In my King James Version (Matthew: 16v18) Jesus says, “And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church.” Jesus is said to have spoken only Aramaic, a Semitic language of the larger Afro-Asian group. This quote in Matthew 16, 18 is a play on words, a pun, only in Greek and in no other language on the face of the Earth, involving a Greek word, petra, meaning “rock” and the name of the person to whom Jesus was speaking, Peter. Moreover, the original language of this gospel was Hebrew - Matthew was not the author and it was written between 80 and 90AD, some 30 years after Matthew’s death – the plot thickens, as they say!
Another linguistic anomaly involves the very unlikely event of virgin birth. In Isaiah 7:14 it is written “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel.” When we say that some thing was lost in the translation we do not know how important that “thing” might have been.
In this instance the Hebrew word for “virgin” was bethulah, but that was not used in the book of Isaiah – the Hebrew word that was used was “almah” meaning only a very young woman. In subsequent translations into Greek, “virgin” was inserted where “very young woman” might have been more appropriate. This led to the religious dogma, embodied in most creeds, that the birth canal of the holiest virgins is only a one-way street, from womb to vulva.
Talk of translation reminds me of an anecdote that made the rounds a few years back. An abbot in charge of the copying section of a large monastery suddenly left his desk and went into the basement of the monastery where all the original manuscripts were stored. After about two hours, his deputy, who was concerned at the length of time his chief had been away, went down to the basement and found the abbot slowly banging his forehead against the wall and sobbing. He asked the old abbot what the problem was. Through his sobs, the abbot pointed to a word in one of the manuscripts and said,”That word in the original was celebrate – some idiot back in the Middle Ages copied it as celibate!“
I read recently a report in which the number of gods who have existed since humankind started worshipping deities is plus or minus 2,700. Therefore Christians, which includes Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other assorted cults or sects, Jews who stand alone and Muslims, are atheistic about 2,699 of them. Atheists go one god further and deny the existence of the entire family of gods. That works in percentage terms to a difference in atheistic sentiment between devoutly religious and avowed atheists of .000371. We are not really that far apart, are we?