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An “Indian Bible” or a “Bible for India”?

An “Indian Bible” or a “Bible for India”?
April 28, 2009 @ 2:48 pm

By Tom Heneghan



[1]Annotated Bibles come in all shapes, sizes and standpoints. One of the most interesting recent examples is The New Community Bible in India. The novelty is not the text itself but the extensive footnotes comparing and contrasting Christian teachings with those of India’s main religions. Christians make up only 2.3% of India’s 1.1 billion population compared to 80% for Hindus and 13% for Muslims. The illustrations are also clearly Indian — in the drawing for the Flight to Egypt (at right), Mary wears a sari and a bindi [2] on her forehead while Joseph sports a turban.

The New Community Bible (NCB) stirred up some controversy when it was published, with official Church approval, by a Roman Catholic group in Mumbai last summer. A Protestant pastor called it [3] “a complete turn back from the real Bible.” Hindu natiotionalists denounced it [4] as a bid to convert Hindus to Christianity. A blog named after Hindu guru (CORRECTED: see comment below)Sathya Sai Baba warned [5] that Christian missionaries were “taking aim at India” with a “deceptive Bible and other questionable tactics.” . There was also criticism from Catholic laity, enough to prompt the bishops to order a study of the issue [6] and have the publisher hold off with a second edition. That’s too bad because the first edition quickly sold out.

During my recent visit to India, I got a look at a friend’s copy of the NCB and found it fascinating. Following are a few points that stood out while I paged through it (and a few not very professional photos I took of its illustrations):



In Genesis:

[7]After its opening “in the beginning,” the footnote observes: “Even in the Upanishad, some creation accounts open with the word ‘agre’ (at the beginning)…”
At the phrase “God saw that the light was good,” it notes: “Light is considered good and desirable also in the Vedas. The expression “TJ” is well known. Tamasoma jyotirgamaya…” Lead from from darkness to light… (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.3.28).”
After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve “become shamefully conscious of their nakedness and plan a cover-up from God (3:7-8). To use Indian terminology, they regress into avidya, that is nescience or lack of right perspective, which causes alienation and suffering.”
On Noah and the Flood – “There exist myths of the flood in almost every religion, and the Biblical aco**** shows some striking parallels to the Mesopotamian flood story. Satapath Brahmana (1.8.1-10) offers the earliest Indian version. The Mahabharata (3.187) also narrates a similar story.”
On the Tower of Babel — “For the Yahwist author, Babel meant confusion, a athetic symbol of the folly of human pride and self-sufficiency… We can find modern Babels all around us, constructed by the stinking rich and proud politicians. Instead of using wealth and power to creatively solve the real problems of the people, they use these to bolster their own images and pamper their presitge. To make a name for themselves, they ignore, nay, trample down on the legitimate rights of millions of poor and oppressed people. The resentment and revolt this causes is another sort of babel, confusion, alienation.”

[8] [9]Since it’s aimed at today’s Indians, Bollywood naturally rates a mention. At the end of the Book of Job, when God restores Job’s fortunes, a footnote comments: “Like in modern TV soap operas and box-office films from Bollywood, ‘God’ reenters in the form of a deus ex machina who, with a word and a magic wand, restores everything to its earlier felicity and Job lived happily ever after.”

Not all references are to Hinduism. In Matthew’s nativity account, the NCB notes: The Koran, written some six hundred years after the Gospels (about AD 650), affirms the virginal conception of Jesus – called Isa, probably an Arabic form of the Syriac version of his name (Sura 19:16-22). This forms part of the common belief of Muslims. Interestingly, Joseph is not mentioned in the Koran… The wise men were priests of the Zoroastrian religion, which used to be the religion of Persia before the country was taken over and converted by Islam. It now survives as the religion of the Parsees in India… For Matthew, the magi are the highly respected religious leaders, representing non-Jewish religions.”

The NCB notes that Mahatma Gandhi was inspired by the Sermon on the Mount and uses Jesus’s criticism of the Jewish purity laws as an opportunity to make a wider point about Indian society today: “The same kind of distinction underlies the caste system in India. The ‘dalits’ are treated as ‘untouchables’ by the so-called ‘clean’ castes, because the kind of work they do brings them into touch with ‘polluting’ things and so makes them in Hindu society ritually impure. Jesus completely abolishes this kind of purity/pollution distinction. He shows that true ‘purity’ (that is, fitness for worshipping God) does not depend on external things but upon the attitudes of the heart.”

The illustrations also make points about modern-day India. In the Exodus story of Moses and the burning bush, the NCB notes that God told Moses to take off his sandals because he was on holy ground. The accompanying illustration (below) shows modern footwear in front of a church, a mosque and Hindu and Sikh temples. “Every religion is deserving of our respect, even if we do not accept all of their cultural and social wrappings,” the footnote says. “As Mahatma Gandhi said, respect for other religions helps us to understand our own religion better.”

[10]

The NCB tries to explain Christianity in the Indian context, both to Christians living in a culture marked much more by other religions and Indians of other faiths trying to understand the Christians among them. Why should that be controversial?


http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/04/28/an-indian-bible-or-a-bible-for-india/

 I QUOTE Bloomfield here -
//. 267-276): ‘The descriptive Grammar of Sanskrit, which Panini, brought to its highest perfection, is one of the greatest monument of human intelligence and (what concerns us more) an indispensable model for description of languages. The only achievement in our field, which can take rank with it is the historical linguistics of the nineteenth century and this indeed owed its origin largely to Europe’s acquaintance with the Indian Grammar. One forgot that the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European languages got its start only when the Paninian analysis of an Indo-European language became known in Europe…If the accentuation of Sanskrit and Greek, for instance had been unknown, Verner could not have discovered the Pre-Germanic sound change, that goes by his name. Indo-European Comparative Grammar had (and has) at its service, only one complete description of a language, the grammar of Panini. For all other Indo-European languages it had only the traditional grammars of Greek and Latin woefully incomplete and unsystematic.’…//

swami Vivekananda on this subject.
From a speech given in Madras,
The Myth of Aryans and Non-Aryans
By Swami Vivekananda
"The mind jumps back several thousand years, and fancies that the same things happened here, and our archaeologist dreams of India being full of dark eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryan came from - the Lord knows where. According to some, they came from Central Tibet, others will have it that they came from Central Asia. There are patriotic Englishmen who think that they were all black haired. If the writer happens to be a black haired man, then the Aryans were all black haired.
Of late there have been attempts to prove that the Aryans lived on the Swiss lakes. I should not be sorry if they had been all drowned there, theory and all. Some say now that they lived at the North Pole. Lord bless the Aryans and their habitations. As for as the truth in these theories, there is not one word in our 
scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryans came from anywhere outside of India, and in ancient India was included Afganistan. There it ends. All the theory that the Shudras caste were all non-Aryans and they were a multitude, is equally illogical and equally irrational. It could not have been possible in those days that a few hundred Aryans settled and lived there with a few hundred thousand slaves at their command. These slaves would have eaten them up, made "chutney" of them in five minutes.
The only explanation can be found in the Mahabharatha, which says, that in the beginning of Satya Yuga there was only one caste, the Brahmanas, and then by difference of occupation they went on dividing themselves into castes, and that is the only true and rational explanation that has been given. And in the coming of the Satya Yuga all the other castes will have to go back to the same condition. The solution to the caste problem in India, therefore, assumes this form, not to degrade the higher castes, not to crush out the Brahmana."

Colin Renfrew, Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, Cambridge University Press, 1988, 
“IT IS DIFFICULT TO SEE WHAT IS PARTICULARLY NON-ARYAN ABOUT THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION.” 

Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Karachi & Islamabad : Oxford University Press & American Institute of Pakistan Studies, 1998) -“MANY SCHOLARS HAVE TRIED TO CORRECT THIS ABSURD THEORY [OF AN ARYAN INVASION], BY POINTING OUT MISINTERPRETED BASIC FACTS, INAPPROPRIATE MODELS AND AN UNCRITICAL READING OF VEDIC TEXTS. HOWEVER, UNTIL RECENTLY, THESE SCIENTIFIC AND WELL-REASONED ARGUMENTS WERE UNSUCCESSFUL IN ROOTING OUT THE MISINTERPRETATIONS ENTRENCHED IN THE POPULAR LITERATURE.”

I give-Historian M. G. S. Narayanan, who finds in Sangam literature –
“no trace of another, indigenous, culture other than what may be designated as tribal and primitive.” And concludes : 
“The Aryan-Dravidian or Aryan-Tamil dichotomy envisaged by some scholars may have to be given up since we are unable to come across anything which could be designated as purely Aryan or purely Dravidian in the character of South India of the Sangam Age. In view of this, the Sangam culture has to be looked upon as expressing in a local idiom all the essential features of classical “Hindu” culture. M. G. S. Narayanan, “The Vedic-Puranic-Shastraic Element in Tamil Sangam Society and Culture,” in Essays in Indian Art, Religion and Society, p. 128.

Nilakanta Sastri goes a step further and opines,
“There does not exist a single line of Tamil literature written before the Tamils came into contact with, and let us add accepted with genuine appreciation, the Indo-Aryan culture of North Indian origin.”

Why Bring the Artificial Aryan Nonsense Here- and I have to bring VIVEKANANDA’S VIEW HERE - //In India we have fallen during the last few centuries into a fixed habit of unquestioning deference to Authority. .. We are ready to accept all European Theories; “the theory of an “Aryan Colonisation of Dravidian India”; the theory of Nature Worship and Henotheism of the Vedic Rishis .. .. as if these Hazardous Speculations were on Par in Authority and Certainty with the law of Gravity and Theory of Evolution.
So Great is the force of Generalisation and widely popularised errors that all the world goes on Perpetuating the blunder talking of the Indo-European Races claiming or disclaiming Aryan Kinship and building on that basis of falsehood the most far-reaching Political, social or Pseudo Scientific Conclusion.’// -Swami Vivekananda
The Missionary minded Indologists who found that Sanskrit was Mother of Greek and Latin- which in turn were the Eldest of Most European Languages, and the amount of Depth and Knowledge in it brought the “Aryan” Invasion Myths- i.e., Indians are not capable of such a Wealth Language and Civilisation. It is a continual attack to run down India's great accomplishments and Civilisation...
Proper Study of Harappah and Mohanjadero now confirms that most of its Contents are Aryan, And the Speculation of the Seals being Proto Dravidian is weakening. Even the Die-hard Aryan Incoming Supporters put that from BCE7000- 1500. Linguists who worked with Tamil, popularly Identified as Dravidianists from Caldwell, Burrows etc., – All say Dravidians came around 3000 BCE and later to India from Outside. 
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA : “There is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryans ever came from anywhere outside India.... The whole of India is Aryan, nothing else.”
U.S. archaeologist Jim Shaffer puts it : “Current archaeological data do not support the existence of an Indo-Aryan or European invasion into South Asia any time in the pre- or protohistoric periods. Instead, it is possible to document archaeologically a series of cultural changes reflecting indigenous cultural developments from prehistoric to historic periods”
Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, biological anthropologist at Cornell University, U.S.A., who has worked extensively on Harappan sites to study human skeletal remains, concludes unambiguously : “Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any of the theories concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity.... What the biological data demonstrate is that no exotic races are apparent from laboratory studies of human remains excavated from any archaeological sites, including those accorded Aryan status [by the old school]. All prehistoric human remains recovered thus far from the Indian subcontinent are phenotypically identifiable as ancient South Asians.... In short, there is no evidence of demographic disruptions in the north-western sector of the subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture.”
J. M. Kenoyer, who is still pursuing excavations at Harappa, is even more categorical :There is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or mass migrations into the Indus Valley between the end of the Harappan Phase, about 1900 BC and the beginning of the Early Historic period around 600 BC.

Max Müller was a British agent, especially employed (in 1847) to write the translations of the Vedas in such a demeaning way so that the Hindus should lose faith in them. His personal letter to his wife dated December 9, 1867 reveals this fact. 2. He was highly paid for this job. According to the statistical information given on page 214 of the “English Education, 1798-1902” by John William Adamson, printed by Cambridge University Press in 1930, the revised scale of a male teacher was £90 per year and for a woman, £60 in 1853. The present salary of a teacher in London is £14,000 to £36,000 per year, which averages a minimum of at least 200 times increase in the last 146 years. Max Müller was paid £4 per sheet of his writing which comes to £800 of today (1999). This is an incredibly high price for only one sheet of writing. But it’s the general law of business, that the price of a commodity increases with its demand. The British were in such an imperative need to get someone to do this job and Max Müller was the right person, so they paid whatever Max Müller asked for. His enthusiastic letter to his mother dated April 15, 1847 reveals this fact. 3. Max Müller’s letters dated August 25, 1856 and December 16, 1868 reveal the fact that he was desperate to bring Christianity into India so that the religion of the Hindus should be doomed. His letters also reveal that: 4. He lived in poverty before he was employed by the British, (5) his duplicity in translation was praised by his superiors, and (6) in London, where he lived, there were a lot of orientalists working for the British. Letters of Max Müller. “The Life and Letters of Friedrich Max Müller.” First published in 1902 (London and N.Y.). Reprint in 1976 (USA). TO HIS WIFE, OXFORD, December 9, 1867. “…I feel convinced, though I shall not live to see it, that this edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what that root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years.” 
To Chevalier Bunsen. 55 St. John Street, Oxford, August 25, 1856. 

“India is much riper for Christianity than Rome or Greece were at the time of St. Paul. The rotten tree has for some time had artificial supports… For the good of this struggle I should like to lay down my life, or at least to lend my hand to bring about this struggle.

To the duke of Argyll. Oxford, December 16, 1868. 

“India has been conquered once, but India must be conquered again, and that second conquest should be a conquest by education. Much has been done for education of late, but if the funds were tripled and quadrupled, that would hardly be enough… A new national literature may spring up, impregnated with western ideas, yet retaining its native spirit and character… A new national literature will bring with it a new national life, and new moral vigour. As to religion, that will take care of itself. The missionaries have done far more than they themselves seem to be aware of.” 

“The ancient religion of India is doomed, and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?”
SO STOP THESE. 
On Veidc Influence on Old Testament.
Oxford University Professor and Renowned Scholar- A.H.Sayce- in his –The Herbert Lectures, 1887, Origin and Growth of Religions said- “ The sacred stone was Bethel or house of God, no habitation of mere spirit, but the dwelling place of deity itself. And these Pillars are holy to Semitic people and its branches. The Black stone present at “KHABHA” stands proof of this. The Arabic people had enormous faith on this and hence Muhammad did not try to crush this, but linked this with Biblical stories, and made holy in his religion.”

Again G.U.Pope- This worship of God (Generally some local deity) in connection with a stone or pillar, as marking a sacred spot, is found everywhere in Ancient records. See Genesis 28.. Thiruvasagam Pxi- foot note 11.
Gen 28- 16-22, 35:14 31:13, Joshua 24:26, 1Sam 7:12 all talk about Pillar Lingams, A Vedic pattern continued.
Ka.Su.Pillai has noticed this and written this in his book.
N.C.Kanthaiah Pillai, in his book0 Sivan has referred this and also the 1Kings12:28-33, Putting of Calf symbol is referred as putting Nandi as per Indian practice. 
The very name Sivan does not known to Tholkappiyar to sangam to Silapathikaram, where as Vedic Literature right from Rig has it.
I would add more from Blawatsky- who worked on Comparative Religion much more than any other in my next post.
The names of Hebrew months and other activities prove much more of its debt to Vedic ancestory, in my next posts.

JESUS AND VEDAS:
Rudolf Otta- book The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man- says
“The figure of a being who had to do with the world and who was subordinate to the primary, ineffable, remote andaborginial deity is of high antiquity among the Aryans …. The Phrase “ The Son of Man” pints back insome way (though Enoch) to influences of the Aryan East” and I quote this from Sarvapalli Radhakrishanan- Eastern Religions p 160-2.

Maxmuller –“ Many people, no doubt are much distressed in their minds when they are told Christianity is but a second edition of Buddism. Is it really true?, they ask, why did you not tell us before? “Studies in Buddhism” page- 77 

One of the Earliest Evidence for Vedas is from Persian Cuniform Tablet found in Egypt, EL-Amarna, which tells names of God Mithra, Varuna, Indra etc of Vedic origin correctly, now dated around 1700 BCE, Oxford Dictionary of World Religions dated Vedas to 1800 BCE, but on more rational approach giving atleast 300 years for spreading 2000 TO 600BCE is given for Vedas, by Entire Western Universities, which for common man can be verified from Wikipedia.com. Indic Culture existence is proved by Archealogy and Literature from Kumari- to Kashmir, Assam to Goa, but neglecting and coming in self inflicted False circles by few Tamil Groups is giving Lot of Bad name to Tamil.

Devaneyan has said:

"Iyarsol Thirisol Thisaisol Vadasolen
anaithe seiul ittach Solle" -Tholkappiyam Solathi1
Merkuriya Iyarsol Thirisol Thisaisol ennum mundruda, Edaikalaga(Sangaha) Kalathil Puthithai Vanthu Valanghiyaoru sila Vada Sorkal Tamilil Kalntha Ayanmozhi endra vakayil vadasorkal endre Koorap pattana. Akkalathil tamilir Kalantha Ayanmozhi Vadamozhi Ondre. Immuraipadiy Ikkalathilum Tamilir Kalntha Angila sol, Portukesia sol, muthaliavarrai Avvam Mozhi peyalral Angilasol, Portukesiyasol enak kural vendume andri Thisai sorkal enak kooruthal koodathu. Page 9,10-Thiravidathai.
Pavanar maintained this in all his books he wrote over 50 years of his research. I AM Confident that his Knowledge to interpret Tamil verses of Tholkappiyar is OK.

Nalvetham or Nanmarai, Arangam Agamam enbana ellam Arya Noolkale enbathum, Thirukural thavira ippothulla Pandai Noolkalellam Anthanar enbathum Brahmararie Kurikkum Enpathu Sariye. Page- 102 Tamilar Matham. 

Samaskrithtil Thalai sirantha illakana Noolakia Paniniyam, Paniniyal BCE4m Noorandile eyarrpattathu. Ilakkana Noolai Viyakaranam enbar vadanoolar. Annoolirku mun ENN Ilakkana Noolkal Iyarrpattathuakach chollap padukindrthu. Avarrul Muthalathu Vetha Kalthathu enpadum Iyendiram" 
- Tamilar Varalaru Page 56,57.