The vast majority of (English-Language) Bibles are full to the brim with footnotes. In some instances these footnotes are more or less irrelevant. For instance, anyone who's ever sat through the never ending stream of "sermon on the mount" sermons knows that "Raca" is an aramaic expression of contempt, that doesn't translate directly to any word in english (Matthew 5:22). In this instance, the footnote is more an explanation of a foreign word, that doesn't effect the flow of the story.
In other instances, however, the footnotes have some substantial influence on the story. Consider Mark 1:40-44, in the typical telling of the story, a man has leprosy and asks Jesus to heal him. Jesus is "moved with compassion", heals him, and tells him not to tell anyone about it, but to go straight to the priests so they can declare that he is "clean". If you read this version of the story you tend to get the image of "gentle Jesus, meek and mild" who sees a sick man, pities him enough to heal him, and is humble enough to ask that he not going around singing Jesus' praises.
The crazy part is that this isn't the actual story. Go check your footnotes for verse 41, the oldest manuscripts don't say "moved with compassion", they say "moved with anger". This changes the whole meaning of the story. No longer is Jesus the humble man who pities a man enough to heal him. Suddenly we have a picture of "angry Jesus" who's outraged at being asked to heal a man, decides to heal him anyway, but orders him not to go around telling people that he's giving out free health care!
I'm sure one could probably come up with some excuse or explanation where they interpret the instance of Jesus being "moved with anger" in a way other than what I've stated above, but there's one additional problem: Why is it that so many Bible publishers are deliberately hiding the oldest (and presumably the most true to the original) translations in the footnotes, and publishing what they thing people want to hear instead? Could it be that they know the religion is a sham, so publishing something that's true to the original isn't as important as publishing something that conforms to what people want to believe about Jesus?
Lastly, there are those instances where there are footnotes inside of footnotes - cases of "footnote-ception", if you will - where the actual problems in the story are obscured through several layers of footnotes. For example, consider the "virgin birth prophecy" of Jesus as told in Matthew 1:22-23 that tells us that "The virgin will conceive a child!" The footnote tells us that the prophecy comes from Isaiah 7:14, which also says that "The virgin will conceive a child!" However, the footnote to this verse tells us that the word that is translated as "virgin" actually means "young woman".
Obviously, one could counter that young women of the era were expected to be virgins so "young woman" and "virgin" are essentially the same thing. This is a decent argument, but absolutely not correct. The author of Isaiah uses the Hebrew for "virgin" four times in his book and this "Virgin Birth" prophecy is not one of those times. The obvious reason for this is that the author of "Isaiah" didn't mean "virgin" he meant "young woman". What's more this Isaiah 7:14 prophecy is fulfilled in Isaiah 8 when the priestess gives birth to a son (who, unlike Jesus, actually is called "Immanuel"), further showing that it wasn't a prophecy about Jesus at all. So the Jesus narrative in Matthew has apparently mistranslated Isaiah in such a way that the claimed fulfillment added a biologically impossible condition, that was not present in the original prophecy.
My question to you to think about: How is it that a divinely inspired work contains a prophecy that was mistranslated, and then misapplied to the Jesus narrative?
To recap: The footnotes in the Bible often show us that the story was drastically different originally and has been adapted over time to adhere to the morality of the times, or perhaps simply to adhere to what people wished to be true. Sometimes (as in the case of Isaiah 7) these changes are sufficient to show that later Bible stories (and especially the gospels) that claim fulfillment of prophecy are fictional works that were based on mistranslated or misunderstood verses of previously written works, and not the inspired words of an infallible deity.
Happy Easter-4/20. Smoke if you got 'em.
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