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Most touching of all was a video in which a pastor and his congregation recite The Lord's Prayer, just as I learned it as a child.
Then they open their Bibles and read what seems like the same passage, but the words are strangely different.
For instance, rather than the familiar, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," they find, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."
And they wonder: Who changed the Bible?
This sort of discrepancy is particularly worrying to fundamentalist Christians, who believe every single word of the Bible ought to be taken literally and none of them ought to be changed.
It's especially difficult on people who think the Bible was written in English, who don't realize the text is older than the language, who have no idea how many different translations have been published over the years.
Given the power of the Internet, it wouldn't have taken them more than five minutes to find out that all these translations are different, which is to say they are now and always have been different, and that the text they remember is from the Book of Common Prayer, which is not now and has never been identical to the King James Bible, from which they've been reading.
Or maybe they know all this, but it's irrelevant to them because the explanation to which it points presupposes that they could have been ignorant or confused or forgetful as to their sources. And they just can't believe that. They can't even consider it.
They wouldn't believe me if I said that I, who am not a serious Bible scholar, have been aware of this so-called discrepancy for many decades, having noticed it shortly after I graduated from Sunday School and started reading the Bible for myself ...
... implying, of course, that these recently-discovered secret changes are neither recent nor secret, and that the people claiming otherwise may well be ignorant or confused. Nobody wants to believe that, of themselves or their pastors.
They find it easier to believe that their Bibles have been changed, and so have all the other Bibles in the world, in print and online, secretly and retroactively, with no evidence left behind, except in their memories.
And this situation is especially mystifying to those who have never heard of The Mandela Effect.
