Originally posted by ushomefree
God influenced the Holy Bible, through the Holy Spirit, using men as His instruments. The Holy Bible is the King of religious books. Other books claim divine inspiration as well, such as the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and parts of the (Hindu) Veda. But none of these books contain predictive prophecy.If you are an intelligent person, you will read the one book that has drawn more attention than any other, if you are searching for the truth.
Welcome to the Holy Bible!
All religious books (including the Holy Bible) are vulnerable to human error to some degree. Regardless, with the wealth of original manuscripts Historians, Archaeologists, and other accredited men and women, are able to confirm the authenticity of the Holy Bible in reference to others.
Let me break this down for you. The Holy Bible and ALL other religious books have been translated numerous times throughout history. To cross reference the accuracy of the new translated scriptures, one must study the original scriptures. Makes sense right?
In ancient times there was no standardized version of the Old Testament. Different Jewish groups and different regions had their own versions. There were the Septuagint, the Aquila, Theodotion's version and Symmachu's version, all containing different text and different numbers of books. The Old Testament used by modern Christians is based on the Massonetic version which only appeared after the Jamnia Synod at the end of the 1st century AD. The New Testament did not appear in its present form until the year 404 AD, nearly four hundred years after the death of Jesus. Before that time, the Gospels of Thomas, the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Paul and a dozen other books were included in the Bible. In 404 AD these books were simply cut out of the Bible because they contained teachings that were contrary to Christian theology of that time. One of the oldest existing Bibles, The Codex Sinaiticus, includes the Epistle of Barnabas, a book that is not included in the modern Bible. If these books were considered to be revelation by early Christians why don't modern Christians consider them to be revelation?
When we look at the Bibles used by modern Christians we find that there are several different versions. The Bible used by the Ethiopian Church, one of the most ancient of all churches, contains the Books of Enoch and the Shepherd of Hernias which are not found in the versions used by Catholics and Protestants. The Bible used in the Catholic Church contains the books of Judith, Tobias, Banuch, etc which have been cut out of the Bible used in Protestant churches. Prof H.L. Drummingwright of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in his introduction to the Bible explains how these books came to be cut out of the Bible used by the Protestants. These books were, he says, "in most Protestant Bibles until the 19th century, when publishers, led by the British and Foreign Bible Society voluntarily began to omit them". Once again, these books contained ideas which the churches did not like so they just cut them out. How can a book like Judith be the infallible word. of God one moment and not the next? Why are there so many different versions of the Bible? And which version is the infallible word of God?
In my country i, was raised to believe that I should always think for myself, that I should discern fantasy from reality, that violence is not something that should be glorified, and that God is greater than our ability to describe in words or to limit with ideas. For these reasons, I do not accept the Bible as a unique authority on God or any other subject. That does not mean that I dismiss it entirely, however.
To begin with, I will not accept anything just because it is written in the Bible. As far as I am concerned the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament from the Christian point of view) is a collection of the tribal legends, historical records, and religious writings of the ancient Hebrews. I am a modern man - not an ancient Hebrew. Therefore, my entire worldview is informed by scientific data and cultural assumptions that are extremely far removed from those of the ancient Hebrews. Unlike them, just to name a few examples, I am convinced that this universe is billions of years old; that life as it now appears on Earth is part of an ongoing process of evolution; that different languages and dialects developed over time; that it is not an abomination to eat pork, shrimp, or lobster, or to mix beef and dairy products; that slavery is immoral; that it is immoral to execute disrespectful children; and that one is never justified in committing genocide or ethnic cleansing. The ancient Hebrews, however, were ignorant of modern astrophysics, ignorant of geology, ignorant of the fossil record and carbon dating, they believed that all of the existing language groups originated from God's curse at the tower of Babel, they believed that it is an abomination to eat certain kinds of foods or to prepare foods in certain ways, they believed that disrespect to God or one's parent's is a capital offense, they practiced slavery, and they believed that God had commanded them to kill every man, woman, and child in certain towns during the conquest of the promised land (in other cases the men and boys were killed and the woman and girls enslaved). So, for scientific and moral reasons I do not view the Bible as an authority.
The Bible also relates stories wherein a donkey speaks to its master, a flood covers the entire world and all life on earth today is descended from only the animals aboard Noah's ark, a woman turns into a pillar of salt, people are lifted up bodily into the heavens never to return, the sun stands still in the sky, and finally a man physically comes back from the dead and proceeds to walk through walls and ascend bodily into the heavens. I am leaving out a lot of other miraculous tales that are either logistically impossible, or which could be explained in a more rational way. The point is that the reality I live in does not operate that way, and I have never been given any good reason to believe that any of these things happened in real life other than the testimony of the ancient Hebrews who (as I said) had a prescientific mythical worldview; and the testimony of a small sect of Judaism which became the nucleus of a minor mystery religion in the Roman Empire, which eventually became the official religion of that empire, which then become the reigning religious ideology of various European nation-states. I must say that I require objective, empirical, and verifiable and irrefutable evidence before I throw common sense out the window and accept that any of these things happened in real life.
I apply the same standard to the more fantastical stories and anecdotes which appears of 84,000 doctrines in Buddhism which is 5 times larger manuscripts than the Holy Bible. In Buddhism, however, the fantastic elements are never the main point and they almost always exist to underscore a point that does make sense. In most cases, the metaphorical nature of the supernatural and miraculous in Buddhism is very easy to see and the Buddhist scriptures themselves state that they are using metaphorical language on many occasions.
I also cannot accept the Biblical God's use of violence, terror, and threats to get people to do what He wants. This includes Joshua's conquest of the promised land, the behavior of the Judges, Jesus and St. Paul's threats of eternal damnation for those who do not believe, and finally the Armageddon promised in the Book of Revelations. Jesus even says at one point that he comes not to bring peace but a sword to divide families against one another (Matthew 10:34). It seems to me that the violence and threats of violence in the Bible are nothing more than a very human way of abdicating responsibility and laying all of our very human shortcomings at God's door. I do not accept the Biblical portrait of a God who commands, condones, and makes use of violence and terror.
If the Bible really is God's word it indicates that he is a very strange being indeed One would expect that the creator of the universe would only speak to man when he had something of great importance to say and that what he said would be of universal significance. Not so. The book of Chronicles for example consists of little more than lists of names of people we know little or nothing about and who died thousands of years ago. No commandments, no ethical principles, no hints on how to live properly or to worship God - just page after page of useless names. Why would God waste his and our time revealing such things? And what about the Songs of Solomon? This book consists of a collection of erotic love poetry. Once again, with the world in such a mess one would have supposed that God could have thought of something more important to say to man than this.
Then we come to the Gospels which recount the life of Jesus. Why has God decided to reveal the whole of Jesus' biography, not once, but four times? And why has he revealed what are, quite clearly, four different and contradictory versions of the same story? Unlike Christians, historians have given perfectly plausible answers to these questions. The Bible is not a revelation from God, rather it is a compilation, a fairly untidy compilation, written by many different people, over many centuries, changed and edited from time to time, and containing legends, stories, genealogies, fables, sacred and secular writings. It is no more a revelation from God than are the Iliad or the Odyssey, the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, books which the Holy Bible resembles quite closely.