The Holy Bible

Contents:

1. Introduction to the Bible
2. The Old Testament
3. The New Testament, a brief history and summary
4. The Complete Bible Today - Formation, Selection and Evolution
5. Unsuitable for Children

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Introduction to
The Bible is the world's most important collection of writings ever bound. It has had the single biggest influence through the decades. It has inspired Leaders, Slaves, Peasants, Kings, Crusaders, Officials, Wars and Individuals across the globe. The Bible consists of sixty six books, two thirds of them (39 out of 66 books) make up the Old Testament, with the remaining 27 forming the slender New Testament.

The Old Testament

Two thirds of the books of the Bible is contained in the Old Testament, and many of the them are much longer than those in the New Testament. If the Christian Bible has anything to do with God, then that God clearly places importance in the Old Testament.

The Old Testament starts with the Torah, the Jewish Bible, which are the Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These are also called the Pentateuch (meaning: Five scrolls). Moses himself did not write them. Many passages could not have been written by Moses, such as the account of his death, verses such as "the man Moses was very humble, more so than all men who were on the Earth" and the reflection "there has never been another prophet like Moses". Some portions of the Pentateuch were not written for centuries after his life. There are repeated passages that describe the same events in different ways, in different orders and with different, contradictory details. Some of them are so wildly different that they could not have been by the same person. The original words of Moses are completely lost to us - we only have the remains and re-interpretations that the Hebrews passed on through verbal communication. It was hundreds of years until the combined Torah became established from this large variation of versions and traditions taught by Moses.

"The time points reference for pre-Abraham parts of the bible are skewed. Prior to captivity in Babylon, the teachings of the torah were carried by oral tradition down through the generations. The major writings of the bible, the mosaic law, were stored in the tabernacle which was lost at that time, and few who carried the oral tradition actually ever saw those stones. Obviously, if archaic stories were carried as strictly Judaic they were carried through Abraham, who admittedly comes from a family that worshipped several household gods in the city of Ur, so you can't argue that they were inspired by god to people who worshipped pagan gods. In reading of Abraham, we can be certain that Sumeria and the surrounding areas was in a time of strife, that Abraham and his family were on the move, and concealing their identities in order to protect themselves. Thus the discontinuity between Abraham and his family his residence in Ur and in Hebron create a definite bottleneck in the bible as a carrier of historical events."

Therefore the old testament contains many stories that the nomadic Hebrew people believed in plus those which Moses propagated. With no printing press and no photocopiers they were duplicated by word of mouth and later it was copied painstakingly slowly in ink on papyrus leaf. Judaism was the first successful propagator of Monotheism. This concept was the Single-God religion of modern day Christianity, the advent of organized religion.

The Flood
One of the famous stories in the Old Testament in the great flood, where God kills every single man, child, woman, baby and animal on the face of the planet except those who lived on Noah's ark for a period of time.

Nearly all old cultures from Europe to Asia Minor have flood stories. Incidentally in 7540bce (5539 years ago) there was a flood event in the Meditteranean, when the Black Sea filled with water, undoubtedly making a huge impact on the local residents, killing and destroying an area of land similar in size to the UK!

Source of Noah's Flood Stories

The New Testament

The New Testament contains the core of Christianity. It is the most used, most read and most relied upon texts for the Churches that dominated the development and subjugation of the entire Western World. The Gideon's Bible, as was famously placed in the Hotel Rooms and such by the valiant Gideons, consists only of the NIV version of the New Testament.

The New Testament is based on the Jewish rabbi Yeshua Nazaret, known as Jesus (The word Christ means 'Messiah'). The four gospels are the first three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, who give a fairly consistent description of Jesus, plus the fourth one, John. The word 'gospel' comes from the Greek word for "good news", euangelion.

The other books of the Bible are written by various authors, some of them (such as Acts) were written by the same author's as the gospels. The gospels are written in Greek, and they are pseudepigraphic: which means they were written under the names of legendary characters, and not under the true names of the authors. Most of the writing originates from late in the first and in the second centuries, i.e., from between 75-180ce. As time progressed scholars assigned names to the gospels according to this pseudepigraphic tradition.

The gospels are not eye witness accounts of Jesus' life, but a description of what Paul had told them about Jesus plus other Jewish traditions on Messiahood, mixed with Roman myths.

Jesus was an Aramaic (a Hebrew language) speaking Jew, which is not a written language. This is why the only records we have, are by people writing in Greek. Jesus was crucified in 30ce at the age of 34, and the oldest writings appeared after 75ce which leaves a forty year gap for his teachings to become known in Greek, passed on by oral traditions into the Roman Empire after the scattering of the Jews from 70-90ce.

How did this happen? Bilingual Christians, speaking Aramaic and Greek, would have taken the "Good News" to Syria. Native Greek peoples, who could write but did not know any Hebrew, would have learnt the stories and in due time, recorded them, and spread them further. The tormented way in which the gospels were passed from word of mouth, for forty years, to paper, produced over 200 hundred different possible books and good news stories during the second and third century from which only 27 were accepted into the Bible in the fourth century.

The oldest fragments we have are two from 125ce, one from an unknown gospel which was not accepted into the Bible and another from the gospel of John.

Mark

"This anonymous gospel was the first to be written, between 60 and 80CE, by a Roman convert to Christianity. It was copied word-for-word and used extensively by Matthew and Luke, as their primary source. Nevertheless, the gospel author didn't meet Jesus, wrote in Greek, not Hebrew, and was not a Jew. It is unlikely that Mark knew any Jews. There was no-one to correct his blunders about Jewish life, such as misquoting the 10 commendments, attributing God's words to Moses, and having Jews buy things on the Sabbath. The Gospel of Mark has undergone many changes and there are several ancient versions. The oldest versions of Mark all end at Mark 16:7. Half way through the second century the Christian proto-orthodox had come to call it 'Mark'."

"The Gospel of Mark" by Vexen Crabtree 2006 Aug

One of the more shocking versions of the gospel of Mark is the Carpocratians version of Mark - where Mark describes Jesus' paedophiliac relations with young boys, which in the Carpocratian culture was considered a virtue.

The gospel of Mark, the youngest and most probably the closest to anyone who witnessed Jesus, does not describe the history of Jesus, or his virgin birth. These parts of the New Testament's stories were added by Matthew, 30 years later, who assimilated other myths into the legends.

Matthew

"Matthew's works were wrote between 90-100CE in Syria, probably written in the same time range as Luke, as they were unaware of each other's existence. The original works of Matthew were completely anonymous and it was not until about 150CE that the author "Matthew" was assigned to the writings. [...]

The first two chapters of Matthew, the virgin birth and the genealogy, were not contained in the first versions of Matthew's gospel.

Matthew's gospel contains 92% of the text that appears in Mark! This is a very high percentage - almost a copy - but Matthew corrected many of Mark's blunders about the Jewish ways of life and proceeded, a few versions later, to add the chapters about the virgin birth. (See the text on Mark: Mark was not a Jew - he did not understand Jewish ways.) [...]

Matthew staked his writing career on the fact that Jesus was a great man, divine and the Messiah. He set out in his writings to prove that Jesus was all of these things. "

"Matthew" by Vexen Crabtree, 1999

Luke

Luke's, the physician, uses Josephus's "Jewish Antiquities" as a reference, and must have been wrote after 93CE. The place of origin of Luke's writing is unknown. Luke is also the author of Acts, the fifth book of the New Testament, and they were two parts of the same writings.

The assumed pseudo author, "Luke" is based on a Christian interpretation of the healing god, Lykos, in Greek mythology.

Along with Mark, Luke was not a disciple of Jesus, but was the other friend of Paul. However, it can be noted that at 93ce, Paul (who lived at the same time as Jesus although were enemies), would have been very old, improbably old for the times, if not dead, and the assumption that Luke knew Paul is disputed.

Luke also uses Mark, and 'Q', as a source of information. Out of Mark, 54% is quoted in Luke, and there are a hundred or so versus that along with Matthew, he took from the source 'Q'.

John

It has been said that John was written about the same time of Luke, sometime after 93CE. The gospel of John was written in the name of the apostle John, the brother of James who was the son of Zebedee. John was killed, however, by Herod Agrippa in 44CE, and therefore in the same fashion as the other gospels, was writing under an assumed name, leaving the original author anonymous, although we do know that he was from Ephesus (in Asia Minor).

The oldest surviving fragment of John is from 125CE, and the earliest versions of John did not contain the final chapter, which describes Jesus Christ appearing to his disciples after rising from the dead. John did not quote as much of Mark as the others did.

The Epistles of St Paul

“We do not have the original of 1 Thessalonians (i.e., the text that Paul actually wrote) or of any other New Testament book. Nor do we have copies made directly from the originals, nor copies made from the copies of the originals, nor copies made from the copies of the copies. Our earliest "manuscripts" (hand-written copies) of Paul's letters date from around 200 CE, that is, nearly 150 years after he wrote them. The earliest full manuscripts of the Gospels come from about the same time, although we have some fragments of manuscripts that date earlier, including P⁵², a credit card sized fragment, usually dated to the first part of the second century, of verses from John 18 [...] but even our relatively full manuscripts from around the year 200 are not preserved intact. Pages and entire books were lost. Indeed, it is not until the fourth century, nearly three hundred years after the New Testament was written, that we begin to get complete manuscripts”

"Lost Christianities" by Bart Ehrman, p218-219

The Complete Bible Today - Formation, Selection and Evolution

There were many dozens of compilations of Biblical stories (and still are), taken from hundreds of books and letters, from different tribes people and nations but most of all, the leaders and influential people of the time were particularly able to contribute to the mass of Biblical text. It was not until the Roman Empire's reunification that more complete and stable versions were produced, including many additions by the Romans themselves.

Many of these documents are known to us, and are used to cross reference. As a result we know a great deal about the changes that have occurred over time, and even of some of the mistranslations that occurred along the way. This page has a large amount of links on aspects of Bible Translation.

The modern bible as we know it was conceived from these texts, the people involved having chose from the mass of stories which ones were to be included. There are still many versions of the Bible as different sects re-write it and people try to "modernize" it or "translate it into modern words".

At the time of the formation of the Canon there were about thirty Gospels, and over 200 other books which were considered to be holy. In 313ce Constantine published the "Edict of Toleration" which made Christianity a legal and official religion within the roman empire. The council of Nicea was formed in 324ce by the Emperor Constantine chose in 382ce only four of the gospels for this reason: "There were four winds, four points of the compass, four corners of the temple" and ordered the remaining ones to be destroyed by the Roman Empire. The choices were made by the tried and tested democratic method of holding a ballot (i.e., voting).

In the production, selection and promotion of the Biblical texts throughout history the utter domination of Males must have been highly significant in influencing the Bible and the text therein.

"In fact only two of the sixty-six books in the Bible bear women's names ... the women in question (Ruth and Esther) are not generally considered to be the original authors of the books and the books themselves are extremely short ... far less than one percent of the total canon." [ Kevin Harris, "Sex, Ideology and religion - the representation of Women in the Bible" p26 ]

The actual text of the Bible is male biased in that it tells the tales told by men, to men, about men, concerning matters which men are concerned with. All ancient myths are the same: Stories of the heroic or horrific actions of men, or animals, or both.

"It is therefore not surprising that the Biblical text reflects and speaks the language of such [male-orientated] practices and attitudes ... which, if nothing else, reflect the sort of things it would be expected that the males who recorded the Bible and kept it alive orally would say." [ "Sex, Ideology and religion", page 26 ]

It is hugely apparent that the God of the Old Testament is deeply different to that of the New - and this is perhaps a result of the historical context in which they were wrote. The Old Testament was a result of tribes people, slaves, refugees and primitive peoples, whose previous religions were all polytheistic and non-anthropomorphic. The New Testament God was produced in Greek, in a much more civilized environment, and the God portrayed reflects that.

Unsuitable for Children

The Christians frequently say that, for family values, they promote the censoring of pornographic material. Here is an example I read once: It is understandable that the Christians wanted "top-shelf" pornographic material removed from shops. After all, what they are saying is that they do not want a certain type of literature forced into public view. I mean, it's crazy to do that, like putting Bible's in everyone hotel's room or something stupid like that.

There are some really nasty violent moments in the Bible, wife beating, mass killings (e.g., of babies, pregnant women, children). Although I am sure they're important to the general story, there is more in the Bible than in any other single film with an Eighteen certificate.