Can we trust the Bible’s historical accuracy when it mentions a Jew named Mordecai in Esther?
“The book is a free composition, not a historical document”—Catholic Commentary
“The only character known to history is Ashasuerus”—Catholic Commentary
“Now there was at the citadel in Susa a Jew whose name was Mordecai, the son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, a Benjamite, who had been taken into exile from Jerusalem with captives who had been exiled with Jeconiah king of Judah, when Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had exiled”—Esther 2:5,6 NASBread more
Critics claim the Bible is largely fiction, and is not the authentic Word of God. The Codex Sassoon manuscript was sold at auction in May 2023. It is the oldest complete Hebrew Scripture manuscript that is extant with punctation and vowels.
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Almighty God promised to preserve his word, the Bible, and he has! Jesus Christ told his apostles:
“‘Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.’ Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures”—Luke 24:44,45 NIV.
What Jesus referred to above was our present day 39 book Old Testament, the Hebrew-Aramaic Scriptures, from Genesis through Malachi, which was divided into “twenty-four books” (2 Esdras 14:44), by the ancient Jews. These were considered to be “the Scriptures”, and “the word of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:13). It has been accurately preserved by God for 2,500 years.
The following article gives some evidence of this fact:
“By David Gritten, BBC News, May 18, 2023
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The Codex Sassoon is thought to have been written about 1,100 years ago.
It is the earliest surviving example of a single manuscript containing all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible with punctuation, vowels and accents.
US lawyer and former ambassador Alfred Moses bought it for the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, Israel.
” The Hebrew Bible is the most influential in history and constitutes the bedrock of Western civilisation,” Mr Moses said in a statement.
“I rejoice in knowing that it belongs to the Jewish people. It was my mission, realising the historic significance of Codex Sassoon, to see it resides in a place with global access to all people.”
The winning bid exceeded the $30.8m paid by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in 1994 for the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific notebook.
But it fell short of the record for a historical document sold at auction set by hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, who bought a first-edition printed copy of the US constitution for $43.2m two years ago.
The Codex Sassoon is named after a previous owner, David Solomon Sassoon, who acquired it in 1929 and assembled the largest and most important private collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the world at his home in London.
The text of the Hebrew Bible – whose 24 books make up what Christians call the Old Testament – remained in flux until the early Middle Ages, when Jewish scholars known as Masoretes began to create a body of notes that standardised it.
The Aleppo Codex, which was assembled around 930, is considered the most authoritative Masoretic text. However, damage from a fire in the Syrian city of Aleppo in 1947 means that only 295 of the original 487 pages survive today.
The Codex Sassoon, which carbon dating shows was created around 900, is missing only 12 pages, according to Sotheby’s.
“It presents to us the first time an almost-complete book of the Hebrew Bible appears with the vowel points, the cantillation and the notes on the bottom telling scribes how the correct text should be written,” Sharon Mintz, senior Jewish artefact specialist at the auction house, said in March.
Centuries of annotations and inscriptions reveal that the manuscript was sold by a man named Khalaf ben Abraham to Isaac ben Ezekiel al-Attar, who later transferred ownership to his two sons, Ezekiel and Maimon.
In the 13th Century, the codex was dedicated to a synagogue in Makisin, in north-eastern Syria.
After the town was destroyed by either by the Mongols later in the 13th Century or by the Timurids at the start of the 15th Century, the manuscript was entrusted for safekeeping to Salama ibn Abi al-Fakhr. It then disappeared in history for 500 years.
The Codex Sassoon’s most recent owner was Swiss investor Jacqui Safra, who bought it for £2m ($2.5m) at auction in London in 1989.”read more
Macro-Evolution Theory Upset by ‘Revived 46,000 Year Old Worm’
Macro-evolution theory is the gradual change from one species to another over that is asserted to take place long periods of time. But why does the the theory of Macro-evolution constantly get revised? Scientists report they have revived an ancient worm, and have discovered that, “some processes of evolution are deeply conserved,” as reported in a CNN ARTICLE, of July 28,2023. Here is the article:
“Scientists have revived a worm that was frozen 46,000 years ago — at a time when woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and giant elks still roamed the Earth.
The roundworm, of a previously unknown species, survived 40 meters (131.2 feet) below the surface in the Siberian permafrost in a dormant state known as cryptobiosis, according to Teymuras Kurzchalia, professor emeritus at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden and one of the scientists involved in the research.
Scientists have revived a ‘zombie’ virus that spent 48,500 years frozen in permafrost Organisms in a cryptobiotic state can endure the complete absence of water or oxygen and withstand high temperatures, as well as freezing or extremely salty conditions. They remain in a state “between death and life,” in which their metabolic rates decrease to an undetectable level, Kurzchalia explained.
“One can halt life and then start it from the beginning. This a major finding,” he said, adding that other organisms previously revived from this state had survived for decades rather than millennia.
Five years ago, scientists from the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Russia found two roundworm species in the Siberian permafrost.
One of the researchers, Anastasia Shatilovich, revived two of the worms at the institute by simply rehydrating them with water, before taking around 100 worms to labs in Germany for further analysis, transporting them in her pocket.
After thawing the worms, the scientists used radiocarbon analysis of the plant material in the sample to establish that the deposits had not been thawed since between 45,839 and 47,769 years ago.
But still, they didn’t know whether the worm was a known species. Eventually, genetic analysis conducted by scientists in Dresden and Cologne showed that these worms belonged to a novel species, which researchers named Panagrolaimus kolymaenis.
Researchers also found that the P. kolymaenis shared with C. elegans — another organism often used in scientific studies — “a molecular toolkit” that could allow it to survive cryptobiosis. Both organisms produce a sugar called trehalose, possibly enabling them to endure freezing and dehydration.
Belching lakes, mystery craters, ‘zombie fires’: How the climate crisis is transforming the Arctic permafrost “To see that the same biochemical pathway is used in a species which is 200, 300 million years away, that’s really striking,” said Philipp Schiffer, research group leader of the Institute of Zoology at the University of Cologne and one of the scientists involved in the study. “It means that some processes in evolution are deeply conserved.”
And, Schiffer added, there are other actionable insights which can be gleaned by studying these organisms.
“By looking at and analyzing these animals, we can maybe inform conservation biology, or maybe even develop efforts to protect other species, or at least learn what to do to protect them in these extreme conditions that we have now,” he told CNN.” read more
Increasingly Frequent Mass Murders – Is the End Near?
Every day there are shocking reports of mass violence and murders in the news. Just when it seems like things can’t get any worse, they do! This same worsening scenario seems to be repeating day after day. Such horrible events are part of the fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecy:
“Because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold”—Matthew 24:12 NRSV
Does this mean the end is near?
Jesus predicted that: “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man,” in that people in general would be going about completely absorbed their daily lives, and totally unaware of “the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:37-39 NIV), until it “will come on them suddenly” (1 Thessalonians 5:3 NIV).read more
“Even though we might desperately want to know the identities of the authors of the earliest Gospels, we simply don’t have sufficient evidence. The books were written anonymously and evidently not by eyewitnesses”—Bart D. Ehrman
The Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, nor did they include any eyewitness testimony, so says the popular agnostic Bible scholar, who has quite a following. While such claims were rare prior to the 1800’s, they have been increasing, and ever more so in recent times.read more
Was Jesus Christ being born in Bethlehem, foretold, or predicted, in advance? Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been accurately dated to before Jesus was born.
“Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms”—Luke 24:44 NIV
Critics claim that Jesus was just an ordinary man, and that predictive prophecy is impossible, and therefore deny that Jesus fulfilled any Old Testament prophecies. Since there are so many prophecies that Jesus actually fulfilled, critics resort to claiming that the prophecies in the Old Testament were written after the fact, so as to conform to what happened to Jesus, and also that the New Testament recordings of these fulfillments are frauds, that is, written to conform to Old Testament predictions. read more
Although all four Biblical gospels report Jesus’ burial by Joseph of Arimathea (Matthew 27:57-61; Mark 15:42:47; Luke 23:50-56; John 19:38-42), there are some skeptics and critics, such as the currently prominent agnostic Biblical “scholar” Bart Ehrman, who deny this fact. Experts point out that the more independent witnesses reports of an event that are available, the more likely the complete, composite report is true. Matthew and John were disciples of Jesus at the time of his execution, and its aftermath. So was Peter, who used Mark as his writer of the second Biblical gospel. Luke was familiar with “eyewitness reports circulating . . . from the early disciples,” and says, “having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, Ialso decided to write an accurate account” (Luke 1:1-3 NLT). So Luke’s gospel was based on accurate eyewitness accounts.read more
“In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar–when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea”—Luke 3:1 NIV
Pontius Pilate is mentioned in all four the the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and in Acts and 1 Timothy, as the Roman governor before whom Jesus was brought to trial, and who, under pressure, passed the death death sentence upon Jesus (Matthew 27:1-26; Mark 15:1-15; Luke 22:66-23:25; John 18:28-19:16; Acts 4:27; 13:28; 1 Timothy 6:13). Pilate was “governor of Judea” from 26 CE to 36 CE, and is mentioned by the writer Tacitus.read more
Some people today say they have seen God. Preachers teach that people in the Bible saw God. Is this true? What does the Bible say?
“The Son is the image of the invisible God”—Colossians 1:15 NIV
“To the King eternal, immortal, invisible“—1 Timothy 1:17 NIV
The Bible says that Almighty God is invisible. What is invisible cannot be seen by human eyes. He has always been “invisible”. “I, Yahweh, do not change” (Malachi 3:6 NJB)
“Yahweh said, ‘ . . . no human being can see me and survive.”—Exodus 33:20 NJBread more
Atheists assert that faith is inferior to reason. One of the reasons (no pun untended) for this is that they usually have a misconception of what faith actually is, thinking it is blind faith or credulity. True Biblical faith is:
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”—Hebrews 11:1 NASB
“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for, it is the evidence of things we cannot see”—Hebrews 11:1 NLT
“Faith” here is from the Greek word pistis, which refers “to confidence that something is real, with a strong implication that action will ensue from this belief” (NLT Word Study System).read more