Do you believe in unicorns?

Today the unicorn is legendary, or mythical. But this was not always so. At one time the unicorn existed--or, at least, was thought to exist.As described in ancient scientific writings and depicted in painting and tapestry, the unicorn was a beautiful horse-like creature with a single long horn thought to have medicinal properties. Respected ancient scholars, such as Aristotle and Pliny, mention them existing in their day. But today unicorns have gone the way of fairies, elves, and trolls. Belief in such creatures was abandoned with the 18th century Enlightenment. Oddly enough, however, the unicorn remained a fixture in the Bible until the 19th century."How could that be?" one may well ask. TheChristians who wrote the New Testament did not use the Hebrew Old Testament, but rather its Greek translation, as sacred Scripture. In the Greek Old Testament eight passages describe an animal having only one horn (monokeros) as a translation for the Hebrew word re'em.In the late fourth century, the Old Testament was translated into Latin (the Vulgate) using both the Greek and Hebrew.

In some of the passages above the Vulgate translates the Hebrew re'em as "rhinoceros" and others as "unicorn." All Christians used the Vulgate until the 16th century, at which time Martin Luther translated the Bible into German — the first time the Bible was ever translated into a modern European language. Luther used only the Hebrew, for the Old Testament. Nevertheless, he still translated re'em as unicorn.Later William Tyndale, using only the Hebrew, likewise translated re'em as unicorn, and so did theKing James Version of 1611. In the 19th century, however, scholars decided that the Hebrew re'em did not really mean unicorn, but rather wild buffalo. Thus Christians from the fourth century well into the 19th found the unicorn in the Bible. The first English language edition to read "wild ox" for the Hebrew re'em was the American Standard Version of 1901. Today, "wild ox" has become the accepted English translation for re'em.The Greek Orthodox Church, however, still uses the ancient Greek version of the Jewish Bible as their Holy Scripture. Where it differs from the Hebrew (and it often does), they believe the differences are due to divine inspiration. Unicorns, therefore, still exist in their Bible, as they existed for all Christians until the 19th/20th centuries.So the question boils down to this: Did scholars change re'em to "wild ox" because they knew unicorns were mythicalan......