Technorati Tags: bible code, computers, ELS, mathematicians, myth

The link has the show set for 6-10 PT. I can’t actually recall if I was on the full four hours or just three.  It may have been four since the show was five hours when Art did it (the first hour was usually for news or whatever else Art wanted to talk about). The only thing I do recall about the show and debate was that Grant Jeffrey really had no idea what I was talking about.  He basically has no background or knowledge of Hebrew, textual criticism, or how the Old Testament was transmitted.  But if you have a friend that believes this nonsense, please invite them to listen, as well as going to this web page – pretty much the page I had up for the show, visually demonstrating (from the Dead Sea Scrolls) how the idea of an every-letter equidistant letter sequence (ELS; the backbone idea of the Bible code) is demonstrably false.

Thanks to Shirley in Michigan for alerting me to this!

Technorati Tags: bible code, Dead Sea Scrolls, ELS, hebrew, manuscripts, Qumran, Textual Criticism

The Achilles Heel of the Bible code, of course, is the fact that there are tens of thousands of letter sequence differences in existing Hebrew manuscripts. Most of this concerns spelling and scribal corrections, but there are also clear scribal errors (some scribes even noted them in the margins of manuscripts). The historical commentary of the manuscript transmission process by the scribes themselves ALL unequivocally testify  that the preservation of the every-letter sequence of Hebrew letters is uncertain.

One Bible code supporter, Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, psychiatrist and author of Cracking the Bible Code, has claimed that if 77 letters were lost from the text sequence upon which the Bible code is based, the code would statistically collapse. My book The Bible Code Myth DOUBLES this number through actual examples from manuscript disagreements and notes of the scribes themselves – all exclusively drawn from the Torah.  You don’t need to know how to read Hebrew either – just how to count!

• Examples of the Torah’s Textual Uncertainty from The Bible Code Myth

Another problem for the Bible code are the Dead Sea Scrolls.  These texts, which are our closest textual witnesses to the actual composition of the Hebrew Old Testament, have a markedly different way of spelling.  In just a few verses there might therefore be dozens of letter differences.  The significance of this is illustrated in two ways.  First, we have no way of knowing WHICH text to use for a coded letter string.  Bible code proponents like Grant Jeffrey can’t seem to grasp this fact.  Jeffrey claims to have found dozens of coded names associated with Jesus in Isaiah 52:13-53:12, the Old Testament prophecy of a suffering Messiah.  You hardly need a Bible code for this idea (uh, you could just read the Bible as it is). This nonsense is easily shown for what it is by comparing the letters in these these fifteen verses. There are 115 letter differences between the text Jeffrey and other Bible-coders use and the Dead Sea Isaiah Scroll – the text closest to Isaiah’s own time.  Want proof?

• Click HERE to see these texts laid side by side.

If anyone is interested in my book, The Bible Code Myth (Only in PDF), you can order it here ($6).

Technorati Tags: Bible, bible code