after it. This course was followed the next year by Coverdale, in the first printed English Bible, of 1535; and the English Authorized Bibles, the Great Bible, the Bishops’ and the King James, all followed the same course. The Catholic English Old Testament of 1610, however, followed the Vulgate arrangement and left them scattered among the books which we include in our Old Testament. It still contains them, but on the Protestant side both British and American Bible societies more than a hundred years ago (1827) took a definite stand against their publication, and they have since almost disappeared.