I was having a little discussion with someone who read my last postings and insisted, using Biblical references, that Satan and Lucifer were the same angel, and that Lucifer was thrown out of heaven because of his pride. Well we know how touchy the God of the Old Testament is about anyone else having a smidgeon of authority, or any other deity having any living followers, so the story has a ring of authenticity, mythologically speaking.
However, my well worn and cherished English Bible is the King James Version, and it says on the front page “ Translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and revised.” And this elegantly phrased statement was not what happened.
To begin with, the translators used mainly the then current translations from the Hebrew that were already around in Latin, Greek and English. So it is a problem for literalists like my acquaintance when the name Lucifer pops up in Isaiah 14:12, where it is the only time Lucifer is mentioned in the Bible, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!"
Those people who think that God dictated the Old Testament in English have no problem with such a verse. Those who realize that Lucifer comes from two Latin words, lucem ferre, bringer of light, will have a problem.
Isaiah was supposed to be written in Hebrew, which it was, and centuries before Rome and Latin came to power, which it was. What then was a Latin name doing in the middle of the text? It’s a bit like Romeo calling Juliet on a cell phone…totally in the wrong time, anachronistic is the crossword puzzle answer.
The answer to the riddle is simple. The translators had already made up their mind that the verse referred to a fallen angel, who was not even mentioned in the Hebrew text, and they called him Lucifer. There is an interesting thread to follow for those interested in the truth about things.
In the Hebrew, that chapter in Isaiah is not about an angel, it’s about an ex-king of Babylon, renowned for his wealth and the splendor of his reign, who had persecuted the children of Israel during his lifetime. The chapter is jeering at the now dead ruler, as only temporarily a bright light. There is no mention of Satan…the adversary, by name or reference. The whole story was made up by the translators. But why Lucifer? There things become much clearer.
In the Hebrew the king is described as Helal son of Shahar, which is translated as “Day star, son of the Dawn” This is a laudatory term describing the wealth and luxury of his court, rather like Louis XIV of France whose glittering court and personal adornments gave him the name “Sun King” in Europe.
Well, in Roman astronomy Lucifer was the name given to the brilliant Venus, when she appeared temporarily just before dawn as the herald of the rising sun. The English scholars used St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the scriptures, not the Hebrew version when translating that part of Isaiah. In the 4th century when Jerome came across the “Day star, son of the Dawn” stuff he translated it into Latin as Lucifer, the Latin name for Venus, the morning star. By the usual monkish methods and centuries of misdirection the morning star became a disobedient angel who was thrown out of heaven and given rule over hell.
The concept of the Fall of even a celestial being due to sin became an opportunity too much to miss, and Christian traditions now link Lucifer with Satan, another invention, and ironically enough, the Herald of the Light has become the Prince of Darkness. But Jerome hadn’t done anything particularly wrong, nor did the translators of the Hebrew into the Greek in the 3rd century BC translation called the Septuagint. They used the term ‘heosphoros’ which also means Venus, the morning star.
So, the name Lucifer in its Latin meaning as morning star, the light bringer, can take away the confusion for Christians who remember that in Revelation 22:16 Jesus says “I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.”
To those who believe that the Word of God is infallible, and that God inspired the King James Version, it looks as if Jesus is saying that he is Lucifer, and so He is. But Lucifer is not the monkish invention of a diabolical angel, Lucifer is the bringer of light. And the error didn’t happen until after Jerome’s translation into the Latin.
So the problem of the Christians is that they believe that Satan and Lucifer are the same being, and quote the single Isaiah verse to prove it. A similar problem occurs when they try to use another verse from Isaiah to prophecy the advent of Jesus and invent the doctrine of the virgin birth. But that’s another story.
The Greek from which the “A virgin shall conceive…” verse comes uses the word ‘parthenos’ which means a virgin, medically speaking. The Hebrew word means young woman of marriageable age. Quite a difference. The Virgin Mary cult is the result of not using the Hebrew.
In context, the virgin verse is a prophecy about the time it will take for the king’s foreign policy to be in ruins…about nine months. Taking verses out of context is a favorite trick of religionists.
But there is also another, and much more modern religion that has a problem because of the Isaiah /Lucifer verse. When the amazing imagination of Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon it was supposed to be a translation of an ancient and original work using the magic of the seer stone.
But Joseph did not translate anyone's original words. He copied great swathes from the King James Version and among them included the word Lucifer in his Book of Mormon. The doctrine of the Church of Latter Day Saints affirms the idea that Lucifer means Satan, and The Pearl of Great Price, another received scripture of the LDS, which is a pure fabrication from start to finish, also touches on Lucifer when it talks about a war in heaven. How did all this happen?
When Joseph was in Ohio he visited the town of Kirtland, where the Mormon church was beginning to evolve. In town was a kind of carnival show that had an exhibit of four Egyptian mummies. The owner of the carnival showed Joseph some Egyptian papyri that came with the mummies. Now Joseph claimed to be able to read all ancient languages using his amazing seer stone, and he looked at the papyri and told the other Church members that they were the actual work of Abraham, it was in fact, he said, the Book of Abraham.
He said that he could recognize some of the symbols and that with further study he could probably translate the whole thing. That was in 1835. The Mormon Church bought the manuscripts from the delighted carnival owner for $2,400, a lot of money in 1835.
Joseph later reported to the happy Church folk that their purchase had paid off and that the papyri contained some long lost writings of Abraham. His full translations of the papyri were published as The Pearl of Great Price and became official Mormon scripture in 1880.
It was in 1799 that the Rosetta Stone was brought to France after Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. It was many years after before any scholars in Europe could read hieroglyphics. Certainly NOBODY in America could read hieroglyphics in 1880. To the Mormons this was evidence of the supernatural ability of their prophet, not of his deceit.
The original papyri disappeared from view, rather as the Golden plates from which the amazing linguist, Smith, had translated the Book of Mormon from the Reformed Egyptian language. But in 1967 the original papyri were discovered in the vaults of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Mormon archaeologist who had, with great integrity and faith vainly dug all over America to find remnants of the great civilizations mentioned in the Book of Mormon, was delighted. Here at last was possible public proof.
He sent copies of the papyri to universities West and East for translation, without comment. All translations were pretty much equivalent and showed them to be standard funerary inscriptions, nothing whatever to do with Abraham, and nothing whatever like Joseph’s inspired ‘translation.’ The Pearl of Great Price was a totally made up piece of fiction, although it was now part of the Mormon canon, like the Book of Mormon from the same source.
I was shown this book by a Mormon, anxious for my opinion on another book that had been published about it. He also had a copy of the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar that Joseph prepared. Whatever you think about Joseph you cannot but admire his industry. He followed on his deception even to the extent of writing a book about the non existent language.
My own knowledge of hieroglyphics is limited to what I picked up from Gardiner’s huge book many years ago when I collected Egyptian antiquities, but I certainly recognized the diagrams called facsimiles, as the sort of thing found in inscriptions of the Book of the Dead and funerary paintings. Neither Joseph nor anyone else in America had the faintest idea of what the papyri said at the time he ‘translated’ them.
I pulled out one of my standard illustrated Egyptian texts, and showed the astonished Mormon a picture of the god Anubis embalming a dead person, with the canopic jars under the table and the bird like ba of the dead one. It was pretty much like many such pictures from Egypt. But Joseph figured out that in the Mormon picture Anubis was a priest about to sacrifice Abraham, the funerary jars containing the organs of the corpse were idols, and the birdlike ba (soul) of the deceased became the Angel of the Lord. The rest of his translations went even deeper into the realms of his fertile imagination. The whole translation was ludicrous.
It was enough to make one suspicious of the Book of Mormon. In case you haven’t read this most boring of all scriptures that seems to contain all the really boring parts of the Bible as its foundation, here is a minimal summary of the story.
According to the Book of Mormon one of the lost tribes of Israel migrated to America around 600 B.C. Joseph Smith assures his readers that these Jews, the Lamanites, were the principal ancestors of the American Indians. Like so many humans they lost their faith but all was saved when Joseph was visited by the angel Moroni who loaned Joseph the golden tablets that held their story. Joseph, by his ‘seer’s stone’ translated the language, which he called Reformed Egyptian, and the Book of Mormon was born.
Now the Egyptian translations have been found to be totally fraudulent, like the Grammar, and no remains of the powerful Lamanite civilizations have been found in any of the places indicated in the Book of Mormon despite dedicated and expert search. And recent research has shown that there is no connection whatever between the DNA of the Native Americans and that of the Jews.
The academic paper titled "Lamanite Genesis, Geology and Genetics." was published in "American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon." Murphy, the author is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington, where his dissertation work focuses on how the Mormons refer to Native Americans.Every researcher agrees that Native Americans arrived here from Asia from 7000 to 50000 years ago.
It takes a very dedicated believer to avoid the obvious conclusion from all this validated data. Joseph Smith was a con artist who intended to deceive, and did it brilliantly in the 19th century.
But in this century there is knowledge available that shows that the whole religion is based on fraud. As are others, which nevertheless contain good people whom you would like as neighbors. I don’t knock people who were programmed as children to believe the nonsense that all the adults around them believe. But the basis of their beliefs is nothing to do with facts. I would not like someone who could now still believe in the truth of the Book of Mormon, to be my government representative in situations where intellect and reasoning were required.
All of these dots are connected easily as soon as you realize that Lucifer was a Latin word supposed to be translated from a Hebrew text. There are many such dot connections to be made when studying the growth of religions and their dogmas.
The truth of a scripture cannot be proven by any scientific or archaeological evidence, but its falsity can be so proven, but not to the tiny group who can accept no evidence that shakes their comfort zone.
Now the only effect of such scientific discoveries and historical research will be to diminish the number of people who cling to the fiction on which their religion is based. But the fewer the numbers become the firmer the faith of the few in their beliefs. Fundamentalist sects often split into smaller and smaller groups over some translation of a specific verse. There is never any attempt to compromise. It was only very recently for example that the American Flat Earth Society finally caved in to the light of research. It survived even the voyages of the Russian cosmonauts for quite a long time.
Scientists aren’t immune to this very human trait either. The current crop of experts defend their theories with brilliant ingenuity until facts are uncovered that can no longer be ignored or inserted into the modified theory. Usually this takes a generation. But it always happens in science eventually. It never seems to happen in religion.
Scientists modify their theory of how evolution occurred in the plant and animal kingdom. They do this because of newly discovered and validated facts. Creationists and other such are immune to any facts. Nothing will change their view. This is the difference between a religion based assertion and a scientific theory. It is the strength of the theory that it is modified by facts. It is the weakness of the assertion that facts are ignored.
Three of the current presidential hopefuls have stated that they don’t believe in evolution. I tremble for whatever future is left to this country. We have all noted this aspect of human behavior in the invulnerability of the current administration to facts. Nothing seems to be able to change their original assertions, which were not based on facts, and the results are, as in the case of fact resistant religions, very troubling to the future survival of humanity as a species.
A fertile and creative imagination doesn’t always have to be applied to deceive, but maybe the DNA of the Joseph Smith branch of the family had a predilection for this. Check my posting of 11/19/2006 What you EXPECT is what you see, which is about the charismatic Cyrus Teed, Joseph Smith’s cousin, who also invented a religion that lasted certainly into the 1990’s, and was also totally spurious from a factual point of view. Yet thousands of Americans believed it and even founded a town based on its tenets. Its journal was still being published in the 1990’s.
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