Why The Geneva Bible, 1560, Is Astonishing Me: Was God's Real Character Obscured in Later Translations?
Is God Much Nicer Than We've Been Told?
The headline of these readings is that the Geneva Bible was translated by dissident reformers who were in self-exile, in Geneva, Switzerland, in order to avoid martyrdom by Queen Mary, directly from the Hebrew; by people committed to getting God’s word into the hands of everyone, without mediation or institutionalization.
The Geneva Bible, and the Hebrew original to which I am comparing it, are both “blowing my mind”, as I wrote earlier, because these are completely different literary texts than are most received later translations of the Bible that I have read.
Specifically, throughout (at least up to Joshua, which is as far as I’ve read; I paused to re-read it to you all aloud from the start, with commentary) God in the Geneva Bible (and in the Hebrew) is much less punitive, much more tender and parental, much more patient and emotionally present, and far more reasonable and, frankly, lovable, than He appears to be in later translations. He is, at the risk of being offensive, hard to love or trust, from a human perspective, in later translations, in my humble experience; as He is inaccurately presented later often as being irrational, choleric, rigid, and focused on minutiae.
In comparing the Geneva Bible to the Jerusalem Bible (which I chose as a representative popular Bible that updates five centuries of Catholicism; hence, “the West”), and comparing both to the Hebrew original, I am astonished by how later translations concealed God’s tenderness toward His children and the intimacy of the human-God relationship! And also how later translations constantly foregrounded the religious institution as an institution, and inaccurately highlighted the role of the middlemen that came between humans and their Dad.
This mis-representation in later translations of the character of God — and, as a corollary, the consistent mis-representation in later translations of the role of human beings, as they morph from being (in the original Hebrew, and in the Geneva Bible) agents of personal responsibility who are always deeply loved, to being the hapless ciphers of sin and misery, in desperate need of middlemen to appease the wrath of the Master, that they later became - seems to be systematic and must be intentional at some level, as it is so consistent.
Did later translations deliberately obscure the fact of how much God loves us and wants us to thrive and do well, in His moral universe? This central message, if left un-obscured, would indeed (as it briefly did, before the 1560 Geneva Bible was censored) drastically alter the role of institutional religion, to being inevitably less central to humans than would be their active, dynamic, always-available relationship to a loving, everpresent God himself; and this message, if it had been left to descend to us intact through the centuries, would also have drastically empowered individual human beings.
This aspect of the Geneva Bible may well explain the courage of the Puritans, and the presumption, too, of the Founders, that they were entitled to build a New Jerusalem in the New World.
Please join me on this incredible journey as I read through the entire text, with commentary, and compare key passages to the Hebrew!
God is Divine Most High; Source. Anyone who has actually felt pure Divine Grace flowing through his/her consciousness comes out of the experience knowing that God has no ego, no need to be worshipped, to be feared, to be obeyed....Source is Divine and is all encompassing.
- In this time of the Great Revealing, the most difficult thing of all will be what comes out of the Israel/Vatican. Many good hearted people will have a very hard time dealing with the realization that their beloved Scriptures have been subverted in exactly the same way that the foundations of all other systems in the world have been subverted. The Divine Most High is always there....but beliefs built upon anything other than direct personal relationship with Divine (resulting in knowing that comes directly from Holy Spirit) have been deliberately manipulated. Belief in the way that it is understood today by society is an abdication of personal responsibility....the exact same abdication of personal responsibility that can be found in those who worship science and allopathic medicine. Beautiful people, look within yourselves and challenge your own cherished First Principles.
- A Dark Night of the Soul is coming for ALL of humanity and the form that it takes will be different for different people. Betrayals will spare no one. Regardless of how many different belief systems comfort each of us and help us to get through the chaos, at the end of the day we are all the same; we are human. And where we go one, we go all.
I’m in! Love that you’re doing this. Impeccable timing. We all need Him right now.