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The Bible As The Inspired Word of God
[Take a look also at these sites: http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/ -- http://www.askwhy.co.uk/judaism/0180PersiaJudaism.html ] “All
Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; That the man of God
may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works”
– 2 Timothy 3:16,17. “Inspiration”
is defined, theologically, as (a) “a divine influence directly and
immediately exerted upon the mind or soul of a man” and (b) “the divine
quality of the writings or words of men so influenced” – Hamlyn’s
Encyclopaedic World Dictionary. It
must therefore follow that the Bible is not to be regarded as the work of men
but rather a work completely formulated and directed by the Creator of All,
which, in these Scriptures, is called Jehovah or Yahweh. The
men that penned the words of the texts which form this Book were not the real
authors but only the instruments of divine Will. These writers could not, even
if they so wished, put down any independent thoughts of their own as all their
efforts were being controlled by a power greater than them. This
being so this Book should, from beginning to end, present an homogeneity which
no other book on earth could ever match; in it there would be no place for
mistakes, either by the original writers or by those that copied or translated
the very first God inspired texts. There would be no room for contradictions
or individual free will, given the vital importance of the doctrines expounded
in its pages and which are, as accepted by the faithful, necessary for the
future well being of humankind. Does
this Book, which is referred to as “Holy” (a word defined as “referring
to the divine, that which has its sanctity directly from God”), possess such
qualities? Any
God given instruction affecting the destiny of humans would not be placed on
parchment but rather in the minds of all the peoples. It would not be in any
particular language or presented first to a particular race, group or tribe.
It would not be revealed in installments
over long periods of time and it would not provide for favourites when
bestowing blessings (or curses) on His creation. If
one follows this pattern of thought and belief one has to come to the
conclusion that there are no divine books on earth. Those
that are presented as such are nothing more than the efforts of man seeking to
understand the purpose of life and trying to give meaningfulness to his
existence. How The Bible Came To Be Written(The
Believers Version)
God
(Heb. Elohim
- 'gods') created the Heavens and
the Earth and populated the World with all sort of creatures, ranging from
microscopic bacteria to mastodons and whales, and made Man and Woman on the
sixth day of Creation. This set of events took place some 6000 years ago
(according to Bishop Usher's calculations based on the age of the Patriarchs).
God's
very first command to the original human pair was to “go
forth and multiply”, an injunction that
humans took very much to heart, and after much begetting they indeed “replenished
the earth”. Some
2500 years after that six-day creation spree God (now called Jehovah) decided
to write a book so that all His efforts would be documented and thus not
forgotten. He used 'Moses'
to write this account by dictating to him Genesis. He
must have been pleased with the outcome of His first literary effort and
decided from thereon to keep a written record of all that happened to Moses
and the Israelites. He had taken these folk under His wing, whom He described
as His favourites, and had promised them that one day they would control the
whole Earth. Moses
'lived'
from about 1590 to 1470 BC and wrote four more books and after his death God
continued to dictate to his successors – Joshua was told his life story,
then Judges, Kings, Chronicles were dictated to various individuals. Each of
the Prophets also wrote a book, kings David and Solomon a few more, and He
even used two women, Esther and Ruth, as His writing tools. As
all these books were of God's own authorship He imposed heavy penalties on
anyone that would be foolish enough to add to or subtract from the Divine
Text. So,
presumably, no one did and the Scriptures we have today are a true and
faithful reproduction of the original manuscripts that had been dictated, and
written, in Hebrew. Now,
there were many other books written throughout the ages but when it came to
the selection of the true writings of God He ensured that only those He had
dictated would be marked with the stamp of “Holiness”. This stamp of
approval was bestowed at the Council of Jabne in 90 AD and that seal of
“genuine” was reaffirmed in 118 AD by a second meeting of learned and
inspired scholars held in the same town. And that was that. The number of the
Old Testament (or Covenant) Books was settled, though they varied from 21 to
24. After further divisions and rearranging of texts we now have the official
figure of 39 Books. Between
the two Testaments God took a break of about 400 years from dictation and any
books written during that period were merely human forgeries. The
New Testament followed in the divine footsteps of the Old and by 300 AD
consensus had been reached on which 27 Books, of the many at hand, were truly
from God, although divisions were still present regarding individual works and
these divisions continued
for a few centuries more. After
about 100 AD, when the Book of Revelation was completed God retired from the
literary scene and has not dictated a single line to anyone. This
inactivity is, of course, vigorously denied by the Muslims and the followers
of the Mormon faith who maintain that God dictated their Holy Books in the
intervening years as an Erratum and a Postscript, respectively, to His
original work. To
produce the New Testament God used many less human writing tools than for the
Old Testament, most probably because He only wrote 27 Books after His son was
born. Thus
the whole Bible came to be with a total of 66 inspired texts - a number that
is just short of one 6 to make it to the evil number of Revelation. But it is
close enough.
Is The Bible, Indeed, The Work Of An Omniscient God? "Of course it is!" affirm all believers, "God said so, didn't He?" and they refer you to the words that He had dictated to Peter: "Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time (or, at any time) by the will of man: but holy men of God spake (as they were) moved by the Holy Ghost". - 2 Peter 1:20,21. Paul,
on the other hand, would be told to jot down "All
scripture (is) given by inspiration of God, and (is) profitable for doctrine,
for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:".
- 2 Tim. 3:16. So
there you have it, "at
the mouth of two witnesses" - Peter and
Paul
- the
matter should be settled for all time. End of discussion. To
be fair, one cannot really consider them as witnesses seeing that they just
jotted down what God told them to write, and they probably did not grasp the
full implication of the divine thought. In
the 2
Peter 1:20,21
verses only "prophecy"
was to be regarded as "inspired",
not the historical accounts that form the major part of both Testaments. Fair
enough, Paul had been told that "All
Scripture" fell into
this category but the question arises - "Why put a limitation on
inspiration in 2 Peter?". Was it to emphasize
that "prophecy" was double inspired? Or is it because the divine
author felt that too much repetition is not conducive to good reading and thus
changed the wording at this point? But
that is just the beginning of so many questions that can be asked by
inquisitive minds on the validity of the Bible as a Holy Book. Take
Paul's (sorry, God's) affirmation: "Doth
not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame
to him? - 1Cor. 11:14.
What
does it mean? That man's hair does not continue to grow? That nature ensures
that the human male will always keep his "short back and sides"
hairstyle and those who grew long hair were freaks? Poor Samson, and all the
Nazarites! And
Jesus himself is commonly portrait
as having long, flowing hair.
So
let us start asking questions: In
the beginning God created "light"
in Gen.1:5, but only made the source of such light in verse 16. If
the first "light" was different to that provided by the sun where is
it now? What type of light was it? Laser? God
created man - "male
and female created He them" but Chapter
2 tells us that He created man first and after an undisclosed period of time
He realized that "It
is not good that man should be alone"
and He created Eve, after noting that the animals were not compatible with
Adam. Also,
this account of Creation puts man as the first creature to be made, before
animals and plants were thought of. Can one perhaps discern that there were
two separate Creations and in the second God perfected the human by giving him
a talent to "till
the ground",
which ability the first pair did not possess? And
this second Creation was in a particular corner of the Earth (east of Eden)
and not, like the first, somewhere else in the World, and the trees and
animals that "came
out of the ground" were different from
those of Chapter 1? The
dietary law given to Adam, about not eating the fruit of a particular tree,
differed from that of Chapter 1 where no such prohibition existed. Why was
that? Was
it because "the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil"
was not available outside the Garden? Was it created specifically as a
stumbling block for Adam and Eve, to test them? And
if this is so, does an Omniscient Being need to test his handiwork? That
they did not pass the test shows that they had been created with flaws, but
seeing that they were made "in
the image of God",
was their Creator also imperfect? He must have been, for He told Isaiah that: "I
form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD
do all these (things) - Isa.45:7.
Or
maybe that is "perfection": to be able to know and do all things and
choose between good and evil. But
if that is so, then Adam and Eve before they ate of the fruit were not
perfect, for up until they ate it they did not know wrong from right. This
period of their lives, before the fall, is even labeled
the "era (or period) of innocence" by Biblical scholars. And
when God chose Israel as His peculiar people He gave them a new set of food
laws prohibiting all sort of animals, birds and insects, while back in Gen.9:3
He had told Noah and his descendants that they could eat "every
moving thing that liveth".
Why this change of heart from a Being that "changeth
not"? Was He trying to protect His
special people from food that could be harmful to them, but not to the rest of
mankind? Or, perhaps, He just did not give a hoot about the others!? In
Genesis God blesses the human pair and tells them to "be
fruitful and multiply" but by the time
Leviticus was written to "be fruitful" became a sin which required
the guilty woman to bring a "burnt
and sin offering" to the priest before
she was considered "clean"
(free from stain or sin). It appears then, that at this stage procreation was
no more a "blessing" but a "curse".
It is argued that, after the fall, human fecundity became tainted due
to the curse God put on the woman at parturition, but Eve and all the women
that lived until Moses days did not bring sin offerings to atone for the birth
of a child, at least it is not recorded anywhere in the Sacred Writings, which
would have been if that was a requirement right from the start. Or did God
only remembered to put it down on paper that much later? The
above is but a small part of the discrepancies one encounters in this Holy
Book and is taken, basically, from the first few Chapters of the first Book. To
number and comment on them all would require many foolscap pages which, if
bound together, would create a book not that much smaller than Holy Writ
itself. What,
with questions on divine repentance; differences in shekels payments; number
of horses and stalls; of foremen; text duplication; uncertainty where a
particular event took place; the killing of innocents; the visiting of the
sins of the fathers upon the sons; the unfulfilled prophecies; and so on and
so on. And these just on the Old Testament books. The
New Testament fares just as badly: - discrepancies regarding where the Christ
was born; his genealogy; how many were fed and what number of fishes and bread
were available; what his last words were; what was written on the cross; how
often the cock crowed; who was at the crucifixion; were the women at the foot
of the cross or afar off; who got first to the empty tomb; how many angels
were present; from where did he ascended to Heaven; is salvation by faith and
not of works or are works a major component to attain it; what is meant, then,
by "work
out your own salvation";
is there predestination; what does "baptism for the dead" mean; did
the Christ lie to his brethren regarding him going to the Feast of
Tabernacles; who will do the judging at the Judgement Day, etc., etc.. Of
course all the above can be explained away but the question remains "why
not write something that is self explanatory?" And
any explanation that uses human error in copying, compilation or translation
is not valid. This
is, after all, a divine book and God would certainly not allow puny humans to misrepresent
His message to humankind, or the misplacing of His Holy Words for about 8
centuries as we are told it happened in the 2nd Book of Chronicles.
In What Language Were The Originals Written? One
hears constant talk of, and references to, the "original" Hebrew of
the Old Testament from where the Greek translation known as the Septuagint was
based. Those "originals" were not preserved and the closest one can
get to them is the Masoretic Text of the 5th Century AD, with the exception of
a few texts found at Qumran dating from 200 BC, although some of these
differed considerably from what is written in the Biblical account. Ancient
or Early Hebrew alphabet only saw the light of day around 1000 BC, at about
the time of King David. It was not, like later Hebrew, characterized by square
symbols and consisted only of consonants, 22 of them. In later Hebrew (square
writing), vowels (the so-called "Jot" and "Tittle") came
to be inserted around 400 BC after the return of the Jews to Jerusalem from
the Babylonian captivity. This
being so, and if Moses, Joshua, etc. wrote the books they are believed to have
written they could not have been in Hebrew as the language did not exist at
that time and so it would be an exercise in futility to look for any Hebrew
"originals". The
New Testament "originals" date no earlier than the 4th Century and
by then the Greek spoken differed from that of the time of the events it
describes, which was Koine Greek, a universal language for the Greek Empire
and different from the classic Greek spoken at the height of Greek influence. It
was a peculiarly emphatic language especially in the use of the definite
article, which in English translates as "the",
which pointed to a specific place, person, or thing.
Thus the Lord's Prayer would read "Our the Father which are in the heaven, hallowed be thy the name. Thy the kingdom come ...." and the Great Commission was not for "all" nations but rather for a particular set of nations - "Go ye therefore and teach all the nations, baptizing them ..." The
following is an article on the subject of alphabets: INTRODUCTION Alphabet
(from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet), set of
written symbols, each representing a given sound or sounds, which can be
variously combined to form all the words of a language. An
alphabet attempts ideally to indicate each separate sound by a separate
symbol, although this end is seldom attained, except in the Korean alphabet
(the most perfect phonetic system known) and, to a lesser degree, in the
Japanese syllabaries. Alphabets are distinguished from syllabaries and from
pictographic and ideographic systems. A syllabary represents each separate
syllable (usually a sequence of from one to four spoken sounds pronounced as
an uninterrupted unit) by a single symbol. Japanese, for example, has two
complete syllabaries-the hiragana and the katakana-devised to supplement the
characters originally taken over from Chinese. A pictographic system
represents picturable objects, for example, a drawing of the sun stands for
the spoken word sun. An ideographic system combines various pictographs for
the purpose of indicating nonpicturable ideas. Thus, the Chinese pictographs
for sun and tree are combined to represent the Chinese spoken word for east.
Most alphabets have about 20-30 symbols, though Rotokas, used in the Solomon
Islands, has only 11 letters while Khmer, the largest alphabet, has 74
letters. Early
systems of writing were of the pictographic-ideographic variety; among them
are the cuneiform of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, Egyptian
hieroglyphs, the written symbols still used in the Chinese and Japanese
languages, and Mayan picture writing (see Native American Languages). What
converts such a system into an alphabet or syllabary is the use of a
pictograph or ideograph to represent a sound rather than an object or an idea.
The sound is usually the initial sound of the spoken word denoted by the
original pictograph. Thus, in early Semitic, a pictograph representing a
house, for which the Semitic spoken word was beth, eventually came to
symbolize the initial b sound of beth. This Semitic symbol, standing
originally for the entire word beth and later for the sound of b, ultimately
became the b of the English alphabet. NORTH
SEMITIC ALPHABET The general supposition is that the first known alphabet
developed in Palestine and Syria between 1700 and 1500 BC. This alphabet,
known as North Semitic, evolved from a combination of cuneiform and
hieroglyphic symbols; some symbols might have been taken from kindred systems,
such as the Cretan and Hittite. The North Semitic alphabet consisted
exclusively of 22 consonants. The vowel sounds of a word had to be supplied by
the speaker or reader. The Hebrew, Arabic, and Phoenician alphabets were based
on this model and the present-day Hebrew and Arabic alphabets still consist of
consonantal letters only, the former having 22 and the latter 28. Some of
these, however, may be used to represent long vowels, and vowels may also be
indicated in writing by optional vowel points and dashes placed below, above,
or to the side of the consonant. Writing is from the right to the left. Many
scholars believe that around 1000 BC
four branches developed from the original Semitic alphabet: South Semitic, Canaanite,
Aramaic, and Greek.
(Other scholars, however, believe that South Semitic developed independently
from North Semitic or that both developed from a common ancestor.) The South
Semitic branch was the ancestor of the alphabets of extinct languages used in
the Arabian Peninsula and in the modern languages of Ethiopia.
Canaanite was subdivided
into Early Hebrew and Phoenician,
and the extremely important Aramaic branch became the basis of Semitic
and non-Semitic scripts throughout western Asia. The non-Semitic group was the
basis of the alphabets of nearly all Indian scripts; the Semitic sub-branch
includes Square Hebrew, which superseded Early Hebrew to become the prototype
of modern Hebrew writing. "Alphabet,"
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