MARCH 27, 2008 — Few topics like biblical "errors" can put well-meaning Christians at one another’s throats. Suggesting that the New Testament contains errors and contradictions are fighting words for some believers who are firm in their convictions that God is perfect … and therefore so is his word. But a Tennessee writer believes that rigid literalism is cheating black folks out of the truth about African friends of Jesus.
He claims “intentional errors” have been made in the Bible’s original manuscripts to obscure important truths about the faith and three “vitally important” New Testament figures — all of whom, he believes, are of African descent.
“Paradoxically,” says Randall Carter Gray, “some or many Christians have been kept from the truth by their refusal to believe the Bible contains errors. Biblical perfection is precisely what the enemies of Christianity want us to think … so that the very significant changes they’ve made to hide these unsung black heroes of early Christianity will be unsuspicious and therefore undetected.”
“And the truth, the true truth,” the writer contends, “is profound … and runs deep and wide, to borrow from a song I learned in Sunday school as a child. It has eschatological implications. It has profoundly racial implications … with our redemption at stake.”
Failure to acknowledge these errors, which Gray says appear mostly in the concluding chapters of all four gospels, is tantamount to saying that there is no evil which “very intently is at work to do us ill … even to the point of deceiving us so that it can **** us.”
So what are these errors? Gray calls them “John and Mary problems” — which he adds are “the telltale red flags that enemies of Christianity have been playing fast and loose with the truth” — altering names, in most cases, omitting large passages of text, rewriting others and putting New Testament figures “in places they shouldn’t be.” He added that “most likely these intentional Bible errors were committed within centuries after the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus “to dilute all that early Christianity accomplished thanks to Africans … and to rob Jesus of his deity and us of the miracle of his resurrection.”
The most glaring and probably the most important of these intentional biblical errors occurs in the Gospel of John in the scene at Golgotha, Gray said, the hill outside the city walls of Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified … and where a man named John, a.k.a. “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” and a woman named Mary, said to be the mother of Jesus, are told by Jesus to “behold” and embrace one another as a new son and a new mother.
“Within the hour after hearing these instructions from Jesus, John’s Gospel tells us, this man John and this woman Mary leave the scene, headed for John’s home, presumably still in Galilee, where John, the son of Zebedee, and his brother James, and their mother Salome, are from — Capernaum in Galilee, to be exact, nearly one-hundred miles from Jerusalem. That’s a long walk for Jesus’ mother at her age.”
So, where are the errors? Gray says they’re evident at the next two significant events in the ministry of Jesus: his resurrection and the empty tomb, and, his ascension on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem forty days later. The third-person descriptor “the other disciple” is used by the author of John’s Gospel to refer to himself, he points out.
“ ‘The other disciple’ is used three times in the opening verses of John 20, after Jesus has resurrected and Peter and ‘the other disciple’ run to the empty tomb. If ‘the other disciple’ is John, the son of Zebedee … he has already left with Jesus’ mother for Galilee!”
And then, Gray says, in Acts 1, Zebedee’s John and Mary, the mother of Jesus, are back in Jerusalem for the ascension … after Jesus had said he was going to meet everyone in Galilee. The angel who speaks to the full group of disciples after the ascension at the Mount of Olives addresses the group as “men of Galilee,” but, as Gray indicates, “they’re not in Galilee, but Jerusalem, and there are women present.”
“But the kicker is … after the ascension, when the group gets together for a prayer meeting, Mary, the mother of Jesus, is accompanied by her sons. Her sons! Why would Mary, the mother of Jesus, have needed Zebedee’s John to take care of her … if her sons, including James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem, were with her in Jerusalem after the ascension?”
So what’s to be made of this? “The people named John and Mary at the foot of Jesus cross were not John, the son of Zebedee, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, but John, of Cyrene, an African scholar, and his mother Mary … Jesus’ closest friends.
“This John, an African, was ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved,’ ” Gray asserts. “His mother, named Mary, was a wealthy African widow, who wrapped Jesus’ body in expensive linen. It was in their home where the last supper was held and where the disciples met for prayer during and after Jesus’ earthly ministry. This John was John Mark, who evangelized his native Africa and founded the Coptic Christian Church in Alexandria, Egypt. But we know nothing about him from the Bible … because of the successful efforts to hide him.”
But why? Why hide the fact that Jesus best friend was black?”
The Tennessee writer, who worked for a year in East Africa in 1974 as an intelligence specialist during civil war between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea, prefers, for now, to let people come to their own conclusions about why it has been hidden that Jesus’ best friend “was not an illiterate white fisherman with a big mouth” … but instead an African scholar, “who adopted the name Mark, which means ‘hammer’ in Greek … after witnessing the crucifixion of his dearest friend.”
