"This translation unmasks historic twisting of the original Gospel message to support particular beliefs. It will be as controversial as John Wycliffe's first translation into English which was declared illegal for anyone to read by the church which had him declared a heretic." The Bible for a long time has been the world's number one selling book. Since the first English translation in 1380, more than 630 years ago, there have been around 150 English translations. So why do we need another one? Author, scholar, poet and grammar expert Christopher Sparkes from Petersfield, has spent twenty years painstakingly going back to the original Greek and Hebrew, and has identified "a thousand blunders" which have been repeatedly left uncorrected. Over the centuries, as translators strived to make the language more "modern" and understandable, so many errors and mistranslations have occurred that many of the original meanings have been obscured, or even lost. The acid test, according to Sparkes, is that if you translate the English versions back to their original Greek or Hebrew, they are too often nowhere near the original. So what has gone wrong? The problem facing translators is that they already knew - or thought they knew - the stories and teachings they were translating, so when the original Greek or Hebrew didn't quite fit with them, they "fidgeted" the words to make them fit with what they believed. Words have been added, taken away or changed to fit with specific creeds or beliefs. As George Gershwin wrote "The things that you're liable to read in the Bible - it ain't necessarily so!" Christopher Sparkes has taken a different approach, using "Deep Grammar, Transcendent Logic, Internal Harmony, and Diamond-Mining Research", to unpick the locks, untangle the barbed wire, and discover the meanings of Greek and Hebrew words and phrases which have been wrongly translated in every single English version. A brave thing to do as, over the centuries, men have been hunted down and assassinated by being burned at the stake for daring to translate into English or tamper with the established Latin Vulgate translation of Jerome in 390 AD.
