Project History

This article explains the origins for each of the projects that currently make up parts of Paleo.In. This story is told in historical order, and includes the problems and fundamental insights that spawned the need for each project.

Phil's Salvation

I had been involved in church at various times up through High School. The last of those times was in my senior year in high school. It was in a youth group at a congregational church not far from home. What I remember about those days was the inability of the group leaders to adequately nor clearly explain the Gospel message.

A year or so later I was in college and there was a group of students going door to door in the dorm. My roommate at the time did not want anything to do with them. I retorted that if god wanted to say something to me, I wanted to listen. That answer shut up my roommate.

This group was a little more cogent, and one night I eventually prayed to Jesus that I wanted to follow him. The phosphorus on the monitor of my old TRS-80 began to shimmer like there was an external electrical field in the room. It was a strange night.

I soon went with that group of college students to a weekend retreat. At that retreat one of the pastors running the event gave me a prophetic word. I predicted that I would eventually be in full time ministry. He later took me aside and said he had never given such a strong prophetic word. He suggested I change my major to something related to Christian ministry. I considered it briefly, but my parents were funding most of my college and I would need to renegotiate with them. I decided to finish what I had started.

It turns out, that prophetic word was valid. I quit my well paying tech job in April of 1998, about 16 years after my undergraduate graduation.

Attending Church

The last 2 years in college I worked as a supervisor in a large dining hall. This was a job normally reserved for seniors, but I was hired for the job in my junior year after events in the dining hall caused by the Mount St. Helens eruption in May of 1980.

I so busy, that I did not want to spend time on things related to church. I was already busy enough to have very little social life. I decided that once college was over I would return to thinking about Bible related topics.

After college I went to work in Rochester, MN. I worked there for about 4 years. The last year I was a department manager. That last year I had an employee who was old enough to be my grandfather. It was strange times.

Early on in those 4 years, a coworker invited me to visit a Lutheran church in that city. I consider this my first real time attending church. I took a new believer's class and learned about Christianity in a much more formal setting. This in the oldest Protestant tradition.

Regular work time was mostly constrained to a normal work week, so I had plenty of time outside of work. I was hungry to learn as much as I could about the Bible. Soon thereafter a Baptist pastor had knocked on my door. Long story short, I was now attending 2 church services each weekend.

I also became a regular viewer of a national televangelist. He had come of age before World War II, something of an antique. His strange views would matter considerably to this story. I will return to him below.

Finally, an elder in the Jehovah's Witnesses would also knock on my door. This fellow knew his Bible better than anyone else I had ever met. He outclassed all of the pastors I knew at the time. And, he cared about the Bible's chronology. This was the first guy who would use STEM tools to think about the text. He and I did a weekly Bible study for my remaining time in Rochester.

The Game

These 4 traditions are very different from each other. Within the whole of Christianity, they are actually closer to each other than they are to some of the other Christian traditions.

Why, I wondered at the time, could 1 book create such differences in practices and understanding?

I did not know why this should be. At the time I would explain it this way, I don't know what the game is, but those who know the Bible well, play this game much better than everyone else.

When I left Rochester for a job in Raleigh, North Carolina, I completely stopped attending church at all. I went from 4 different traditions each weekend to zero.

I spent most Sundays simply reading the Bible for myself end-to-end. I read for as many hours each Sunday as I could stand. When my eyes got cross-eyed it was time for dinner. I wanted to understand the raw data in the Bible for myself. I wanted to be able to play this game as well as anyone I had met.

By the time I left computer work for full time ministry work I had read the Bible through 19 times. I still regularly read through. But now, I use the Sabbath Reads app. It is a reduced cut of the Bible, timed to cover inspired text once a year.

To explain the origins of the various projects on Paleo.In, I need to back up, and start with some obscure church history. Once you know enough of that history we can connect that history back into my testimony and then work through the history and reasons for the projects we currently maintain here at Paleo.In.

Millerite Fiasco

Most readers here probably do not know the history of the Millerite Fiasco. This was a fundamental event that informs much of modern American church theology. It also more distantly informs the origins of our work here at Paleo.In.

Miller was a farmer, living north of Hudson Falls, New York, in the early 1800s. He was well versed in the Bible and was within the Protestant tradition of his time. There was much more diversity of thought in church circles in those days.

In those days, even from colonial days, there was a common way to interpret chronologies in the Bible in order to understand modern headlines. Take any day accurate chronology, turn those days into years, and then look for how that might inform modern headlines, often big headlines, like wars and revolutions.

Miller was not the first to use this strategy, but he used it in a novel way. He used this technique to predict the soon coming return of Jesus. This was novel because of the way he used it to predict something future and because he used it outside of the political, historical, world. He had shifted to an end-times use.

Of course with hindsight we know Jesus did not return, so Miller was wrong. But, in Miller's day, this was novel, and he used his theory to spark a rival. For his day, he was as famous as Billy Graham was starting in the 1950s.

Miller traveled around by horse back across New England and preached revival. He is thought to have personally lead to the salvation of as many as 50,000 people. Quite a number in a day without any mass media, nor large stadiums, nor, for that matter, paved roads.

Of course Miller's predicted date came and went. Nothing happened. What did he do? He found a math error, set a new date and continued on.

At the appointed date, a large crowd gathered at his farm. There they gathered at what is now known as ascension rock. Of course that date came and went as well. Nothing happened. The crowds went home disappointed.

Miller returned to work his farm, a disgraced prophet.

Miller's detractors made a point of ruining him. They were often seminary trained, he was not. They had small crowds, he had a large crowd. They could not rejoice in his harvest of souls.

So, they collectively set in place a messed up theology we still see today, that no man can know the day nor hour of Jesus' return. This itself is based on butchering of a single Bible quote, but those details are beyond our scope here.

So what happened to those 50,000 people?

They were saved, were growing in Jesus, and did not care about the missed dates. They had always been disorganized, but within a couple decades after Miller 2 modern denominations began to form from the heirs of Miller's work. The first denomination is now called Seventh Day Adventists. The second is called Jehovah's Witnesses.

Of course if you are outside of these denominations, but still in some tradition, you have probably been taught these are cults. This is an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

The Jehovah's Witness

I did not know this history when I was a young man. A Jehovah's witness, as was their custom, knocked on my door wanting to talk. This started a many month series of conversations. He taught their understanding of Miller's time system.

In particular, they used it to point at their own history with events in 1914. It turns out this is a self serving use of prophetic history. Miller and his peers were using the system to predict world changing events, like wars and revolutions. So even if that 1914 math was correct, it should be used to point at World War I, not some denominational meetings.

It also turns out that day-for-a-year prophetic systems are based on knowing the design of the Bible's calendar. Miller and his heirs used a 30 day per month calendar, supported as it is from passages as early as Noah's flood and as late as Revelation. But they missed the leap month in the Sabbath and Jubilee years.

If you correct their 1914 math you end up pointing at the end of World War II, not World War I. Since World War II was a bigger war, ending with the use of nuclear weapons, that longer form math is even better.

For readers here who might be interested, all the detailed math for this is in the Bible Time Website, in the Theory Section.

I understood basically everything I have listed here so far, but my world changed when I came across a book by Harod Camping.

Camping's Book, "1994"

Harold Camping was a well known California based preacher. He wrote a popular book that predicted an end of the world event would happen in the year 1994, thus the simple title for his book was, "1994." Once that year was over, Christian book stores who had been selling copies, put left over copies of that now disgraced book on their clearance tables. Camping was, of course, following in the footsteps of Miller.

I was walking around in one such Christian book store and found a copy on such a table. Failure analysis had been a big part of my first job out of college, and that book just begged to be read and reviewed with an eye for mistakes. Could I figure out where he went wrong?

To Camping's credit he had several very insightful views of the historical chronology of the Bible. Instead of using Ussher's chronology, which places Adam's first year at 4004 BC, Camping was placing Adam's first year around 10,975 BC. You should recognize this as close to the end of the last ice age, so it has some scientific support.

Camping gained most of these 7000 additional years buy building a longer form chronology based on an interesting and valid interpretation of the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11.

But, Camping was sloppy, and was not even correctly citing, nor transcribing, many of the other time references needed to build a Biblical chronology. He was sloppy enough that the math around his conclusions could not be trusted at all.

Camping was also making a mistake relative to how he linked the end of the biblical chronology to what was for him future time, out into the year 1994.

I already understood a better strategy was to predict the dates for modern, but what to us are now historical events, like the events in and around World War II. Accurately predicting such modern dates would lend credence to any predictions of still future modern dates.

My Own Timeline

By December of 1997 I set to to rebuild Camping's long form historical timeline but with carefully transcribed and cited references to back it up. That work is of course documented at Bible Time.

That month I was part of a Daniel fast, a fast for insight and wisdom. Then again in January of 1998 I was again in a Daniel fast. Across those 2 months there were a strange set of prophetic encounters, including audible voice prophetic words. It was a strange season.

By the end of January, 1998, I had reworked Camping's rough chronology it was now done on a day accurate graph and I was again looking at how that graph might point out into the modern era.

As explained on Bible Time, there is a way to day-accurately align the calendar used to write the Bible with the modern calendar. The process of finding that alignment also meant that there were day-accurately predicted dates that would begin in late 1998 and run for maybe 4 years.

I was offered free use of my mom's cabin where I could quit my high tech job and continue studying this problem. There was much more technical work to do, but the predicted headlines should be seen in real time starting that fall.

Ryan Joins

Ryan had been watching most of the prophetic events that surrounded the start of the Bible Time project. We had met at a conference on the Holy Spirit in Yakima, Washington, in early 1995. By 1998 I was an elder in his boyhood church, which was also my father's boyhood church. When he left home to go to college he ended up in a spare room in my house.

Once I was moving to Oregon he had the opportunity to follow. Knowing that something strange was going on, he prayed about moving to Oregon as well. He was soon in Oregon and by late 1998 was enrolled in Bible College in Portland. From there he could monitor the Bible Time work while continuing his schooling.

Once through with college Ryan would start is own prophetic work on the text of the Bible itself. That work is now the BRB text and app and the related family scripture of apps. That work became full time in 2006.

Sodom and Gomorrah

After settling in to the cabin in late 1998, I began following headlines in real time. The first obvious date related to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

There was no obvious headlines within the window predicted by the story. This suggested trouble with the timeline, and for awhile I considered quitting right then an there. Though I had sold my house and quit my job and moved, so undoing that would not be easy.

There was also a problem with that story involving Abraham's prayer for a mercy delay. So that story might have some complexity that escaped me at the time. I decided to wait out the next headline and see if it failed too.

Abraham To Mount Moriah

A few weeks later, headlines did indeed start passing in real time when then US president Bill Clinton visited Jerusalem, and especially temple mount. That mount was known in Abraham's day as Mount Moriah.

That Clinton headline was following a careful replay of Abraham taking Isaac to Mount Moriah, a visit to the same place. Clinton had taken a 747 load of servants with him, though he left them behind at the hotel. This was a direct match to Abraham, who had taken servants too, but left them behind at the base of the mountain. Clinton went mostly alone by helicopter to Temple Mount. The details were running unexpectedly well. All that was needed to clinch the headline was that Clinton had to something akin to sacrificing of a ram caught in a thicket.

When Clinton arrived back in Washington DC, he announced that he would bomb Baghdad. At the time there was much speculation that this was a 'wag the dog' scenario. The term comes from a movie where a US president creates an international incident to keep himself in office.

In Clinton's case he was facing impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair. So he was himself about to die in a political sense. He had to do something to shake attention off from himself and on to war. He did that when he bombed Baghdad.

The prophetic story agreed, sacrificing a ram caught in a thicket preserved Isaac. It was an essentially perfect match.

Once I saw how carefully this prophetic story matched world headlines, I would never again want to return to regular work. This was now a full time call.

It was starting to give direct and concrete scriptural back stories for current events. It was doing so in a way that no other system had ever done. I was very happy, but did not yet understand how it might contradict popular understanding. That would come in September, 2001.

Samson Kills 3000

Most of the headlines were passing by uneventfully, which was fine. This was an era when the problem was one of matching stories in the Bible to headlines. How this might work generally had to be learned by example.

By September of 2001, there was a small cluster of Bible stories that fulfilled together at the bombing of the World Trade Center buildings at the southern tip of Manhattan Island in New York City.

You probably know the obvious Bible story. Samson pushed over 2 columns killing 3000 people on the roof. This fulfilled when the 2 columns of the twin tower trade center collapsed on 2001-09-11.

The official death toll was worked out as 2997 people. I would dare say they probably did not count 3 pregnancies, because killing babies is not illegal in the USA. This headline was probably an exact match to the expected prophetic number of 3000.

This was a blatant, obvious, match to the Bible's story. It did not require the timeline to fit the headline to the text. Either residents of New York City, or else all Americans, were Philistines. Those 3000 killed on the roof were but the leaders.

But, nobody of note in American Christianity dared voice this connection. Johnathan Cahn, would come close in his famous book, The Harbinger. But Kahn would only deal with small details from ground zero, not the elephant in the room related to the towers themselves or the obvious match in death totals.

In other words the text was calling out the victims of 911 as mortal enemies of the people of faith. It was also calling out the perpetrators of 911 as prophets, but to their shame, sorry excuses for prophets.

The text was starting to provide commentary that would not play at all well with normal patriotic American Christian audiences. It is the sort of news that these days gets the messenger utterly banned from social media.

This divergence of the true prophetic from church as we then understood would continue go get wider and wider. Ultimately, a chasm would develop between the common understanding found in American Christian churches and what the text of the Bible was truly saying. That chasm would take a few more years to develop.

Bible Tribes

The first spin-off project from Bible Time was and is still called Bible Tribes. That project started life as a tab on Bible Time. The study behind Bible Tribes is based on Revelation 7, where the heirs of Jacob are 144,000 and are called out in sets of 12,000.

Joseph famously interprets the cupbearer and baker's dreams. In that interpretation, Joseph teaches us as readers that all counts, no matter what else they may be are also reference to time.

So the 144,000 in Revelation 7 are creating a timeline. 33 years between a series of document sealing/signing that themselves identify the lost tribes of ancient Israel. Those document signings spread out over about 390 years.

I found those documents, and ended up identifying all of the lost tribes. Many of the tribes themselves already have faith communities that know who they are. I used some of that to calibrate the work.

The Bible Tribes study provided a way to use normal STEM tools to identify the entire set. This provided a powerful interpretive framework for understanding the promises made to Jacob and his future heirs.

In particular, the modern nation of Israel claims the Biblical name Israel to itself. Most of American Christianity goes along with this, especially Christian preachers trained after World War II. By the way, this was not so widely held before World War II.

The Bible Tribes riddle calls out the modern nation of Israel as the tribe of Benjamin, alone. The other tribes are spread across Europe and include the USA and Russia. Those lost tribes, via former colonies, also include the rest of the world. On the Russian side, where we do not have colonies, but we have Job's 3 friends, we pick up China, Iran and probably India. India ends up listed as connected to both sides of Israel, so is curious.

This study is yet another falsification of common propaganda taught in American Christianity. As this work progressed, standard Christian understanding of the text and how it relates to the world became more and more false.

With the tribes identified, no common end-times understanding of Israel could be trusted. Everything must be rechecked. But, figuring out the worst problems were still ahead.

2008 Financial Crisis

By 2004 the original headline series was over. By 2006 another headline series began. This series was based on a 3500 year anniversary replay of the plagues on ancient Egypt. The timeline of those plagues was monthly, not daily as normally understood in English Bibles.

Different prophetic date series have different tolerances on fulfillment. Previous series had been accurate to the day, some individual stories are even less accurate.

The dates in the plagues series were usually timed accurately to the hour. Usually they hit around sunset, really day break, in modern Israel. So in the USA, this meant that if the headline was exactly on time it would strike at around 11:00 AM Eastern Time. (This is why the towers fell in NYC at around 11:00 AM.)

You know the headlines for this plagues series as the 2008 financial crisis. Each plague type matched headlines were related to failures of different types of financial institutions, usually in the western world.

One of the headlines was very different. Understanding that headline would change the nature of our work.

My Muslim Faith

The day in question was a Sunday, and it was an otherwise slow news weekend. Then candidate for US President Barack Obama was being interviewed on the ABC network's Sunday Morning show.

In the interview he was talking about his faith, and called it his 'Muslim faith.' The interviewer corrected him, and said, Don't you mean your Christian faith? Obama then corrected himself and said yes his Christian faith.

This headline created quite a stir. It spread on social media like wildfire. A Muslim was about to become president of the USA. It was clear to anyone watching that his Christian faith was simply an act.

The timing for this was exquisite. The broadcast was around 11:00 AM. But, how did this match the expected text for this headline. Here is the quote from the NIV. This was the version we were using at the time and is what we were expecting that day.

We know this of course as the 'plague of flies.'

Now the overall series of dates was quite strong. It had started with the 2006 war in Israel across the northern border with Lebanon. This had been the killing of the Hebrew Babies.

Most of the other headlines were related to some type of financial institution that had failed on or very near the expected date.

In order to debug this headline, the citation itself needed to be checked against original language text. This would be the first ever such headline related check.

The charts themselves held over 2500 other cites, and if this turned out to be serious, then another 2500+ citations would need to be checked later.

Was this NIV English hiding something?

When we dug into this verse we found that indeed, there was a very high value original language word that was absent from the NIV English. This was NOT just an NIV problem. All the other widely available English language Bibles were also missing the word.

Note that the underlying original language text for this verse includes the word normally translated as 'Arab'.

Was Obama referencing his Arab faith?

Of course.

Obama was self identifying as the Arab that this passage says would eventually ruin prophetic Egypt.

In other words, by the time Obama is gone, the USA will be in ruins.

So the prophetic date hit just fine, but a complete fulfillment never happened. The timeline was now seen providing high level context for long term ongoing headlines.

Though usually ascribed to dementia, current US President Biden has repeatedly stated that he still works for Obama, and that Obama is still in control of presidential policy. This pair is often mockingly called the O'Biden administration for good reason. Obama even visited 10 Downing Street in March of 2024, still conducting foreign policy. Even in 2024 this Arab is not gone.

The national ruin called for in Obama's prophetic headline is still future. We expect Muslim Obama to bring the historically Christian USA to ruin by intentionally steering the western world into nuclear war with Russia. Obama will have taken out all the nations where Christianity was the historical faith.

But, American Christians, reading their own Bibles, have no visibility at all to how an Arab was involved in the fall of ancient Egypt. At last with 911 anyone reading the Bible for themselves could notice the 3000 killed.

After this headline we learned how no one has ready visibility to even consider political players like Obama as the source for much destruction.

Plans For An Audit

After that 2008 headline with Obama, we began to plan for how we might generate a complete interlinear of the Bible. Software would need to manage the English language words that are displayed along side each original term.

Ultimately, it needed to be done without political influence over the translation process. King James, himself, was involved in the translation that bears his name. He was in part making sure the text did not expose his own crimes.

The same goes on with Jews today. They are changing the meaning of Hebrew words to suit their modern political agenda. Those changes ripple out into English translations done since World War II. For example, they even changed the 10 commandments.

Ultimately, this is still our goal, but the path to that goal is not simple. In the interim, Ryan has been the manual keeper of the BRB English. Even after 15 years he is still regularly auditing BRB English terms against the original language texts.

Doing this by hand has given us considerable insight into the history and troubles that lead to the mistakes we first found in the NIV with that headline.

Alphabet Class

By 2009 we had taken an introductory Hebrew language class. In that class the instructor spent the first semester dealing with the history of the alphabet and the history of Hebrew word spellings. The instructor then introduced each letter, at a pace of about 2 letters per class session. It was an overwhelming load of new information.

This was NOT a class like you might find in any college. It was built on a workbook by Seekins, with much practical advice thrown in.

What you need to know are the following points:

• The Hebrew letter forms known today are only ~2500 years old. Note that Moses is ~1000 years earlier still.

• The previous form, known as Paleo Hebrew in religious circles, but Phoenician to everyone else, was used for at least 1000 years earlier, probably much more.

• Students were expected to know, from memory, each Paleo Hebrew letter form. Students were expected to mentally translate each Hebrew letter into that form.

• The exact spelling of each word in that Paleo Hebrew alphabet gives the dictionary definition of each word. No printed dictionary is ever needed, nor have any ancient dictionaries ever been found.

• The spellings of all words in the Bible changed over time. Students were expected to know exactly how to undo those spelling changes, including dropping of all vowel points and ignoring added vowels. This must be done to find the spelling that defines each word.

Lessons from this class informed our starting point on the audit. We needed an app that would display an interlinear text where there was an English word above or below each original language word. No problem.

But all the steps we had been taught in class could simply do on screen. We could drop vowel points, we could mark added vowels, we could reformat the font into the Paleo Hebrew forms.

This is not conceptually hard. The estimated effort was not much more work than the BRB app itself.

The first step in that process was to build the font. It would turn out to be a prophetic journey that still continues.

Finding The Paleo Font

In the fall of 2009 we visited friends in Montana. One of our friends in Montana had an intense prophetic dream the morning when we were leaving.

In the dream he saw Phil pulling objects out of a tool box. The box was functioning like the famous bag in a scene in the original Mary Poppins movie. Mary pulls much more stuff from her bag than could naturally fit.

In that prophetic dream, Phil is pulling various 3d object out from a tool box with a similar bottomless quality.

On the trip back to Seattle we began to think about the problem of building the font. We need to learn the Fontforge tool and we needed to settle on the shapes.

Starting almost immediately after returning to Seattle, Phil starting having intense waking prophetic dreams. These went on for about 3 weeks. Some days they were audible prophetic words in the shower.

The first dream was important enough to recount here.

In a dream I was having a conversation with someone. A deep imperative male voice.

I was asked, "How many dimensions are there?"

I answered, "Eleven."

I was then asked, "Then why are there 22 letters?"

I answered, "Because there are 2 aspects to each dimension."

I then saw the 22 letters of Phoenician folding on themselves. My view was in the middle, what we now know of as the Ku and Lu were folding together and coming towards me. Each additional letter pair followed behind, in a string that stretched away from me.

When I woke from the dream I knew the riddle that had to be solved.

Each correctly drawn letter was a 2 dimensional projection of a 3 dimensional object. There was 1 such object for each letter pair.

Find the object and the correct 2d drawn form will be known.

This was not an easy riddle.

While on a business trip to Israel in 1997 I had visited the gift shop in the tower of David in the wall of the old city of Jerusalem. While there I was compelled to purchase a poster that had a list of ancient drawn letter forms for each modern Hebrew letter.

I had that poster still framed on my wall, and so I had a good place to start to solve the riddle.

It took about 3 weeks of messing around with copper wire and the example letters. Because the wire was hard to manipulate it hurt my fingers so I switched to pipe cleaners.

Each day for the next 3 weeks was another dream and more hints and directions as to how to solve this riddle. Some letters could not be solved given the witness from the poster from Jerusalem. The Unicode standard and Wikipedia filled in. Eventually they were worked out.

These models are now known as the 'bones' series over on bom.paleo.in if you want to see them, or download and 3d print them.

Near the end of the 3 weeks I was told again in a waking dream to assemble them. I had no idea that they could do such a think. The model required some model copies. A few were duplicates and mirror images. The theoretical basis for why these existed would come in late 2022.

There are 2 such assemblies, a sower and reaper. These are also visible and available on that website. These are the bones from the story of Ezekiel's bones in the Book of Ezekiel.

Our current Paleo fonts are all based on that late 2009 work.

Anyone who actually used Paleo Hebrew (or better called Phoenician) in ancient times would readily recognize each letter in this font. If you don't believe me, look up Phoenician on Wikipedia and compare.

Why So Important?

Intense prophetic seasons like those 3 weeks are extremely rare. They happen because they are very important. They happened in order to get the font exactly right. This is very important for a bunch of reasons.

The 3d models behind the 2d letter shapes in the drawn alphabet are providing a system that can detect and correct the drawn forms of each letter in inspired text. Even after 2000 years of devolution, the recovery was reasonably easy to pull off.

When knowledge of those objects was lost, the Phoenician alphabet then deformed. It devolved into all the other known phonetic alphabets. This includes Latin and Greek letters, Aramaic and Hebrew letters, and some strongly argue all other phonetic letters, including far away ancient Japanese.

As I will explore below, we believe the entire canon of inspired scripture was built on a similar system which could not only detect but also correct any errors introduced into the text over time.

The alphabet was just our first introduction to the principle of an error detection and correction systems used with inspired text.

More Sets Of 3d Shapes

There were 3 more sets of 3d models that would come over the following years. The last set came about 2016. Those model sets are also available on the bom.paleo.in website.

The 'tools' set is formed by folding 3d letters against themselves. This creates 25 3d models that are the objects that define the meaning of the letters.

The letter definitions given in the workbook in the Hebrew class that we had taken were only correct in 11 out of 22 times.

So the possible word definitions that could be constructed by students in that class were only going to be correct about 1/2 of the time.

There are yet 2 other 3d model sets that link the alphabet to 2 different infinitely repeating objects. One of those is an initial star. The terminal shapes are biological. This means the entire set of 2d shapes and 3d models is closed.

Those other model sets also assemble. One set assembles into either a silo or well. The other assemblies into models that tell the life cycle of plants.

These 3d models give us a sense of the mind that was behind the creation of inspired scripture. It also strongly suggests similar design elegance will be visible once manuscript recovery is complete.

Aramaic Texts

Everything explained here so far has only been dealing with the Hebrew language of the Old Testament.

We had many lessons to learn along the way involving original language texts and their histories.

The first step in that discover process involved the New Testament.

The Bible Time project had been named as an echo of the 'Bible Codes' work done by others. For those unfamiliar, the Bible Codes work arranges strings of Hebrew letters taken from the OT into variously sized grids. The line length is called a skip distance and the grid created is like a crossword puzzle. If the Hebrew text is run across, for example, then the intersecting strings of vertical letters sometimes spell out of other things.

This process is known to not work in Greek and is used by Hebrew fans of the OT as an argument as to why the NT is not inspired.

I chanced upon an article by someone who had used the Aramaic text of the NT and run it through the same software tools as used in the Bible Code work.

The article explained how there might be similar codes in the Aramaic NT.

Given what we were taught about the history of Hebrew, the Bible Codes work would probably stand a better chance if they cleaned up the texts themselves before using such tools. In general what this work is really doing is hinting at more volumes, a subject I must explore later.

In any case, that article introduced me to the existence of the 'Church of the East' who kept the Aramaic texts of the New Testament.

By this name they do NOT mean east as in eastern Rome, and the Orthodox branches of Christianity. This group grew up independently of Rome. It was highly active at some periods in history. It first brought Christianity to China in the 800s. Here are the points you should know:

• This group was indigenous to what is now northern Iraq.

• The first Persian Gulf War which caused them to be caught in the cross fire of civil war in Iraq. Many fled to the west.

• They believed they carried the inspired NT writings.

• Until around 1800 they kept those writings with the same scribal care as the Jews did with the Hebrew OT.

• There were 2 competing scribal communities within their midst.

• Modern literary analysis agrees with their contention.

Aramaic Primacy

The keepers of the Aramaic NT tradition claim they carry the inspired text of the NT. This is a claim to truth.

There is also the claim by western Christianity that the NT was written in Greek. This is a competing claim to truth. As outsiders, how are we to pick? Only 1, or perhaps neither, of these claims can be true. One of the texts must most likely be translated from the other

The process of translation usually leaves behind artifacts where the translators made mistakes. By studying differences between the Greek and Aramaic we can find places where an ancient translator likely made a mistake.

These mistakes can be from various sources, say misreading the letters on an ancient scroll. It can also be from not knowing the nuances of the source language. Translators usually need to be better in the target language.

There are 100s of detailed examples and then a few common examples used in the discussion over Aramaic Primary. Let me share 2 of many examples.

Eye of a Needle

The following is passage from the NIV. This is a careful modern translation into English from Greek.

Here is the same verse from the BRB, itself now audited against the Aramaic for the same verse:

Spot the difference?

The Greek asks if a camel can go through the eye of a needle. The Aramaic asks if a rope can go through the eye of a needle.

The first pass at choosing which is likely to be correct is look at these choices by 'affordance.' Needles are usually threaded. Rope is an extreme example of thread. Rope has affordance to thread and so fits the story better than camel

Camels do not have anything to do with needles, so it has no affordance to the story.

When we dig deeper, the Aramaic is using a word that transliterates to Camel. It means camel. It is the name for a type of animal. The Aramaic to Greek translators knew this.

BUT, the word also means the rope made from camel's hair. Today this is called 'ships rope.' The same heavy rope used to tie up ships.

Curiously, I met a man who had retired from a career in the US Navy. He commented that the name 'camel' is still used to describe the woven ship's rope buffers used on navy ships. He commented to me that this must be the origin of that modern English term.

Leper's House

For another example, consider the leper's house. Here is the quote from Mark 14. First in the NIV, a careful translation from Greek.

Then again from the BRB, carefully audited from the Aramaic.

Note that the Aramaic uses the term 'potter' instead of leper.

Again, using the tools of affordance, what problems do these 2 words present to the reader?

If this is taking place in the house of a leper, shouldn't the main story be the healing of that leper?

Instead the story focuses on a pot of oil that is poured out. Both Greek and Aramaic agree on this point.

But if this is a house of a potter, perhaps this means a house of pots filled with interesting stuff?

Is this one of the potter's pots that is poured out?

Probably so, the Aramaic is likely the inspired text, the Greek is likely the addition.

There is something like 100 similar examples, all of which point to the idea that Greek is a translation from an Aramaic. It is wrong to think that Greek is the inspired language of the NT. Anyone seeking truth needs to focus on the Aramaic and not the Greek.

So for many years we have used the Aramaic NT as the base for auditing English as we have worked on the BRB.

Aramaic is a Semitic family language. The computer standard known as Unicode explains exactly the 1-to-1 relationship between Aramaic and Hebrew letters. So in our journey to an audited interlinear we can easily use the Aramaic NT as the base for that audit.

Conceptually, at this point in our history, all we need to do is use the same font on both testaments. Things will shift later.

Language Shifts

That Hebrew class where we had learned so much about text assumed that the text was inspired letter perfect and in full. The instructor then said that scribes had tried to keep up with pronunciation changes across history, diverging from the inspired forms.

There is (or was) considerable evidence on Wikipedia about the language shift of the Roman world in the latter half of the first century. The Pentecost event recorded early in Acts appears to have impacted the whole Roman world.

Like some sort of replay of the Tower of Babel, the language systems of the Roman world diverged, and quickly.

The upper classes of the Roman world were educated in Latin and had much written materials in that language, especially law and contracts. Their language system did not diverge that much because their written texts kept the speakers of Latin under control. Latin was stable enough that Catholic church used Latin until the 1960s.

But the lower classes, Roman speakers, were not as well educated. They did not have a large base of important written documents that they needed to read.

Around the year 100 AD those lower class speakers where changing how they spoke. In some locations grandparents were unintelligible to their grand children. In other areas simple barriers of geography, like mountains, divided Roman speakers. The Romans of late first century diverged widely in what was once a shared system pronunciation.

This divergence of language is what gives rise to the various languages across Europe today. This was not an insignificant event.

The Hebrew class that we took explained that the addition of vowels, and by 500 AD, vowel points, was done by scribes to keep up with pronunciation changes.

Like upper class Romans who needed to know Latin, the Hebrew scribes were kept mostly stable because of the need to carry the text unchanged. But, they added vowels to mark changes in vocalization.

We have done enough work to know that adding vowels was done in some sort of ad-hoc manner, and some words are seen with both spellings. This fully agrees with what we were taught, that these changes came when the pronounced sound systems of human speakers were change.

This was not seen by our teacher as a malicious action, and indeed it looks added later. But, we eventually found that there was malicious intent behind some of these changes.

Kings Or Angels?

The rules of the class were simple. Drop added vowels, use the remaining letters as the spelling to work out word meaning. This worked often, and well. In the cases were dropping added vowels hits another known word we would not expect any difference.

But we found a very serious exception that still defines our journey. Let me show it by a simple example.

This quote from the NIV is one of many in the NT that at the bottom is tied to the Aramaic 4 letter spelling of the word for 'angel.' The same 4 letters drawn in Aramaic script are used in Hebrew for Angel. So there is no divergence between Hebrew and Aramaic here.

The problem is that in the 3 letter, no-vowel, version of the same word, the resulting word is not angel, but king.

Were these originally the same word?

Or did some malicious scribe intentionally diverge these 2 words?

By this I mean did someone take deliberate malicious action to use an innocent technique for keeping up with pronunciation changes to change the meaning at the same time?

Here is the same verse in the BRB which always audits the 3 and 4 letter spellings of these words to the English word king in its various tenses.

So we use the entire quote to ask author's intent. Was this passage originally about angelic beings? Or was the intent to tell women to dress with head coverings because of earthly kings.

So was the author's intent to warn women for their own protection from the evil intent of earthly kings? Just as earthly kings draft young men into war, they take young women into their harems. (Think Epstein Island for a modern example.)

There is significant weight on the idea that this second interpretation was the author's intent.

Later, we learned to ask about the editor's intent.

Did an editor have a reason to make this change? Editors are either kings, priests or their agents. Would an editor have reason to shift from the word king to angel? Either here or perhaps everywhere across the text?

To see this for yourself, take a Greek based copy of the NT and read through all occurrences of the word 'angel' and ask if this might have always been the simple word 'king.'

If you do this, you will especially see this editor's intent evident in the Book of Revelation. The destruction of earth described in that book would thus be ascribed by original authors to earthly kings, not someone from off planet.

Editor's intent in that case would be to change author's intent from placing blame on the editors to others.

By undoing this likely editor's change, we would read Revelation to mean that kings of earth will be the ones who will destroy earth.

People like Obama and his friends become examples of the men who the text would be discussing.

So are there angels at all?

They are called kings because they occupy seats in the heavenly throne room described in Revelation 4. They come and go from earth at will. They actually do rule earth. They have authority over all earthly kings, should they choose to use that authority, which the often do not use. Figuring who they are and where they come is completely possible but it forms an advanced study.

This sort of vocabulary change was starting to change what the text actually meant. We were diverging from the stock Greek Bibles that we grew up with. Things were about to diverge much more severely.

Doctrine of Inspiration

In 2011 we traveled the Oregon coast to California. Driving for days in the car has often been a key time of insight as we generally stop work on the computers and sit and talk.

In that trip it dawned on us that there might be manuscript tampering that was larger than just changes in spelling.

It had taken years to get to this point because our Protestant upbringing takes the doctrine of inspiration as fundamental. Here is the important quote.

Martin Luther used this quote to argue that the Bible has fundamental authority over affairs of the church. Church leaders were not to be considered the supreme voice, such as the Pope at Rome.

This was profound in many ways, and it triggered what is now called the Protestant Reformation. Everyone had reason to study the text to find out for themselves if they had basis for rejecting tyrant leaders. There was suddenly compelling reasons to teach children how to read. That way they could read the text for themselves. Literacy went up, and the entire world of ideas became open to intellectual exploration.

But, there is a logical mistake in this doctrine that springs from that verse. Everyone who quotes it, should know the problem.

Luther and his spiritual heirs think that the Bible that we hold today is the same book as called out in the passage quoted here.

Consider, Mormon's easily use that verse to claim the Book of Mormon has authority too. Other religions are doing the same. Protestants are not superior in using this as the basis for their claims about the Bible.

We need some concrete evidence to prove that the Bible we now hold is the scripture referenced in that passage.

Routes To Proving Inspiration

At the time we already knew about how the 3d system behind letter forms provided a system to detect and correct errors in letter shapes. That system is either inspired or comes from some ancient high-tech world, maybe both. It was not designed by ancient shepherds.

There must be a similar error detection and correction system that applies to strings of letters as written by inspired authors. As it seemed related to the 3d system, it became Phil's mission to try and find that system.

Once that drive along the Oregon coast was finished, Ryan took the challenge to see if he could spot additions based on context and content. Phil added the tools needed so the BRB text could mark Ryan's hunches on large additions.

Let me share 2 early examples.

Numbers 7

Before that drive was even over, we both recognized that Numbers 7 stood the best chance of being an addition.

The chapter itself is out of place and interrupts the narrative running in Numbers 6 and continuing in Numbers 8.

Numbers 7 explains 12 days of offerings that are identical and brought each day across 12 days. This is not matched in the text to the time when these offerings supposedly happened.

Numbers 7 does not explain what happened on the either the 1 or 2 Sabbaths that should have happened on those 12 days. Did they stop Sabbath? If not, was it right to work on the Sabbath?

First Corinthians 13

Some readers here might think that even of the OT is tampered, that the NT must not be. The easiest example to see is First Corinthians 13.

The previous chapter 12 and the next chapter 14 are on the topic of spiritual gifts. Chapter 13 was inserted later, just like Numbers 7, and is not related.

Editor's Marks

Once we were on the hunt for additions, we found places where some scribe appears to have bracketed additions with comments.

Consider that the king might not know how to read and write. In any case hand written scrolls require skills that kings will not normally want to perform. They will dictate their additions and then have some scribe insert the edit.

The best example of this is found in 3 places, which I quote here in the NIV.

Note the common phrase, Do not cook a kid in its mother's milk.

These are NOT passages dealing with food laws.

What is the mother's milk? Inspired text.

Who is the kid? The reader.

Who is cooking the kid? Whomever ordered a scribe to insert text into inspired text.

This footnote was their way to warn future readers about the tamper they were compelled in some way to insert.

Modern Jews simply take this as a food law. It prevents cheese and meat on the same pizza, for example. It has a much more important textual meaning.

Law Of Babel

Once we accepted that there might be tampering, we struggled with another problem. Is there any reason to believe the inspired text even survives to our era?

Is it completely fabricated? Has it lost any fundamental parts?

Error detection and correction systems, no matter how they might work, depend on some amount of the original message getting through to the intended receiver.

Has a recoverable part of inspired text made it into our modern era? The path for finding inspired text that we were starting to walk requires that there is something to find.

There is a principle, given in Daniel's day and then again in Mordecai's day that once a law is issued that it cannot be repealed. This is what traps Daniel, see Daniel 6:8 for an example. This is also what causes the civil war in Esther is based on the same problem. See Esther 8:8 for an example. Instead of repealing a law, all that kings can do is add more laws.

These civil examples provide the basis for why most tampering with the text can be expected to always be additions. Simple respelling and word substitutions appear to be recoverable provided there has been no loss of the general documents.

As we are working on the text, we are also limited to this. Only once we and prove the exact letter perfect text can we then confidently drop the rest. This is why our systems are built around markup against the BRB.

Acts 15, Pass 1

We generally want to find the text speaking about whatever problem we are studying. So once we were on the topic of additions, we looked for places that might be speaking of this problem.

The first place where we found the text speaking about itself is Acts 15. The context is given at the top of the chapter. The disciples had been in Antioch when someone came down from Jerusalem and demanded that early believers be circumcised.

This caused a stir, and they had to get together and hold a council on this point. Various arguments are presented and then the council writes a letter back to Antioch.

Here is the essential quote of the letter set back to Antioch.

Note how they went to great trouble to assemble together to address the issue of circumcision. But, their answer back does not even mention the practice. Instead there are 4 other points listed instead.

The 4 key words are given in verse 29:

• Sacrifice

• Blood

• Strangled

• Fornication

In a flash of insight, we realized the fundamental reason they gathered is because the 'men from Jerusalem' who had come down were basing their circumcision argument on additions.

This would indicate that Exodus 12:44 and Exodus 12:48 are additions, along with many other circumcision related passages, including Abraham, Gilgal, and so on.

It would also indicate that the purpose of the letter was to provide broad and general topics that mark the hand of an editor.

We had hit pay-dirt. Ryan set out to find passages that were on these topics and mark them as likely additions.

Acts 15, Pass 2

In 2016 we hosted a week long set of online meetings. As we tried to do once a year we gave project status to friends and supports spread around the world.

The plan was to review the project, much as this article is doing here.

One of the important chapters to this work is in Acts 15. I was the chief speaker for those live streams and was late in preparing ahead, so I was racing through the material ahead of each meeting in order to prepare slide.

When I was preparing notes on Acts 15, I realized there was much more in this chapter than we had previously understood. Without time to discussion the talk with Ryan, I got up and gave my reasoning to the larger group who had assembled. My reasoning went roughly like this.

Their real problem was that Moses is read on the Sabbath.

The reason they are writing is because they see a problem with Moses being read on the Sabbath. There is a problem in the popular text that is out in the world.

The are going to instruct readers how to filter out uninspired stories using rules.

But instead of just listing rules, they write a letter back to Antioch because each point they raise marks an editor whom are also each identified by letters.

Solomon writes a letter to Hiram for logs. Solomon built the temple and introduces into the public texts the topic sacrifice. Most anything to do with sacrifice is there by Solomon's hand. The temple itself a house of idols. Solomon is editor #1.

Jezebel (in Ahab's hand) writes a letter to get Naboth killed. Jezebel introduces blood, and justification for killing. The commandment is absolute, do not kill. But there are a bunch of exceptions. She is the editor for those. Ahab/Jezebel is editor #2.

Nebuchadnezzar wrote several letters, especially about the cut down tree and the statue. The tree is like a neck on a person. He introduced the Hebrew language and texts. They were in a different language from the inspired text. Daniel was chosen for his job so he could learn the Babylonian language and literature. Together they choked off the inspired tongue. Nebuchadnezzar is editor #3.

Mordecai's wrote letters to the Jews that triggered the civil war in his day. His entire life story is about pimping Esther to be accepted in the king's harem in order to get power for himself. This is the sexual immorality mentioned in the letter. Mordecai is editor #4.

Ezra did not write a letter, but was given a letter. It gave him authority under the power of the king to establish what becomes the state religion. He is the canonizer. The men who first came from Jerusalem and started the story are doing so under his edits. Ezra is editor #5.

The letter is acts is identifying the NT editor. This will turn out to be Ananias who is editor #6.

With the editors identified to specific people it became much easier to establish editor's intent and to catalog editors. The BRB app has a set of filter tags which can be enabled to show who we identify as the likely source for uninspired passages.

Dropping Hebrew OT

Once we got our heads around Nebuchadnezzar as the sponsor of the development of the Hebrew language, we were faced with the problems of the Hebrew OT.

There is an Aramaic version of the OT that competes with the Hebrew OT. At the same time there is NO Hebrew version of the NT.

If Aramaic was the inspired text of the NT, then might Aramaic be the inspired remaining text of the OT too? If the entire Bible was written in 1 language, then Aramaic is the only serious choice.

Remember, of course, that the original language text was not either Aramaic nor Hebrew, it was in the Paleo alphabet in its own language that devolved from that used on the stone carved commandments. That alphabet had escaped to Phoenicia when Solomon wrote Hiram a letter requesting logs for Solomon's temple. This is why it is known as Phoenician, and why it spread around the world.

For maybe 1000 years after Moses, the scribes still used pure Paleo letter forms, but eventually the text was transposed from that alphabet out to other languages. The Hebrew conversion happened at Daniel's hand in Nebuchadnezzar's day.

The Paleo to Aramaic conversion likely happened a couple centuries earlier than Daniel. That earlier conversion was triggered by Jezebel's assassination of Naboth.

Naboth appears to have run a community of prophets. Naboth's vineyard was used to produce the fuser needed for ink. The time needed to regrow an orchard was most likely contributing to why he was not eager to sell out. That vineyard likely had history to Joshua son of Nun's day, thus his claim to heritage.

After the death of Naboth, and the disbursing of that prophetic community, Elijah and maybe Elisha were refugees who fled Jezebel. They eventually headed for Damascus, across the Jordan where they would be safer.

Damascus was a city in Aram, now Syria. This is the name from which the Aramaic/Syriac texts which we have been discussing get their names.

Those prophets, scribes really, are the likely first group to have done a conversion to the local Aramaic alphabet. This group has has a superior claim on being the first group to do a translation from Paleo into another drawn form of the alphabet.

Note that there are serious differences between word spellings in the Hebrew and Aramaic, so this shift to Aramaic is serious. Our first audits done in 2023 worked only against Aramaic. This choice was justified.

NT Divine Name

The Aramaic New Testament spells Jesus' name the exact same way as the OT name Joshua as in Joshua son of Nun. This man was Moses' aide and then lead the heirs of Jacob across the Jordan and into the promised land.

Because we are trying to audit the text we want that spelling to come out the same in all places. We have 2 different choices here. Either we make Moses' aid into Jesus, or we make Jesus into Joshua.

Because Joshua is a conventional transliteration of a name into English, and because Jesus only transliterates Greek, the BRB text and the rest of work always uses the name Joshua.

This is also a helpful change because we understand Joshua as god in the flesh, while Jesus is son of god in the flesh. This is a theological difference that we arrive at given our work in the text.

Joshua is the name we use when we pray. This is the name center to our faith. This is the man who was crucified and raised from the dead. He is the center of the action in the NT.

OT Divine Name

There is a long history and theory about how names are translated between languages. Normally, a name is left alone when it is translated between languages. This fact has been used as the key to recovering languages that have been completely lost to history.

The 1901 ASV English translation attempted to introduce Jehovah as the OT divine name. This English does carefully follow standard transliteration rules and is not a bad choice.

The ASV version was never commercially successful and English language Bibles have generally remained with the use of LORD, Lord and lord instead. This lets them remain competitive for the Bible buying public.

The terms, LORD, Lord and lord, notice the difference in capitalization, are used to hide a confusing number of Hebrew terms that are generally thought of as the OT Divine Name.

When we compare the divine name terms in Hebrew and in Aramaic we find something very strange. Hebrew has what appears to be a standard name, Jehovah, using standard English name conversion rules, or Yahweh, which uses Yiddish conversion rules.

Aramaic does not have a name at all, but a title. That title is also used of ordinary people. It is usually translated from Aramaic as master. That word also transliterates into the English word mister, which is also quite strange suggesting our English word mister comes from that Aramaic root.

This divergence between Aramaic and Hebrew is not normally seen. For most of the common names in the text the Hebrew and Aramaic versions are spelled exactly the same and differ only by the difference in the written forms of the letters themselves.

This point was an issue of dispute and recorded for us in the NT. Here is verse that calls out the dispute:

Pay attention to the local problem this verse poses. Abraham is the father of all the faithful. We are adopted into his family when we come to faith.

What name did Abraham use as his divine name? In other words, what real name did Abraham use when Abraham entertained is 3 special guests?

Since there is only 1 name, this verse is calling out the dispute found in the extant texts. They disagreed, and the NT writers knew this.

In addition, the dispute is fundamental. If you don't know this name, you are not able to become a member of the faith community.

Because the BRB text is trying to reflect audited terms in the English you will always see Master as the OT divine name. This is really a title. When we strip the BRB out for use in our estimations of inspired text we intentionally substitute Joshua for Master, in any passage coming from the OT.

Our hunch that Joshua was the inspired divine name was borne out by our early OT audit work. Work still remains to fully prove this point, but our hunch is growing confident.

The Testimony App

In the 6 months after that early 2016 live stream we now had enough intellectual tools to intelligently mark out passages in the BRB which were not inspired.

At some point that spring it was evident we were going to be marking out more than 1/2 of the Bible. It became important to try and understand what was left over. We also had to work out what the correct name was for that work.

We currently expect the formal name for inspired text to be called, "The Testimony of Joshua." We typically call it the 'TT' for short.

By Tabernacles in August of 2016 what is now the TT App went online.

This app strips out all text in the BRB currently thought to be added by editors. It arranges that material in an organization that we currently think to be inspired.

Conventional Bibles are a collection of different books. They are arranged in a conventional order based on various traditions.

As we experimented with the TT app over the years we spent considerable time trying to estimate what the high level design of that text might be. The TT and its other related Testimony Apps reflect our current understanding on this point.

Instead of the 1189 chapters of the Protestant Bible, there are 400 stories. These break down into 16 sets of 25 stories. There is a considerable amount of Alphabet related structure woven into these stories. It seems to be designed for annual reading at the holiday of Tabernacles, especially the 8 day version that land son Sabbath and Jubilee years.

The text inside the TT app and its cousin apps is still usually updated every Friday afternoon. This to reflect the latest for anyone using the app for Sabbath the next day.

Current Work

Our technical focus is now on the problems of recovering the letter perfect text. We have made several false attempts at this and now have a theory about how this will be done.

This is explained more in the Theory article.