Oldest Known Bible Goes Online
LONDON, England (CNN) — The world’s oldest known Christian Bible goes online Monday — but the 1,600-year-old text doesn’t match the one you’ll find in churches today.
The Codex also includes much of the Old Testament adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians.
Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament.
The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections — some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.
And some familiar — very important — passages are missing…
This article is from CNN.com and I don’t really agree with everything it says, but if you want to read more, see here.
The official website for the project is here.
Literature on Early Christian Priesthood
The FAIR Blog has a great post by Keller listing some of the best resources available on the internet regarding early Christian priesthood history and structure. He provides links to a large number of articles and presentations that have been given by LDS scholars on the topic. Much thanks to “Keller” for putting this valuable information together!
You can see the post here.
The Tree of Life as Nurturing Mother
Before moving on further into the contents of the Orphic Gold Plates, I would like to look with more detail into a motif touched upon in my last post in this series. I described how the Orphic inscriptions instruct the soul that they are to pass by the guardians in order to be able to meet Persephone, the “Mother Goddess” who will help them through the rest of their journey through the Netherworld. Although she was the mother of gods and mortals, her births were parthenogenic (virgin births). It seems that this Virgin Mother Goddess was an essential part of many ancient forms of initiation into the Mysteries, where she was seen as nursing the “newborn” initiate with milk. The Mother Goddess was often symbolically identified as the Tree of Life.
In an earlier post, I discussed the idea that the fountain of living waters (in the Orphic tablets identified as the waters of the goddess Mnemosyne), from which the soul must drink in order to secure its salvation, was also to be considered equivalent to the white tree, the Tree of Life. This connection is made explicit in the vision of Nephi (1 Ne. 11:25), where he explains:
And it came to pass that I beheld that the rod of iron, which my father had seen, was the word of God, which led to the fountain of living waters, or to the tree of life; which waters are a representation of the love of God; and I also beheld that the tree of life was a representation of the love of God.
In Egypt, the Tree of Life was often depicted as a goddess, or having a goddess within it, that nursed or poured forth living waters (or perhaps milk) to individuals.
In Nephi’s vision, remarkably, we also see this connection between the Tree of Life and the virgin mother. In 1 Ne. 11, Nephi is shown the exceedingly beautiful and white tree that his father had seen in his dream. When Nephi asks the Spirit for the interpretation of the tree, he is immediately shown a rather unusual (to us) image — he is shown a virgin as beautiful and white as the Tree of Life. This virgin, who we know as Mary, is presented to Nephi as “the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh” (1 Ne. 11:18). Mary had the baby Jesus in her arms, and although we aren’t given this detail, was conceivably nursing the Child. In response to his inquiry about the tree, this is what Nephi is shown — and he understands these images to represent the love of God. It is amazing how this Book of Mormon vision fits so perfectly the ancient conception of what the Tree of Life represented.
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