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What about the Bible?

 

Continuing with examining the bible …

Was the Bible Inspired (last entry on this subject, at least for now  )?

 

So, the bible is actually a library which was written over a period of 1500 years or so by multiple people in many different genres.  Their writings had to be accepted by different communities and then from those communities, brought into one collection by a variety of collectors, meanwhile going through various episodes of copying, editing, and translating.  Some writings were discarded, or never were accepted by their respective community to start with.

 

Indeed!  You’ve got it, with the possible misconception that there is “one bible.”  The Roman Catholic version has additional writings compared to bibles which follow what you can call ‘the ‘Protestant’ tradition’, and Orthodox bibles are different yet again.  For example, the Anglican church officially recognizes the Protestant collection, with the Roman Catholic additions brought into a seldom-referenced section known as ‘The Apocrypha’ (‘the hidden’) or ‘Deutero-canonical’ (‘of the second canon’) books.  As well, there are many different interpretations currently published – if you read some of Jesus’s sayings from Matthew chapter 5 using a literal translation like the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) or .Net bible (Netbible.org), you may get a much different understanding than reading the same sayings from The Message or New Living Translation bibles, which are paraphrased.

 

And then the final interpretation is by the reader.

 

Yes.  With God’s help, hopefully.

 

And you say all that was inspired by God?

 

Yes I do.  What may be the most miraculous part of it all is how coherent the bible is, despite such convoluted origins.  The bible broadly tells one story, the Great Story, of God creating us, rescuing us, and restoring us:  His Great Project.  It all points to one thing.  The second miraculous part may be how self-referencing it is.  Though it was written over very many generations, as individual scrolls, without the internet or any human plan for it before it was created, the bible is remarkable in how self-referencing and reinforcing it is – almost as if, indeed, there was an overall plan.  Above is a picture of the cross-references in the bible:

 

The bar graph that runs along the bottom (the x-axis) represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in colour between white and light grey. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.  The long bar in the middle of the picture is Psalm 119.

 

For further information on this picture, see https://chrisharrison.net/index.php/Visualizations/BibleViz. 

 

Christians argue over how portions of the bible should be interpreted and the actual meanings of many parts of it – but they all recognize it as authoritative for the community, a foundational document.  

 

In your own mind, how was the bible inspired by God?  How was it not? 

  

Share your answers with others whom you trust.

 

+David