The Bible.
Is the God of the Bible, the Creator?
Is the Bible, reliable? Can we trust the Bible?
Is it truly God-inspired? How do you know it came from God?
Those are some of the common questions asked about the Bible. This thread aims to give answers to those questions (and maybe more).
It is also the most scrutinized book that’s ever written. Scrutiny comes not only from Christians cementing their faith or skeptics seeking truth, but most intense scrutiny comes from those with hostile intentions.
It's very much relevant, even today.
The Bible is written by over forty authors from every walk of life.
There are kings writing in this book. There are military leaders, and there are peasants, there are philosophers, there are fishermen, there are tax collectors, there are poets, there are musicians, there's a harpist, and a drummer. A drummer wrote two psalms. His name was Asaph. There are scholars who write this book, there are shepherds who write this book, and there was a cowman who wrote part of this book. His job was looking after cattle. This has come from a huge variety of human sources.
It was written over a period of at least fifteen hundred years. That means if the last book was being written now, the first book would have been written in the closing days of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire finally was disbanded in 476 A.D. That's just over fifteen hundred years ago. That's a huge time span. During that fifteen hundred years, cultures changed, outlooks changed.
It was written in three completely different languages: Hebrew and Greek are the primary languages, but parts of the Old Testament are written in Aramaic, which also would have been the mother tongue of Jesus, so the original speaking of Jesus would have been in Aramaic, though written in Greek, which had become the international language. That was the legacy of the Greek Empire was they left an international language, a bit like the way the British Empire left English as a kind of language of international communication. Well, the Greeks did that; that's why its written in Greek, but Aramaic is the origin and some of the Old Testament Scriptures parts of Ezra in particular, parts of Daniel, and the language of Jesus.
It was written in numerous styles; in fact, almost every literary style you'll probably find in this book.
There's history, there's poetry, and songs, there is law, there is biography, there is autobiography, there is prophecy, there is parable, there is allegory, and idioms and other figures of speech...... and probably other things that I haven't thought of.
It was written on three continents in a day when people didn't travel very much: Asia, Europe, and a little bit of it was written in Africa, Jeremiah down in Egypt.
Now if you tried to put that together humanly, with a very smart editor, though no editor survives fifteen hundred years....you wouldn't get this kind of unity and harmony.[/COLOR]
