Another Christian tradition is Good Friday. Any serious Biblical scholar will tell you that Christ was crucified on Wednesday and was buried for three full days and three full nights before his resurrection. Yet, because of tradition, the Christian church celebrates this on Friday and people believe it by blind faith, when even a child knows that Friday evening to dusk on Sunday is not three full days. Traditions, traditions, and more traditions. Jesus himself commented on how traditions of men render the word of God powerless. Over time, traditions are accepted as fact and the longer people repeat traditions that are false, eventually the majority of society will accept them as truth.

It is human nature to believe that which our elders have taught us as children. Most of the time, we rarely question what we are taught in church or synagogue. Back before the reformation, only the priests and the clergy studied the scriptures thus the masses had to trust the religious scholars and the church leadership’s interpretation of scriptures. In the Catholic Church, the scriptures were translated into Latin under Roman influence but Latin was a language very few in the west could read or understand. After Martin Luther had his revelation that mankind is redeemed by faith and not works, the Protestant church was born and proclaimed a freedom from the traditions of the Catholic Church.

However, in no time at all, the Protestant churches made up their own traditions and built their own denominations, which rarely agree on the meaning of the scriptures. Followers of Martin Luther became Lutherans, followers of Calvin became Calvinists, followers of Wesley became Methodists and so on until today there are hundreds of denominations just in the Protestant faith alone. Why so much disagreement?

The King James English Bible was written so any layperson could read the scriptures for themselves. However, the men who translated the King James Bible from the original Hebrew had to make many judgments as a word in Hebrew could have multiple meanings and thus could be translated numerous ways into English. While the scriptures may have been Divinely inspired, the human brains of the males doing the translating were not infallible. This has lead to endless debates and arguments and thus theological splits within the church. It is obvious to me that the translators of the English Bible (while their intentions were no doubt admirable) didn’t always make the correct choices in their translations. This is especially true when it comes to the origin and the nature of the sexes. The translators of the King James English Bible no doubt believed in a Patriarchal society and this biased perspective influenced how they translated words from the Hebrew and Greek into English. Fortunately today, there are a number of other translations of the English Bible and anyone can research the original Hebrew and Greek meanings of scriptures through a Bible Concordance.