For those of you who were missing my religious streak.. 
Call it the time of year, but I felt the need to post another one.
Call it the time of year, but I felt the need to post another one. So here's my question. Is the Bible God's Word? I believe that the Bible is God's Word as interpreted by man. (Guess I should check with the Catholic Church on that, I might have just excommunicated myself.) I will go as far as to say that some of it is God instructing what to say in certain passages, obviously the 10 commandments falls into this, but I am also willing to add the passages where the prophets say that God "told them to say..." There may be other examples, but you get my drift. I also believe that the parts of the New Testament that quote Jesus can be considered the Word directly.
What sparked this, is someone recently saying that the Bible was the True Word of God and should be taken as the absolute Truth. I don't think that alot of the Old Testament can be taken as the absolute Truth because quite a bit of it was creating Jewish laws which Jesus generally discounted during his time.
Now that I have upset everyone, I will leave you to comment or not as you see fit. 
9 comments:
didn't upset me, mary, you know me...i'm a complete heathen, remember? but i like reading your stuff about religion!
Okay this in the wrong place but i did'nt see any point burrying this in the archives. Its a response to your VPL post and thong debate.
It is said that North American women dress to impress their freinds while European women dress to impress men thats why european women tend to dress alot more alluring. anyways just my 2 cents have a good day
I think it is the word of God interpreted by man. Therefore, how much is really accurate? I think it is something to base teachings off of however, I don't necessarily know how much is truth. That's my 2 cents.
I have not forgot about you, Mary...I had to take a copy of what is in one of our bible study aids and just put it down here for thought...but I would really like to get into this topic a little further at a later date.
The Bible has only one author, Jehovah God. He used men to write the information down, much as a businessman uses a secretary to write a letter. The secretary writes the letter, but the letter contains the thoughts and ideas of the businessman. So it is his letter, not the secretary’s, even as the Bible is God’s Book, not the book of the men who were used to write it.
Since God created the mind, he surely did not find it hard to get in touch with the minds of his servants to provide them with the information to write. Even today a person can sit in his home and receive messages from a faraway place by means of a radio or a television set. The voices or pictures travel over long distances by the use of physical laws that God created. It is, therefore, easy to understand that Jehovah, from his place far away in the heavens, could direct men to write down the information that he wanted the human family to know.
The result has been a marvelous Book. Actually, the Bible is made up of 66 little books. The Greek word biblia, from which the word “Bible” comes, means “little books.” These books, or letters, were written over a period of 1,600 years, from 1513 B.C.E. to 98 C.E. Yet, because of having just one Author, all these Bible books are in harmony with one another. The same theme runs throughout the whole, namely, that Jehovah God will bring back righteous conditions by his kingdom. The first book, Genesis, tells how a paradise home was lost because of rebellion against God, and the last book, Revelation, describes how the earth will be made a paradise again by God’s rule.—Genesis 3:19, 23; Revelation 12:10; 21:3, 4.
The first 39 books of the Bible were written mainly in the Hebrew language, with very small parts in Aramaic. The last 27 books were written in Greek, the common language of the people when Jesus and his Christian followers walked the earth. These two main sections of the Bible are properly called the “Hebrew Scriptures” and the “Greek Scriptures.” Showing their agreement with each other, the Greek Scriptures quote from the Hebrew Scriptures more than 365 times, and make about 375 additional references to them.
I will agree that God could lead men to write what he wanted them to write. However, I think if he were giving them the entire content of the Bible, there would be no discrepencies between the Books. If you believe God is infallible, which I do, then he could not have possibly been responsible for stories not matching.
I do believe that the Bible is the Truth, but I also believe that some of it is created by man and other parts are dealing with symbolism because man, at that point in time, would not have been able to understand certain ideas.
Now if God had been speaking to women.... whole other story. LOL
it's amazing to me that people often get pissed off whent he topic of the Bible comes up...
rediculous really. Some get angry if you don't believe what they believe...
There was a time i thought i knew the answer to this question... Now i'm back to wrestling with God, trying to find answers.
i've met very few people who know more about the bible than i do. I don't mean that in a bragadacious sense. I was a VERY devout Christian at one time, and I'm very curious by nature. I've studied the Bible, not just in groups like a sunday school, or bible study, or descipleship classes, but on my own. Simply because i wanted to know what it had to say...
far too often the people who speak as experts on the bible have not read the bible, but rather, just bits and pieces. The rest of what they know was told to them by the guy behind the pulpit.
I find it odd to claim you know a book when you haven't read it...
Could one read a chapter here, and a verse there, of moby dick and say they understood it? could they do that for war and peace? Pride and prejudice?
Oh well, i'm ranting...
When i have a definite answer, i'll let you know.
for now i have no problem believing the Bible is inspired by God...
I do have trouble with the various interpretations and with people who scream at the top of their lungs that it is literal. that every single word is literal I mean.
Jesus taught in parables and metaphors but the bible isnt allowed to do anything like that... that is odd.
I happened across your comment in my blog, and found my way to yours. I will enjoy this greatly.
Wow. Some many answers here.
'N then I shows up and wonder if'n it'll be read, but, what the hey. I go back to m'old blogs and such.
How about this...
Some will use the words, "what GOD means is," and they say what they think HE means.
Some are more powerful than others and for this, writings are made of things they have heard for the last few millenia, told person to person in storytelling.
By the time we get it, already it has been retranslated some three dozen times, books have been thrown out because they seem too incredulous or have names of those who were excommunicated or thrown out of the church or synagog.
Then there's the continuing conflict of translating, and clerics from all over the world are good at this, whether from Afghanastan, I ran, Iraq, or here and tv clerics like pat robertson, benny hinn, and other holy rollers on a binge, or even specific religious notion movements like Jehovah's Witnesses or the Mormons, not to even get started on Baptists and Methodists and Disciples no instruments or the like.
I reckon I ain't sure, but I got a good guess.
It's mostly hogwash, but puts the spirit in ya 'cause of where it started. That one little touch, whatever the line is, is going the distance, but has picked up several parcels of claptrap along the way. Not unlike a snowball rolling down a hill. Might have started out as no more'n a marble, but, depending on angle of decent, trjectory and velocity and snow amounts, may be as big as a house by the end.
I put it where Jesus put it, and that works fer me.
Trust in GOD with your whole heart, mind and soul.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That's just too easy to throw away. And, it would be just like our GOD to have a sense of humor enough to let that work for us.
So, there it is.
Question is,....
did it get read?
Boneman, It definitely did get read. And I agree about the retranslations, etc., etc. It makes you wonder what the original message was. I wonder the same thing about the Koran. I'm currently reading a Bible with introductions to the books and a ton of footnotes, and one of the things that I've learned is that one thing that the scholars (or whomever does the translations)agree on is that the Letters of Paul where actually written by Paul. I found that wonderful on a historical level. At least it's someone's thought at the time things were starting up. It might be translated over and over, but at least the original thought was from the time period.
Post a Comment