Ahh, but "Word of God" and "dictated by God" are not the same thing at all. They are totally different. They have been different things for as long as the individual books have existed. The original audience treated the books as "the Word of God" without treating them as "dictated by God." This sounds like a proofless assertion arising from a lack of knowledge. I'm just saying, that's what it sounds like. And what if I wrote the entire 7-volume "Harry Potter" series? Oh, wait, we know that I didn't. We know who wrote it and when and where and under what circumstances. THERE'S YOUR ANSWER. People knew each other and talked with each other and wrote to each other. Come on, John was both a church pastor and a regional bishop in what is now Turkey. People knew him. Already answered.
I still feel like I'm not being understood. Let me give it another shot. I believe man to be fallible from birth. So why should I, even though I believe I am a Christian, believe something that another man has written to be worthy of being in the bible? I'm really not trying to argue, just to find an answer. Maybe it can't be answered, I used to have this discussion with my pastor.
We both know that a great deal of communication is lost across keyboards, but, right or wrong, I always get the impression from you that you think the religion popped up in a sterile vacuum. Like, poof, a dusty book fell out of the sky and people who didn't even know each other started reading it, and then they said, "Hey, do you want to start a religion?" NOT! That's not how it happened. The answer to your question is as obvious as the relationship you have with your family and friends and neighbors. The answer is that relationship. Take just the NT for example. Matthew, John, and Peter literally and physically walked and talked and ate and camped out with Jesus 7 days a week for more than 3 years straight. Non-stop. Every day. Think of how deep a relationship you get with people (your children, for example) when you are with them every single days for years on end. James was the cousin or something of Jesus. He literally was family. Think about that relationship. Paul camped out with God for a couple years in the desert. Relationship. And Jesus didn't have just 12 students, the 12 apostles. He had scores if not hundreds of disciples. At one point in the gospels he sent out 70 disciples to preach. 70, at one time. That's a lot of people who know each other. Mark and Luke were the direct students of that larger group as well as being students of Peter and the rest of the apostles. All of them worked together for literally decades as the NT was being written. Paul, Peter, John, the whole crew met and talked face-to-face for decades, sometimes in small groups and sometimes in large groups. They knew each other. Think about how well you get to know someone when you work with him for 20 years. The NT was slowly written during those decades within the context of those relationships. The very text itself talks about those relationships. "Greet so and so"? Have you not read that? And all the names that are listed in the epistles? Lots of names. So that's why they are qualified to write the NT and you are not: they actually had a relationship with the human historical Jesus and with other people who knew him. You can't say that.
Those books which were written during that time period I completely understand and accept the validity of. But wasn't the bible, for lack of a better term, edited in later centuries? Who decided which books would be included and not included? I honestly don't know or know if our historians even know. I'm not qualified to go to heaven let alone write a book included in the bible. Your answer did go a long way towards me understanding though.
No. Originally it was group consensus somewhere close to 400 AD. This bishop used that list in his region, and that bishop used that list, and that one used that list, and so on, and wow, the lists were almost identical. It was not a big deal. With respect to the OT small variations existed even before then and they continue to exist (e.g., how many chapters is Daniel supposed to have?) but it didn't matter to anything, and no one thought the Bible was dictated verbatim anyway. We're +1600 years later and those variations still are not affecting anything. Nobody has ever blamed anything upon a different count of Daniel's chapters, for example. With respect to the NT the only variation that I've ever heard of is that a couple paragraphs got added to Mark's gospel somewhere in those early centuries, but that's footnoted in just about every Bible printed today. It's common knowledge and it doesn't change anything. We all know it's an addition not written by Mark. In the early 1600's (after the first edition of the King James Bible) Protestants dropped seven whole OT books out of the canon used within the Roman Catholic Church. I've asked many people and I've read many books, but I still do not understand why that happened. I'm all blank.
In answer to the last part, the Apocrypha are deemed not to be part of the Hebrew old testament, and therefore are neither of the the old testament or the new, which is slightly problematic, especially in the 1600s when sola scriptura was such a dominant theology among protestants. They used to exist as a separate section within protestant bibles, but as they became less popular amongst protestant groups, it made financial sense to print bibles without the Apocrypha, and eventually that became the dominant version.
1) But it was part of the Hebrew scriptures in the time of Jesus and the Apostles. That's how it got into the Christian Bible. The first Christians took their "Bible" with them. 2) The biblical canon was not formed on the basis of any financial decision.
Sorry but this is all just wrong. While the Bible does claim these people met Jesus and were part of the movement that isn't actually what's important. Firstly, the earliest dating for a Gospel is around 85AD. So that's 50 years after Jesus had been crucified. So in all likelihood those who were immediately part of the events in the Bible were either a) VERY old beyond the normal life expectancy or b) dead. So it is most likely that even the earliest Gospel was written at one generation removed from the events. Finally, Paul NEVER met Jesus. He might have "camped out with God" or whatever, but in all fairness you could take magic mushrooms and have the same feeling.
Well at least I'd like to hear what you have to say...i don't hammer people unless they look at me wrong. Just don't look at me wrong and you'll be fine.
Surely the proven history of christianity is that god made his only son, with a virgin who stayed a virgin, who then died so that god could forgive the sin of one of our ancestors but actually he didn't really die because he was god all along so he came back to life? If it wasn't proven why would they believe all that?
The financial decisions are reflective of broader trends in potestant thought regarding Apocrypha, rather than causative I should think. I think it's fair to say that the Apocrypha were part of some jewish bibles, but not necassarily all, and there appears to be some controversy attached to them as early as the second century. Issues of canonicity and Sola Scriptura were hotly discussed in the 16th and 17th centuries (I mean, Luther advocated removing James!!!), and for some reason, related to their not being part of the original Hebrew bible, they came to be viewed as related to the bible, but not actually canonical. This then led to a diminishing of their importance, and the anti-catholic politics of the time meant in many cases they were outright rejected (at one point in England it was illegal to read them in church). I've not read the apocrypha (grad school has dented my bible scholarship, I may well have a look at them in the summer) so I'm not in a position to comment on the rights or wrongs of this, it's simply a historical explanation.
I was always under the impression there were no accounts of a man called Jesus from the actual time he was supposed to have lived. Anything mentioning his name was written long after he died. There are however a few accounts of "The Christ" or "The Anointed One". There were also many radical Jewish sects around at the time who lived in the desert set apart from the main population centres. There's also a tomb in India or Pakistan that is claimed to be the final resting place of Jesus.
According to many scholars, the Gospel of John appears to actully be a primary source, or at least something very close to it. Interestingly, this gospel makes no mention of virgin conception, it contains no scenes of exorcism, it makes no assertion that Jesus is a descendant of David, it contains far fewer miralces than the other three, and goes into much more detail about a woman's experience of the ressurected Christ than the other Gospels.
I think you might be wrong here. The Gospel most likely to be first is that of Mark at around 85BC. Firstly because it mentions some things that are datable and secondly because it is repeated in the other three and therefore probably existed first. Apparently Luke it the most original one, though John is a bit different as well.
I haven't read it for quite a while But in relation to that, found amongst the Red Sea scrolls were a number of gospels from other disciples that were obviously rejected by the church for whatever reason. Amongst them were the gospels of Thomas, Peter and Mary Magdalene. Sooner or later scholars are going to have to decide if these are the real deal or not. Which if they are will change the Christian church forever. Especially since the gospel of Mary Magdalene suggest she was supposed to inherit Jesus's ministry and not Peter.
Those who think Mark was the first gospel think it was written before the destruction of Jerusalem (which was in 70 AD). And if indeed 1 Corinthians references the existence of a written NT (not a crazy thought), and if indeed it was written in the mid 50's (a lot of scholars believe this), then maybe Mark was written at about 50 AD, eh? Duh, that was done a long time ago. You're speaking outside of your comfort zone and looking silly. Bologny. You made that up.
An example of what I am talking about where modern interpretations of ancient greek and hebrew is noted below. Changing a single word, changes the context a great deal. Proponents of the "King-James-Only Movement" see the New King James Version as something less than a true successor to the KJV. Proponents view the NKJV as making significant changes to the meaning of the KJV translators. For example, Acts 17:22, in which Paul in the KJV calls the men of Athens "too superstitious",[7] is interpreted in the NKJV to have Paul call them "very religious".
