GENESIS

The book of Genesis is about 60 pages long. It starts with the Creation an ends with death of Josef. The Israelites had migrated to Egypt because of the famine, that had struck the Promised Land. Genesis is the first of the books of Moses; the others being Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deutoronomy. Together they form the Torah, the laws of Moses and are most important to the Jews, who call it “the Talmud”. In total (in my bible) 250 pages. The Israelites state that the Old Testament had not been changed from around 400 BC. Every new synagogue needed a handwritten copy and this tradition is kept until this moment. Highly skilled scribes and control mechanisms result in perfect copies. The Islam claims the same purity for the Qur'an. Immediately after the death of the prophet (pbuh), his recitations were written down. This makes the Qur'an, according to Muslim religious teaching, superior to the Bible. Especially the New Testament.

They have a point. The first official content of the Holy Bible was the product of political conspiracy by Constantine the Great. In 323 the bishops of the Christian communities made their choice. Only four gospels were admitted, even though we now know, that many gospels circulated in the early Christian church. The gospel of Simon, Thomas, Maria Magdalene and Judas were dismissed and disappeared into history. But we still don't know, how the New Testament was composed. Emperor Constantine ordered 40 copies of the “new” Bible, but none of those made it. The first official Bible, we know of, is a Codex out of the fifth century.

Moses needed only a few words, to describe the creation of our reality. And even these few sentences have been a much debated issue. And I am far away from the original. My personal bible is a translation of a translation of a … It's not the word of God, but the world of a religious community. To them God created our universe out of nothing. I tend to disagree. I believe that God had material to work with. The empty earth, the darkness and the waters. All these elements needed a spark of light to let the world come into existence. You can call it a Big Bang, if you want to.