The Bible here is, so to speak, the starting point. The Old Testament, written down as the Septuagint, was already in writing two hundred years before Christ. Unfortunately, much has since been deleted, downgraded, or added by commissions or simply other dignitaries. One pope even found it important to delete part of the Bible because it took up too much paper and then insert a verse into both the Old and New Testaments so that posterity would remember it. These are preserved to this day in the Catholic and Protestant versions of the Bible as the Word of God.

The translation here, which I have made using my own knowledge, is neither scholarly, endorsed by any Bible society, nor agreed upon with any church.

In my translation, I work similarly to many underground Christians (more on that later), using so-called conjugation or declension tables. One essentially searches tables of the 20,000 most frequent words. This is now done by computer.

in all their grammatical variations. Until 1975, the sheer amount of work involved putting everything into an alphabetical index and then going through it word by word. Even back then, the result was that you had the root of the word and its grammar.

Today, this whole process can be automated very effectively and is now done with the entire vocabulary. However, you still have to check everything, which took me quite a long time. The other task is searching through all the manuscripts to establish 397 as the reference year, but I received support from Chinese Christians for this.

I only used the three obsolete characters from very early Greek—stigma (6), koppa (90), and sampi (900)—for their numerical value, since these characters had long since ceased to be used when the Septuagint was written.

I deliberately refrained from interpretations, such as in Genesis 26:13, where I translated μείζων as "great" and not, as in many translations, as "rich," because this makes sense in the context. I deliberately refrain from interpretations. If, as in Genesis 35:20 and 35:22, a verse is missing, I have translated it as *and it appeared evil before him*, since this only occurs in some scripts. In the case that a verse does not appear in the Septuagint, as in Ezekiel 1, verse 14, I simply note that. Where there are two different versions of the scripts, I have added an a, b, c, etc., after the verse, but this is not intended as a judgment as to which verse is correct. An extreme example of this is Joshua 9:2 or 3 Kings 2:35. I also deliberately not add words even if I find it hard. An Example is Joshua 21 vers 22 where the Manuscript states: “καὶ τὴν Καβσαϊμ καὶ τὰ ἀφωρισμένα τὰ πρὸς αὐτῇ καὶ τὴν ἄνω Βαιθωρων καὶ τὰ ἀφωρισμένα αὐτῇ, πόλεις τέσσαρες.”, which I translated “and Kibzaim and the lands set apart by it, and upper Beth-horon and its set-apart lands, four cities.” Instead of “and Kibzaim and the lands set apart by it, and upper Beth-horon and its set-apart lands and four cities. ”, as ther is only one καὶ in the script.

The reasons for this unconventional style of Bible translation are manifold.

For one thing, I have long wanted the Bible in English to reflect how it was

in the time of Christ, and for this reason, I deliberately removed all scripts that were added or rewritten after the 4th century without any indication of a church's influence.

Additional motivation came from a meeting with North Korean Christians who, using similar methods to those I employed (as described above), produce the Bible from texts considered historical scholarly documents and therefore exempt from censorship, as censorship often fails to identify ancient languages like Ancient Greek.

What then emerges in some countries is often no longer banned, as it is considered homegrown.

When banning the Bible, those in power are often only concerned with suppressing foreign propaganda, which, unfortunately, is often not far from the mark in a historical context. From these Christians, however, I also learned how important the original canon is, which was fully recognized by all before every denomination created its own Bible. Ultimately, the reason is that I want to read an unabridged Old Testament in German, which is simply more relaxing than reading it in Ancient Greek.

For improvements and bug reports (of which there will be many), simply send me an email to snosser at gmail.com

Cay Hasselmann