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The BibleLest we be accused of circular logic, we aren’t going to just tell you what the Bible says about itself. Instead, we will make a foray into history, backed up by some archeology, and then look at the Bible itself. As with the rest of this web-site, we promise not to use a bunch of religious words or phrases. We want to look at several subjects over the next several pages. They are:
Who Wrote the Bible?The Bible was written by approximately forty men over a period of about fifteen hundred years. Generally, each book of the Bible (The Gospel of Matthew, Jeremiah, Proverbs, etc.) was written by a single author. The authors were men with names like Jeremiah, Moses, Joshua, Paul, and Peter. And some had names like Obadiah, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Some were farmers, some were princes, and one or two of them were kings. Most of them were people very much like you and me. Some men wrote only one book. Others wrote several. Some of the writers lived 400 years or more before Jesus Christ died on the cross; some died more than sixty years after the day Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. The first book of the Bible, Genesis, was written by Moses around 1500 BC (Before Christ). The last book, The Revelation of Jesus Christ, was written around AD 99 by a man named John. Finally, the men wrote their respective books in such places as Babylon (now modern-day Iraq), Greece, Asia Minor (Turkey), and Israel (that’s right – Israel). The Bible wasn’t written by white Europeans who wanted to keep Blacks in slavery. And it wasn’t written by the Catholics so they could keep everyone in spiritual slavery. It was written by Middle Eastern Jews and an occasional Middle Eastern gentile. How did the Bible become the Bible?Did some monk in a monastery suddenly decide which books and which letters would be included in the package? Did he include things he liked and throw away the letters and other stuff he didn’t like? No. Eusebius, a Christian Historian, and Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria set down the list of books accepted by the Church at that time. Later, church councils established their lists as final. It wasn't just a matter of which books they liked, it was more a matter of which books were accepted by the Church. And here we should note the Church was not defined as a group of bishops and cardinals who met in Rome to decide the Canon. Though a large number of texts were used at various times in the early church, only a small number of them were included in the canon, or the standard, that we now call the Bible. The books that were included from the Old Testament were included because the the historians and the councils had sufficient evidence that the books were accepted as authoritative by Judaism (and by Jesus Christ, and His Apostles, as demonstrated by them quoting from them). The books included in the New Testament had several things going for them. First, there was evidence that they were written by one of the Apostles or a close associate of an Apostle. Second, the document had been in use in the church for a significant period of time. Finally, the books had to be consistent with the rest of the canon. As an example of inconsistencies, one of the "gospels" was that was excluded was so excluded because it has such radical events as a twelve year old Jesus casting a spell on an individual who had irritated Him. This is inconsistent with the Jesus that is found in the Bible (which is the basis of judgement). The Bible has been the Bible for about the last 1600 years. The only changes have been such cosmetics as the use of chapter and verse markings and the order that the books have appeared in the Bible. How Do We Know It’s Reliable?The nice thing about living on this end of History is the fact that Archaeology has had a long time (literally hundreds of years) to dig into the history laid out in the Bible. And the interesting thing is that rather than diminish the reliability of the Bible, archaeology has only underscored the Bible’s trustworthiness in history. Just recently, hard evidence of the existence of David was finally uncovered. The recounts of history in the Gospel according to Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles, once decried as flawed and just plain wrong, have been repeatedly vindicated by secular archaeologists -- men and women who are not necessarily friendly to the Bible or Christianity. The Pharaoh Ramses was real. The nation of Israel did in fact exist. The city of Jericho was real and its walls really did fall inward instead of outward. There really was a Nebuchadnezzar ruling over Babylon, and the city of Ur was very real. Only 100 years ago, the "scholars" claimed that all of this was simply made up, myths and legends. While the Christian doesn’t depend on the results of archaeology for our faith in God, it is interesting that the Book we look to has yet to be contradicted by the hard science of archaeology even when it speak of things that science has yet to confirm. Instead, again and again, the Bible has been confirmed. It’s real history about a real God, inserting Himself into the lives of real people in a real world. How do we know that what we have is what was originally written?This is certainly a fair question. It doesn’t matter what process was used in identifying the the "official Bible" (known as the "canon" of scripture) if what we have today doesn’t match what was identified as the Bible 1600 years ago. To add to the difficulty, no one has any of the original manuscripts (known as "autographs"). While we don’t have the original writings, the autographs, we do have copies that go back to within thirty years of the originals. And those are not just one or two copies of the originals; nor even a dozen, or a few dozen; but, literally thousands of copies, portions, and fragments. All of these copies -- from various times, various locations, and copied by various people -- give today’s analysts enough to work with to figure out what the originals said. And their accuracy is, apparently, within 98 percent. The differences that are found between these manuscripts deal more with trivial things like a spelling or the such. Given the increase in old manuscripts since the first modern language Bible was translated (english, german, spanish, etc.), the Bible we have now is actually more accurate than the translation used by, say Germans in the 1500s or used by the church in AD 800. Additionally, along with the thousands of copies that have been found, we have the writings of people who were living within 100 years of the books of the Bible having been written. In these writings they quote the Bible extensively. A big bonus in the reliability question was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls contain portions of the Old Testament. But the neat thing about them is that they are almost 1,000 years older than anything the scholars had to work with prior to their discovery. And when the Scrolls are compared to the later manuscripts (manuscripts that were copied around AD 900 ), the differences between the Scrolls and the newer manuscripts are truly minor. Hidden for 2000 years they confirmed that what we have now is what was written then. For more information on the Dead Sea Scrolls, see the history of the DEAD SEA SCROLLS. More Christian references:
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