Acts 1:6-14; John 17:1-11

[W]hy do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.

Jesus had been lifted up into heaven and then a cloud took him out of sight. Two men in white appeared and told the disciples that Jesus would return in the same way that he had left. This is what we are told in the Acts of the Apostles, an account of what the disciples did in the time after Jesus.

And so, we wait. We wait for Jesus to return. Maybe not all of us wait actively. Maybe some have that idea in the back of their minds, but not as a day-to-day concern. Maybe some do not give it a second thought. And maybe some have their doubts. Should I really be listening to a bunch of strangers dressed in white?

Notice that the disciples asked Jesus when he was going to restore Israel. “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” But Jesus said it was not for them to know. Not until after they were filled with the Holy Spirit–that reading is next Sunday if you were wondering.

Again, Jesus tells them to wait just like the two men in white would tell them to wait. Men in white is Bible code for angels, by the way. Therefore, we have it on good authority that Jesus will be coming back. Good authority as set forth in the Bible a couple of thousand years ago. We do not know when, of course, but at least we know how. For that is what we have been told.

This past week I had a question posed to me. The question was about how worried we should be about artificial intelligence. I started to explain how I thought our dependence upon technology might be a problem. How that technology is at risk of being controlled by computer-based forms of interference. But that was not the concern.

The worry was that artificial intelligence is becoming effective at generating false images, false video, false speeches. And as that false information becomes better and better—or worse and worse depending on your view—it will in time become difficult to trust what we see and hear.

You could make a song or a performance so much like the real singer or performer that you could not tell the difference. You could make a public figure seem to say something damaging or outrageous or misleading. You could be lied to in such a convincing fashion that your sense of what is real might be shaken. How would you know who or what to trust in a world filled with so many counterfeit words and images?

I must agree that this is a concern. For someone accustomed to trusting what they see, what they hear, what they read, it is truly a challenge to know that it is possible to mimic the sounds and words and images around us. However, I think there are ways of approaching this problem. There are modern ways, but there are also ancient ways. And so, I will start off with a medieval story.

The religious scholar and theologian Erasmus was notable for many achievements. He was an early Protestant, even before the Reformation arguably began. He was an advocate for free will and the important role of human beings in their own spiritual salvation. He was a Christian humanist, having both faith in God and admiration for humanity. But for our purposes today, the key aspect of Erasmus’ life was his education: he was able to read and to write in Ancient Greek. He had those skills at a time when these were rare abilities in Western Europe.

Ancient Greek was the province of the Eastern Christian Church. In the West, religious and scholarly matters were conducted exclusively in Latin. However, the New Testament was originally written in Ancient Greek, with a few minor appearances of Aramaic. And yet the medieval Catholic Church used a Bible printed in Latin and, honestly, it generally still does.

But the Renaissance was beginning to take shape in the time of Erasmus. An appreciation for new knowledge was in fashion, even if that new knowledge was quite ancient. The scholarship and philosophy of the Ancient Greeks became of particular interest and these challenged many medieval assumptions about many topics.

And so, in keeping with this renewed interest, Erasmus wanted to print a copy of the New Testament in Ancient Greek. Printing was a relatively new technology at this historical moment, again one of the confluence of events that made the Renaissance possible. Importantly, Erasmus wanted to print his Greek version of the New Testament, but he was not alone in that desire. He had competitors. This prompted Erasmus to accelerate his preparations.

He possessed a 12^th century manuscript including many of the books of the New Testament in Greek. Many but not all. So, he had to borrow a copy of the Book of Revelation from a friend. But that copy was incomplete, missing the last page. However, time was slipping by in the race to publish first. What to do?

Erasmus went to the Vulgate, the official Catholic translation of the Bible into Latin. And he reverse-translated the last page. It had gone from Greek to Latin and now it was going from Latin to Greek. What could go wrong? A lot.

Erasmus’ new translations were unique, unlike any other versions at that time. And he knew there were likely some errors in what he had printed. Errors because of his hasty translation. Errors because a 12^th century copy of a second century document was likely filled with mistakes. Mistakes made over the centuries from repeated efforts of handwritten copying.

And repeated efforts to adjust the text of the Bible to suit theological and ecclesiastic preconceptions. For example, women had important roles in the early church. Various women were named in our reading from the Book of Acts. They acted as disciples. They acted as leaders in the early church. Those roles, however, would diminish over time. Why was that?

I came across one argument this week about the infamous line from the letters of Paul in which women are supposed to be silent and veiled in church. There is a school of thought that Paul never said this. It is argued that there was a marginal comment, a scribbled note made by someone on an old manuscript. And some later scribe read that comment and inserted it into the text, thinking it belonged there. If Paul never sought to have women silenced, and this was in truth a falsehood, what other unknown yet significant changes might there have been?

Back to our story. Erasmus successfully made his publishing deadline and his version of the New Testament came out first. And it was a best seller. In fact, his version was so successful that others eventually duplicated his text over and over again.

To his credit, Erasmus published amended versions of his translation, but that original error-filled edition grew to be the standard. That successful first run became known as the Textus Receptus, the so-called “Received Text.” With such a grand name, is it any wonder it would be treated as absolute truth for centuries.

During the Reformation, one of the goals for many Protestants was to render the Bible into local languages. This was to allow regular people to read and to understand the Bible without the interference of priests and scholars, those who read Greek and Latin. One group was tasked with translating the Bible into English. Their version also became enormously popular. Which is no wonder. It was authorized by the king himself. The King James Version of the Bible was prepared using Erasmus’ error filled manuscript, replicated those errors onto practically every bookshelf in the English-speaking world.

And lest we be overly critical of King James’ translation squad, the Textus Receptus was used in many other groundbreaking versions, like the Tyndale Bible, the first English translation, and the Geneva Bible, the predecessor to King James used by the likes of William Shakespeare in his writings. Repeat an error enough times and it may be accepted as the truth.

And yet, you might ask, are these important differences? That depends on what you deem to be important. One famous difference between the Latin version and the rediscovered Greek texts was the translation of the term “young maiden.” That might not seem to be a big deal. Unless you also note that the term could be rendered as “virgin” depending on its usage and context. And the difference between Mary being a virgin versus a young maiden is not a small matter to many religious groups.

Another word troublesome translation from Ancient Hebrew is the word “soul.” King James often uses the word “soul” rather than the word “breath” even though “breath” is the more accurate translation. The concept of “soul” likely did not exist among the ancient authors of the Psalms. And yet we understand what a soul is and the versions of the Psalms that many of us often cherish sound odd without these mistranslated phrases. We take comfort in these inaccuracies.

Did it ever occur to you that the Bible might contain errors? Mistranslations perhaps or even intentional changes? In the Gospel of Luke, there is a passage during the crucifixion of Jesus in which he calls out to God and asks that those who are killing him be forgiven. That seems to be an original passage according to scholars, but there are later manuscripts in which that line has been removed. Why would that be? Why make that change?

The theory is that some scribes copying the text chose to cut out that line because they did not want people to become confused. Confused because the people who killed Jesus could never be forgiven, at least according to the scribe’s version of theology. And it is likely not the Romans who could never be forgiven. It was Jesus’ own people, the Jews of Judea, the people of Jerusalem, who could never be forgiven by these scribes.

The pen is mightier than the sword, they say. And sometimes that power is used in terrible ways.

Anti-Jewish sentiment becomes normative during the centuries after Jesus’ death. This is even though Jesus and the disciples would never have suggested such an attitude. Never, because they were to a person traditional, observant Jews of the first century.

And as a point of clarification, it would be anti-Jewish rather than anti-Semitic. The term “anti-Semitic” describes a form of racial theory that did not exist until the 19^th century in Europe, treating Jews as a race rather than as a religious group. That racialized term would have been unrecognizable to medieval minds like that of Erasmus. That does not make the anti-Jewish language in the Bible any better, but it is differently bad.

This brings us back to the question of how we should respond to these new technological forms of deception. Is there some way we can respond to these new forms of fakery? One basic response should be to ramp up our critical thinking in response to the information and media we digest. We will sadly need to be more suspicious of our news. And that might place people with less developed critical thinking skills at a disadvantage. But is that truly a new problem?

Yes, someone can now make a video of the president saying anything. Someone can take the likeness of someone and manipulate it to their purposes. We may be nostalgic for simpler times, times when you could turn on the nightly news and find out just the facts. But was that ever really the case? Haven’t we always had to be careful about what we take at face value?

In the 19^th century, newspapers were politically partisan. You knew when you read a paper that it leaned one way or another. Many had openly racist or anti-immigrant editorials and those corresponded with the political parties of that time. Most people knew that the newspapers were trying to get you to think a certain way.

And that was not, or is not, terribly different in the 20^th or 21^st centuries. Very little news media can be classified as neutral. The crucial question then is whether the information provided is trustworthy.

There were numerous occasions over the past hundred years when the information we received was distorted to manipulate the public. War propaganda is one example in which the media passed along something without much in the way of nuance. It was the patriotic duty of these media outlets to lie to us, to withhold some truths in exchange for our collective support.

And then there were public campaigns by business and industries. For example, smoking was known to be a health risk for many decades before warnings were put on the sides of the package. Scientists knew in the 1940s that tobacco use was linked to lung cancer. But that information was not widely known to the public. How many people died before their proper time because someone decided to offer distorted information?

Why was it distorted? To make money. To garner influence. To allow something to keep happening because, if the truth were known, people would seek to make it stop. That sort of information is hard to shake off and that was long before artificial intelligence.

How then should we protect ourselves from such negative influences? Again, critical thinking skills are important. But we are sometimes too impressed with our abilities. Maybe we are good at spotting disinformation and maybe we are not.

Older generations are more trusting of the printed word and that can get them into trouble. Emails tied to online scams, for example, plague our in-boxes.

To that end, as a minister, I will never send you an email asking for money, asking for gift cards, asking for anything of material value. I might email you to come to a concert at church or bring in a package of diapers—that email is far more likely to be from me.

Conversely, younger generations are far more suspicious of media in general, but they are paradoxically also greater consumers of such media. And that dependency can have strongly negative psychological effects. How do you balance the social need for information with the personal need to protect your mental well-being?

First, ask yourself a question: is this information useful for me? If you are a steady consumer of news from Washington for example, how useful is it for you to know that the debt ceiling negotiations are going one way or another, day by day, hour by hour? That the daily events of the war in Ukraine are this or that? What does this information provide for you that is useful, meaning that you are going to use to guide your behavior or that of others?

That will depend upon the subject matter, of course. But to sit and to listen to troubling news from a faraway place may be of no use to you. Just pumping up your blood pressure. And yet some will keep on listening in an effort to stay informed. I am not preaching the value of ignorance, but a cautionary word about moderation. There is too much information available now to stay informed about everything. Choose your battles. Choose what is important to you and yours and then turn all the rest off for a while.

The other important way to handle these possible forms of media deception is not to do it alone. It is helpful to be in conversation with people. To assess what is being said together. With friends and family. With people at church. Sometimes you will be the one to offer healthy counterarguments in the conversation. Sometimes you will be the person in need of that additional voice in the mix.

Think of it like a book club. A group of people get together to talk about a book they have chosen. It could be one that everyone loved, or not. It could be one with a clear message, or not. The conversations you have back and forth might help you to appreciate what was in the book or to recognize some theme of idea that you missed or misunderstood. More people reading the same thing provides a greater breadth of experience and a wider context in which you can try to understand what is going on.

And on the topic of book groups, I would advise you not to read the Bible on your own. Why? Because it is confusing. It has complex and contradictory themes and messages. It is far better to read it in a group or to use additional materials to navigate the many twists and turns. Everyone reads the Bible in their own way and that can lead to greatly different conclusions. Conversations around a table will be useful and revealing. And here I am, a trained professional ready to assist as needed.

Of course, I also have my own way of reading the Bible and my own way of looking at the cloud of information around us. I cannot claim to possess any measure of the truth. But I am humble enough, I hope, to tell people what I really think, hesitations and all. Finding the right people to engage in conversation is one of the great challenges and great joys of this life.

Yes, some people will try to mislead us. Yes, there is bad information out there. But the true value of a community like a church is to be together in open and honest conversation about what we know and what we do not. That will not make everything suddenly clear, but it is one way of weeding out some of that bad information. And, besides, it is nice to have company.

Amen.