The Bloated Scribes Matthew 23:24 “You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel .” - Berean Standard Bible Above is just one example of Jesus being outspoken. Jesus clearly has a sense of humour, simply because He created it ( John 1:3 ). Moreover, Jesus had divine chutzpah that not only outwitted these ‘learned intelligentsia’ of the Torah on multiple occasions ( John 8:7 ), but He also brazenly rebuked them ( Matthew 23:27 ). And because of their hypocritical handling of sacred Script, Jesus’ subsequently words are seen in Matthew 11:25 . Moreover, since He is the Alpha and the Omega ( Revelation 22:13 ) and since we are dealing here with the present, His Word is relevant to this day ( Isaiah 40:8 ). Hypocritical scribes are still doing the unclean thing today. Nothing has changed ( Ecclesiastes 1:9 ). They discreetly- and selectively strain out the implicative little ‘to’ gnat from their translations, while indulging in the added “mighty might” camel, the grave defilement ( Jeremiah 8:8 ) of the Word of God, priming readers into the emotional feedback loop of doubt and fear. Sowing doubt is nothing else than eroding confidence in the truth and creating confusion. See, repetitively sowing doubt seeds leads to the “illusory truth effect”, and ultimately tricks the brain into accepting the lie as being the truth! The mind confuses the familiarity of a repeated thought with verity. Familiarity usually feels like truth, not so? The fruit on the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” looked familiar and pleasing to Eve and here the “ If it looks good, it must be good ” fits perfectly. This is so Satan’s style. Goodness. He not only thrives on the ‘show-off’ outer, but also on kindling chaos in the inner [mind]. And with specific reference to mocking Christ, he used this rhetoric of repetitive doubt-sowing as exploitation of psychology, being his manipulative propaganda tactic that normalised the narrative of ‘ everlasting damnation ’ since the days of Constantine I already. He’s using this myth as baseline by default, thereby gloatingly sustaining false ‘Christianity’ to this day! Why, do you think the so-called ‘Christians’ today are literally running away from anything that just remotely poses a threat to their ‘salvation’? Constant awareness of the ‘eternal punishment’ they face on a daily basis, when they read their Bibles, of course! See, repetitive confrontation with the doubt-sowing modal auxiliaries “may” and “might” across the New Testament is enough to embed the continuous ‘doubt-fear’ feedback loop in their minds. What the eyes don’t see anymore, the brain still does and Satan is well aware of that. Don’t for one moment think he has no clue of psychology, because this is the very terrain he thrives upon, and in this case, the incredible visual cortex and occipital lobes! The brain vividly recreates the image in the mind's eye as it uses memory to create continuous visual exemplars. Needless to say, the more frequent the Bible is read with these inconspicuous add-on auxiliary verbs, the more is the angst petrified in the brain. In spite of the fact that Adam and Eve didn’t have a Bible, purposeful God deliberately placed the ‘no-no’ tree in the middle of Eden, with its fruit being pleasing to the eye. Isn’t it a human wiring to desire what one cannot have? The serpent and his half truths Genesis 3:1-6 “ 1  Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field that the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” 2  The woman answered the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, 3  but about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You must not eat of it or touch it, or you will die.’” 4  “ You will not surely die ,” the serpent told the woman. 5  “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God , knowing good and evil.” 6  When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, she took the fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.” - Berean Standard Bible