RELIGIONS THAT FALSIFY THEIR SCRIPTURES SHOULD BE CRIMINALISED

If publishers produced editions of Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul, with interpolations they have created then they will be regarded as no better than thieves and cheats. The people who buy their books thinking they are authentic versions of The Conquest of Gaul will be entitled to take them to court if necessary to get their money back.

Religion uncannily gets away with selling bastardised scriptures. Separation of Church and state goes too far when civil authorities overlook this problem. Real separation of Church and state urges the state not to let a religion blatantly defraud.

The state may tolerate a religion telling lies up to a point but letting it sell scriptures that it has interfered with and corrupted is just not on. If the religion admits clearly on the cover that the copy is its own version and not the real version that is okay.

It is known that Protestant Bibles such as the Wycliffe Bible and others have been deliberately mistranslated to back up the theologies of Protestantism.

The Vulgate

The Roman Catholic Church made the Vulgate its official Bible.

The Vulgate was sold by the Roman Catholic Church. This Bible is actually an altered one. It contains fake verses that speak of the three persons being one God. And also, as penance is never mentioned in the Bible it alters some statements about repentance so that they talk about doing penance.

And after the Protestant Reformation, the Church selected many but not all of the works of the Apocrypha and added them to its list of Bible books. A Bible with alterations is bad enough but one with books that should not be there is worse! The selection was a bit arbitrary for the Apocrypha's Prayer of Manasseh was left out.

The Jehovah's Witnesses and their Bible

The Jehovah's Witnesses produce and sell the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. This Bible has been deliberately mistranslated in order to make it support the sect's distinctive tenets.

The sect goes against all the Greek scholars in the world by translating, "In the beginning was the word and the word was God" as, "In the beginning was the word and the word was a god." This was an attempt to avoid saying Jesus Christ, the word, was God.

The Mormons and their Bible

The Mormons believe that Joseph Smith their Prophet had the miraculous power to translate ancient scripture texts. He added a story of Adam's baptism by immersion and a prophecy about the coming of Joseph the Prophet - himself! to the Old Testament. He gave no evidence that he possessed the power to translate so he should be considered to be a fraud.

He even altered the text of the Book of Mormon! The book passed off as the Book of Mormon is not the Book of Mormon but a corruption of it. His Book of Mormon originally read, "The virgin whom thou seest is the mother of God." Joseph Smith changed this later to "mother of the Son of God." This changes the meaning of the text drastically. The first makes it clear that Jesus is God and the second does not. Even the Bible makes it clear that it is not necessarily calling Jesus God by calling him the Son of God.