not included in the Hebrew canon such as 1st and 2nd Esdras, Tobit, Judith, The rest of the Book of Esther, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Bel and the Dragon, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, Baruch, etc.) and completed the work using Origen's edited New Testament. These were prepared for Constantine on fine vellum and backed by the stamp of the Roman government. The vellum (animal skin) was of such high quality that one antelope would be used just to make two sheets of finished product. Only the throne would have had sufficient funds to pay for such an undertaking.
THE INQUISITION
What does this have to do with Vaticanus B and Sinaiticus Aleph? The Roman Catholic Church has tried for years to destroy Protestantism and return all Christendom under Rome's Authority. Millions of people were put to death, not in war, but by various means of torture and murder during the Inquisition. The Roman church, using the Inquisition, made Adolph Hitler look like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Hitler murdered six million Jews - a most heinous sin and crime - but during the Inquisition from just after 1200 to around 1750 A.D. as many as sixty eight million human beings were cruelly slain, all in the name of God! A sizable number of the slain were themselves Roman Catholics who had been falsely accused for political and selfish motives. It was a blood bath, a horror story!
Most of the major wars fought in Europe beginning in the middle 1500's and extending for several centuries were conducted for the purpose of bringing the Protestants back under the dominion of the Pope. Then, in 1870, when it was decided by a portion of the Church to "update" the Bible of the Reformation which had brought about the breaking away from Romanism (that wicked system that had strangled Tyndale and burned his body, that had murdered sixty-eight million people who would not bow to it, that had slaughtered 70,000 people at one time in the St. Bartholomew's day massacre) the Great Whore said in effect: "You Protestants are going to update your Bible? Here, look what we just found on the Vatican shelf. Would you like to use Vaticanus B to assist you toward that end?" Yet the revisors were not even the least suspicious. Is not that amazing? When a similar ploy was tried on Erasmus in 1515, he saw through it. Why should the Vatican suddenly want to help the Reformers? We shall examine why presently.
What then are Vaticanus B and Sinaiticus Aleph? They are two extant (still existing) MSS of the original fifty which Eusebius had copied out for Constantine beginning in 331 A.D.1 Of course, Eusebius did not copy them personally but oversaw and supervised the work. B was discovered in 1481 in the Vatican library. Tischendorf, a German text critic, discovered Sinaiticus Aleph in a waste basket at a monastery near the foot of Mount Sinai in 1844. They are derived from Origen's fifth column of the Hexapla and his New Testament. Again, Origen was the "Christian" infidel who deliberately altered Biblical text and, with the aid of fourteen stenographers, changed it to fit his own beliefs.
JEROME AND THE LATIN VULGATE
There is one more piece of the puzzle to be added. Jerome, the hermit of Bethlehem, was commissioned by Pope Damasus to revise the entire Latin Bible. Jerome completed the Gospels around A.D. 384. About 386, he came to Jerusalem under the auspices of the Church at Rome and began to update the Old Latin Bible. What did Jerome use as his standard for this task? Jerome based his Old Testament primarily on the Hebrew text in Origen's Hexapla and admits to using the other columns (his 5th and those of the Ebionites) to "correct" the text. He relied heavily upon Origen's edited New Testament to finish the revision. The entire work was completed c.405.
1 David Otis Fuller, Which Bible?, op. cit., p. 163. Both Hort and Tischendorf believed that these were two extant copies which Eusebius had prepared. A.T. Robertson, among many others, concurs: Introduction to Textual Criticism, op. cit., p. 80.
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