The Unseen Emails: Emails to Malcolm - James E. Campbell

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Résumé :
If you learned that God had said something different than you have been taught, how would your feel? What would you think if you discovered that translators didn't like certain words in the Bible and so deleted them? Wouldn't you wonder what those words are?


Many years ago, I attended a seminar by Malcolm Smith titled, The Search for Self Worth, healing for a codependent society. In the first hour, he spoke about a phrase in the Book of Romans from which translators had historically deleted a certain word. As he explained, deleting that word had changed the meaning of the passage. Amazingly, I was familiar with that passage yet never noticed that a Greek word was missing in the English translations. Unless you are familiar with biblical Greek, there is little likelihood that you would ever be aware of this change. But I knew enough of that language to realize he was correct. Learning about that single change in what God has really said changed my life forever. It was such an obvious change in the Scripture, and it took Malcolm to alert me to the problem.


Years later, I began sending Malcolm letters via USPS and email in which I described to him many other changes that had been made to God's words. I remembered my Greek professor during my short stint in seminary explaining why it was permissible to delete or add words when translating, but the impact of that practice had never hit home until the day I heard Malcolm speak.


In 2012 I began writing letters to Malcolm just to share the marvelous things I had learned that continued to change my life. I had no thought of ever publishing them. But after a few years I realized the life changing nature of what I had written, and it became obvious others would benefit from a new perspective on God and salvation in Christ.


The Unseen Emails is not for anyone perfectly content with their religion. If I were you, I wouldn't buy this, yet. But for anyone wondering what happened to the wonders so evident in the first century church, and for you who are sure there is more to a relationship with God than what the modern church seems to deliver, these emails will be priceless. I do not want you to think they will be easy. But if you stick with them and practice what I explain to Malcolm, your thinking will change to increasingly be just like God's. As you increasingly learn to think like Him, you will find yourself having acted like Him. Oh, is this fun.

Biographie:
I began writing this book about 25 years ago. At the time, I had begun to acquire an attitude of disdain for the King James translators and those who have come since. As God began to unveil His heart and mind to me, I became angry at both Him, the Church, and translators. Why had they hidden such simple and easy knowledge? My family laughed saying God hadn't hidden anything but had been working to cause us to see it. Of course, they hadn't seen what God had begun to show me either, but neither did they feel slighted by Him. They just watched in amazement as my life began to change, usually for good, but occasionally not so good. Yet, even the bad times always turned out to be good. Later, my oldest son joined me in writing Unseen and began to undo some of the attitude it conveyed. In the last few years, my thoughts have changed dramatically. I now stand in awe of all the translators I so disliked. What the KJV translators comprehended as well as many who are alive today is now utterly amazing to me. In Unseen we explain many places where they display a misunderstanding of what God said, as well as how and why it was missed, but just because translators have misinterpreted something doesn't mean that their interpretations are not true statements. It is just that often, God's words tell us far more than we have realized. Unseen seeks to help believers understand more of what God means while not rejecting any truth they have learned from the interpretations of others. Just because something is a mistranslation does not mean it isn't true. For instance, the phrase by Peter, Casting all of your cares or anxieties upon Him, is not a translation but an interpretation of the result of what Peter was explaining. This rendering fails to give us important information if we are to experience what Peter was writing about. Embedded in the original Greek is the understanding of why we have anxieties and exactly what we are casting on the Lord, as well as how to do it. How in the world can you cast your feelings on the Lord if you don't know exactly what is causing them? Without greater understanding, it is very difficult to know how to accomplish what Peter is interpreted to be saying.