bible

[Gravity]

A good pro source is More Than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell. Linky

This is the account of a college professor that was sick and tired of those Christians trying to influence his students. He set out to dispel all the Christian hype and myths. The research he conducted changed his life forever. One quote from this tome that I recall is "the bible is the only book that you will read that demands that the reader make a decision."

It's readable in about 1.25 hours or 3 short lunches. It's in paperback and readily available everywhere.

Gravity

 

[Orsorum]

Case for Faith and Case for Christ by Lee Strobel are unequivocally two of the worst books I've ever read, even more so if I seriously considered them a source to bring me (back) to Christianity.

Sic enim dilexit Deus mundum ut Filium suum unigenitum daret ut omnis qui credit in eum non pereat sed habeat vitam aeternam.

 

[Lonyo]

There are bits of the Bible added and mixed together. Genesis itself reads as 2 stories (1.1 to 2.4 or so is story 1, writen after Gen 2.5 or so onwards) you can clearly tell they are written in two different styles by people living at different times. How can anything be inerrant when it is a mix of two stories that give varying tales of what "happened".

There are different interpretations of things written even within these stories, some versions of the Bible indicate the writers of Gen. 2 were not monotheistic, while others suggest they were, and that's just looking at the passage of the 10 commandments.

Nothing in the Bible can be taken, on its own, as being any kind of absolute truth, and Christians can accept some parts of the Bible and not others, heck, it's impossible to accept the entire Bible as it has different messages and "rules" at different stages (in the OT, there were people with more than one wife, in the NT it's one wife only).

Quite clearly the Bible in fallible, and, due to different interpretations of the Bible, the original question cannot be answered on a basis covering all of Christianity, but only on a very specific individual basis.

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

Originally posted by: xizor
to answer the original question, the Aprocryphal are not accepted because like their namesake, their origin is dubious, they are not historically correct and contradict the inspired writings of the Bible.

This link is not a great source, but has some interesting quotes from the apocrypha link

It seems these books were added to the canonical Bible arbitrarily by Augustine circa 400AD and was not the choice of the early Christian church. Jerome another Catholic leader wrote that he disagreed with Augustine about the validity of the books, so while the books were considered part of the Bible for 1000 years, it was the error of a man (or a group of men, the Council of Carthage) and the Roman Catholic Church.

Other books not included in the Bible like the Gospel of Thomas were not written nearly as close as the canonical books and show obvious lack of primary sources in the writing. For example, some refer to Jesus as hating women (differeing extremely from the canonical Bible) and give accounts that are closer to fantasy than historical writings.

Greyd's post was an excellent explanation on the validity of the books of Bible, which have not changed since they were written. Even new discoveries continuelly validate the Bible like the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls which I believe has the entire book of Joshua perfectly preserved.

Case for Faith and Case for Christ by Lee Strobel are excellent reads about the history of Christianity. I love reading about history and if you have any good pro or con sources, please list them.

The OT as well as the NT still contain errors/contradictions, so shouldn't more books have been left out then?

 

[glen]

Basically, you can find ancient scrolls in Hebrew and in Greek of the Old Testament.
The Greek scrolls contain the same books as the Hebrew texts, plus the deuterocanonical books.
Either these books are part of the Bible or they are not.
ONE of the versions HAS to be wrong.
So, unless you include these books, it is basically impossible to think the Bible is inerrant.
To hold the Hebrew texts to be inerrant is impossible since they are incomplete.

deuterocanonical books:

Baruch
Ecclesiasticus
Esdras
Letter of Jeremiah
Judith
Maccabees
Manasseh
Parts of Daniel and Esther
Psalm 151
Tobit
Wisdom of Solomon

 

[imported_Papi]

So what did man do before the bible and Christianity?

 

[alkemyst]

debated whose god(s) had more horns, bigger wings, etc.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: yayo
So what did man do before the bible and Christianity?

What kind of question is that?
There are people now who are "before" the Bible and Christianity (in their terms) like Sikhs, Buddhists etc. Hell, Jews since you mentioned Christianity.
I don't get the question, it makes no sense because it seems to assume the world didn't exist before Christianity/the Bible, which is not a theory everyone subsribes to.

Before the Bible stories, in Christian terms, there was no man, so man did nothing. Before the Bible was written down, man was nomadic, and passed on stories by word of mouth about the God(s) they worshipped.

 

[xizor]

Skyclad1uhm1: Skeptics continually try to find errors but are proven wrong. I don't know what errors you believe exist, but I challenge you to read the Bible for yourself and study passages you believe are in error in context.

glen: from what I've read the apocrypha was only found in Greek, which differs signifigantly from the canonical books of the OT which originated as Hebrew. The Jews deny that the Aprocrypha is from God, and historians believe that ancient writers added the apocrypha with the inspired books but made it obvious they were not at the same level of authority.

 

[Greyd]

Originally posted by: Orsorum
Case for Faith and Case for Christ by Lee Strobel are unequivocally two of the worst books I've ever read, even more so if I seriously considered them a source to bring me (back) to Christianity.

Sic enim dilexit Deus mundum ut Filium suum unigenitum daret ut omnis qui credit in eum non pereat sed habeat vitam aeternam.

Why do you consider them bad? The level of scholarship seems to be very extraordinary in those books.