I wish someone would drill this sentiment into George Lucas’ head. He is, once again, going to mess with Star Wars, by digitally changing this and that. I wish he would stop it. The only improvement he has made on the 1977 original is to add a penumbra to the exploded Death Star. But he keeps tinkering. I don’t know what he’s planning to do this time. I heard He was going to replace Jabba the Hut with that talking GEICO lizard, that he was going to insert Jared from the Subway commercials into the saloon scene at Moss Eisley, and in a vulgar act of product placement, Han Solo will be seen pouring Castrol GTX into the Millennium Falcon – that’s what I heard anyway. Do the research and you will see that the Bible alone enjoys the vast, proximate and consistent textual support it does. We have the definitive edition, there is nothing to add, alter, or take away I’m glad that John Ford didn’t live long enough to insert a 5 ton space slug into She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (although Victor McLaglen in his long johns looks like a 5 ton space slug).Defenders of Lucas’ tinkering might point out that films like Blade Runner and Lawrence of Arabia have benefited from restored footage, that Walt Whitman was always adding poems to Leaves of Grass, and that Diego Velasquez retouched the early portraits he made of Phillip IV, making him handsomer after the two men became friends. To which I would reply that restoring a work to its original form, enlarging that work, or modifying it to reflect a kinder understanding is not the same as cutting-and-pasting every time you get a new toy.
The newly found Greek text of The Gospel of Judas, an early Gnostic gospel has made the press particularly giddy. Along with the release of the film version of Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code, we are being told that a new view of the Bible and of Jesus must be taken, that things were not as we have been taught they were. Of course these arguments are about as new as a back alley retread. Gnostic gospels have always been known, and people have tried to revise the life of Jesus to suit their particular theories since the first century. That is why John had to write: For many deceivers have come into the world, those who deny Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist (II John 7).
Jude (v.3) describes the faith as being “once for all delivered,” there are no additional truths to be revealed – it is all there. Certainly, parts of the Bible were written after Jude wrote his letter, but they added no theological twists to what had already been revealed. The Bible we have is the Bible, the word of God. There are no bits left for us to unearth somewhere. Each book is supported by hundreds of manuscripts, in the original languages, near the time of the original texts (Unlike the Gospel of Judas which had to be pieced together from fragments of a single Greek text). No book, ancient or modern, is as well founded on solid documentary evidence as the Bible. If you would like to know more about how the various books and letters were gathered into the one book we all carry, a good place to start would be The Canon of the New Testament, by Bruce Metzger, The Canon of Scripture, by F.F. Bruce, and How We Got the Bible, by Neil Lightfoot (he is our brother in Christ, and this book is currently on sale at Barnes & Noble for $7.95).
