Bible

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The Bible is a book of myths (or, more accurately, an anthology of books — or, a two-thousand-page snoozefest^[1]) held by Christians and Jews (and, to a lesser extent, Muslims) to be holy and the revealed word of God. Depending on what sort of faithful you speak to, the Bible is either a collection of parables, metaphors, and moral imperatives, or a literal reading of the history of the world and of all knowledge to be had therein. For other faithful persons, it's a mixture of either of these things. It includes a large number of myths which are interpreted either literally or allegorically largely depending on the reader's level of education.

While the Bible — and other works such as the Qur'an and the Egyptian Book of the Dead — may have some merit as literature, their moral authority is negligible to non-Christians, when unsupported by other ethical theories.

[edit] Basic structure

The modern Bible is divided into two main sections: The Old Testament, and the New Testament. Each of these consists of many individual "books", which are subdivided into chapters and verses for easy reference. The "chapter and verse" designations are late developments, not extant in the earliest manuscripts, and though quite convenient for readers sometimes give a false sense of discreteness, resulting in a frequent divorcing of Bible quotations from their context (quote mining shows the ugly results). Division into chapters and verses is also often used in Bible-like works such as the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon.

[edit] Old Testament

The Old Testament (known in Jewish tradition as the Tanakh), which was all written prior to the time of Jesus Christ, are basically the Jewish holy books, starting with the Pentateuch, or Mosaic books. They tell a story of the creation of the universe, our planet, and life on it; contain many laws both religious and secular in nature; and have many books of prophecy. It exists in several different canons. The universally accepted books are all written in Hebrew; those books considered apocryphal by the most conservative canons are often written in Greek or Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and a few accepted mostly by Eastern and African churches exist only in Coptic or Ge'ez.

The Old Testament can roughly be divided up into three sections, although textual analysis appears to show that editors have moved across sections:

[edit] Torah

The Torah (Hebrew) or Pentateuch, literally 'Πεντετεύχως', or 'five rolls' in Greek, contains the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. While many fundamentalists claim that the Bible is the direct "Word of God" (a pretty-much necessary claim, with their wish to return ad fontes^[2]), Julius Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis identifies four separate main authors: J, or "Yahwist"; E, or "Elohist"; P, or "Priestly"; and D, or "Deuteronomical"; all of whom were assembled into the final Torah by R, the Redactor, who may have been Ezra.

[edit] Nevi'im (prophets)

See:Isaiah

The Prophets are the attributed authors of a series of books that claim to foretell the future of the Israelite and Judahite nations. The actual contents of the books vary widely from first-person accounts (Isaiah, Jeremiah) to allegorical tales (Ezekiel, Hosea) to apocalyptic writings (Daniel) to novellas (Jonah), and while it is generally agreed by those of Abrahamic faiths that these record then-future events and judgements meted out by YHWH, exactly which events are widely disagreed upon between Jews and Christians. For the most part, most Christian thought holds that messianic prophecies in the Nevi'im are direct references to Jesus, while Jews hold that they refer to a messiah who has not yet arrived.

Prophets such as Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha have no currently-extant writings attributed to them; however, the books of Samuel and Kings, as well as Joshua and Judges, are generally put in the Nevi'im in the Jewish canon.

[edit] Ketuvim (writings)

The Writings are those books in the Old Testament which are not part of either the Torah or the Prophesies. They are the most diverse group of texts in the Tanakh, including chronicles such as the Books of Judges and Kings, collections of wisdom and aphorisms such as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, poetic writings such as the Song of Solomon and the Psalms, or apocalyptic literature such as the Book of Daniel (which, however, in Christian canons is filed with the Nevi'im).

In some Christian canons, the Ketuvim are further divided into historical books (Joshua, Judges, Kings, Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah) and wisdom books (Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon). The books of Esther and Job, much like the book of Jonah, generally take the form of novellas, and Job in particular is considered historical fiction (based on an old Middle Eastern legend) by all but the most literalist Bible experts.

[edit] Apocrypha

A subject of many canonical debates over the years, the Apocrypha^[3], broadly, are books in the Old Testament that were not written in Hebrew and are not universally considered inspired Scripture (most are in fact in Greek or Aramaic, though they may have come from Hebrew originals). Significant books known in the West (i.e. those considered canonical by the Roman Catholic Church ^[4]) include additions to Esther and Daniel, as well as the Wisdom of Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, the books of Baruch, Tobit, and Judith, and the books of Maccabees (the post-exile history of Judaism leading into the Hellenistic period, including the story of Hanukkah); others still (1 and 2 Esdras, additions to the Maccabees and Psalms, the Book of Jubilees, and a couple of others, some only handed down in Coptic or Ge'ez) are part of the canon of many Eastern churches, including the Eastern Orthodox communion and the east African churches such as the Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodox churches.

Though not part of most Protestant canons, the King James Bible included the Catholic apocrypha in its original editions as supplemental material, not considered canon by the Church of England; in addition, the New Revised Standard Version is available in editions which include both Catholic and Orthodox (but not African) apocrypha, being one of the few Bible translations to do so. Bible editions with the Orthodox and east African canons are sometimes difficult to find in English, though Bibles with the Catholic canon are readily available.

While not strictly meeting the mainline definition of Apocrypha, the Book of Mormon represents a significant extension to canon as used by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and its many splinter movements.

[edit] New Testament

The New Testament starts with the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke (collectively referred to as synoptic gospels) and John, which tell the story of Jesus' time on earth, his crucifixion and return to life, miracles he allegedly performed, and his philosophy and teachings. It then contains many letters to the nascent churches, mostly written by Saul of Tarsus after his conversion and taking the name of Paul. These are collectively known as the "epistles". The New Testament wraps up with the book of Revelations, a story thought by some to be about the end of the world, or at least the Roman Empire.

The New Testament is written almost exclusively in "koine", the form of Attic Greek that was the lingua franca of most of the Mediterranean basin under the early Roman Empire.

[edit] The Gospels

The Gospels are essentially biographies of Jesus. While none of the four agree in every detail, there are enough similarities between the first three (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) to identify them as having come from a common tradition; as a result, they are known as the synoptic gospels. Essentially, Mark is thought to have been the first written, with Matthew and Luke both drawing in different ways on both Mark and a hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus called "Q" (from the German quelle, meaning "source"). As a general rule, Matthew is generally understood to be the most Jewish of the three, while Luke is thought of as a gospel for Gentiles.

The gospel of John is somewhat more problematic, as it presents a much more spiritual view of Jesus and his ministry, as well as a much more confrontational Jesus, along with several threads of intrigue in the highest levels of the Jewish religious authorities. John is thought to have been written later, sometime in the early 2nd century, in a community with Gnostic leanings.

The author of the gospel of Luke is also likely responsible for a second collection called the Acts of the Apostles, a history of the early church, first under the original Apostles, then under the guidance of Paul of Tarsus. There are many other gospels, many wildly divergent from the four accepted in the Bible; of the many found, the one considered by Biblical scholars to be most authentic is the gospel of Thomas, a very early sayings collection similar to the hypothetical Q gospel but with a decidedly Gnostic slant.

[edit] The Acts of the Apostles

The book of Acts, penned by Luke as a sort of sequel to his gospel, is unique in the New Testament. It is both a history of the doings of the early Christians, from Pentecost to the Council of Jerusalem, and a travelogue of the journeys of St. Paul by land and sea throughout the eastern Mediterranean Sea area, ending with his arrival in Rome.

[edit] The Epistles

The Epistles are a series of letters, about half of them attributed to Paul of Tarsus, that are believed to be the earliest available evidence of the doctrine and structure of the original Christian Church. Most of them take the form of doctrinal and church management advice to a specific congregation or even person, and often cover much material not mentioned in the gospels (in fact, many skeptics of Christianity draw a sharp distinction between Jesus' teaching and Paul's, seeing Jesus as more accommodating and Paul as more moralistic).

The authorship of many of the epistles is disputed; in particular, a good number of letters attributed to Paul are known to have been written by other authors in an attempt (an accepted rhetorical technique at the time) to expand Paul's body of work, while others are attributed to other apostles (John, James, Peter, Jude). One particular work, the Letter to the Hebrews, stands out as being completely anonymous; despite occasional attributions to Paul, Hebrews' author has a drastically different literary style from known Pauline writings and is generally agreed to be unknowable given current manuscript evidence.

[edit] Revelation to John

A significant ongoing theological dispute revolves around the definition of the end of the "world" described in this book; Catholics and some mainline Protestants maintain that the book was about a prophesied fall of the Roman Empire, while most conservative Protestants believe it refers to the end of the world as a whole. The canonical status of Revelation has been questioned by many for centuries, with many theologians considering it doctrinally unsound or even complete gibberish; however, no current Christian denomination fails to include it in its accepted canon.

Due to the now-almost-two-millennia delay in the return of Jesus for the final judgment, and despite being, essentially, a report of a really bad mushroom trip, the Revelation to John has become a dominant part of much evangelical/fundamentalist theology.

This book contains two verses (Chapter 22:18,19) which state "I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book." Many modern Christians, being unaware that at the time it was written Revelation was not part of a greater anthology, mistakenly believe this to be a commandment not to add to any part of the Bible, or take anything out. However, again, as the Bible is an anthology, these verses apply only to Revelation.

Also see authorship of the New Testament — or not — there's not much there.

[edit] Rough plot summary

The Bible opens with a story of how God created the universe, the earth, animals and people on the earth, and pretty much everything. He makes two people, Adam and Eve, a man and a woman, respectively. God, Adam, Eve, and all the animals inhabit the Garden of Eden, a paradise in which the couple can live under only one stipulation: They must not eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or they shall surely die. Of course, since the book was written by a man, the woman screws everything up, with a bit of prompting from a snake. When God finds out that Adam and Eve have eaten the ~~apple~~ fruit (that may or may not have been an apple), he decides to make them suffer and eventually die and kicks them out of the garden he made for them. The only people worth talking about at this point were inbred from this first couple.

Adam and Eve have two sons: Cain and Abel. To please God, both children make sacrifices; Cain offers fruits and stuff, while Abel slaughters lambs. God is not a vegetarian, so he is more pleased with Abel. Because he cannot handle rejection, Cain does the only rational thing and murders his brother. He is sentenced to exile and Eve bears another son, Seth. Seth kind of gets the whole human race thing going, but God gets kind of pissy, because the people become perverse, committing ghastly atrocities. God sends a flood to wipe out the entire population, with exception to an alcoholic named Noah and his family. Then Noah and his wife get down to another round of inbreeding, and all modern humans can trace their lineage to them. Within a few more thousand years all the different races of humanity have diverged, and all the plants, animals, insects, etc. have repopulated the earth.

Years later, one of the descendants of Noah, Abraham, is called by God to father the entire race of the Jews. He has a kid named Isaac, and Isaac becomes the father of Israel/Jacob, and Israel/Jacob becomes the father of Joseph, the first real main character. Joseph is abused by his brothers for having a pretty coat. He goes to work for the Egyptian Pharaoh because he can magically tell the future by reading people's dreams. This puts Joseph and the Hebrews into repute with the Pharaoh, until another Pharaoh who does not know of Joseph takes the throne. He enslaves all the Hebrews in Egypt. The next main character is an orphaned, Hebrew murderer named Moses, who was raised by the Egyptian royalty. He leads a resistance and eventually escapes Egypt with his people, God introduces this lengthy set of laws and customs, and then everyone wanders around the desert for a while, and after Moses dies his people go on to create Israel without him. A bunch of crappy stuff happens to the Jews, until Jesus is introduced.

Jesus, whose mother was a virgin, is the son of God. He came along and told people that they should believe in him, because he was the only way into this awesome new paradise in Heaven. He proved all this, and that he wasn't faking, by doing magic tricks for any people who would stop and listen to him, and running rhetorical circles around his strawmen adversaries. Then some hateful Jews came along and got him killed, because they thought his teachings were a threat to the temple. Then he goes on to an underworld full of pain and suffering. However, a few days later he crawls back out, and Jesus rolls away a rock and scares two poor innocent women, then joins the people he taught, and has them poke fingers in him, and tells spooky stories about the afterlife. He reiterates that everyone had to believe in him or they wouldn't make it to the happy afterlife. After this, Jesus goes up to heaven, and his students are left on Earth without him, waiting for the day when Jesus said he would come back.

[edit] The issue of "Canon"

There are many books that one way or another could be considered to be part of "The Bible", however, various denominations (sects, to unbelievers) pick and choose which ones they consider to be canonical, in other words, to be part of what they call the Bible. At the extreme, some only consider the New Testament (and their chosen books for it) to be canonical.

[edit] Translations

For more information, see Guide to Bible translations.

The original works that form the Bible were all written in ancient Hebrew or Greek, after most probably having long been part of an oral tradition, and have been translated many times into and between many languages. Early translations have proven quite significant in history; the Tanakh was translated during the Hellenistic period into Greek, leading to the Septuagint, the form of the Hebrew Bible that would have been familiar to the Jewish diaspora of the Roman era. This Greek Tanakh was the one that was quoted by the New Testament authors, leading to some interesting doctrinal glitches (e.g. the transformation, in the book of Isaiah, of the Hebrew עלמה (almah, "young woman"^[5]) to the Greek παρθενη (parthenē, "virgin") in a verse thought by Christians to refer to Mary, the mother of Jesus). There is some confusion among Bible translators whether to use the Greek or Hebrew renderings of such passages. The Septuagint is still the fundamental form of the Old Testament used in the Orthodox churches.

The second significant translation was St. Jerome's Vulgate, the base for the Catholic canon and the most significant translation of the Bible into Latin. The Vulgate contains both the Old and New Testaments. While its canon (in somewhat modified form) is still used by the Catholic Church, and its influence still remains in Protestant Bibles, modern translations are generally based on more up-to-date critical editions of the Hebrew and Greek texts. The Roman Catholic Church kept the Bible confined to a Latin translation only for nearly a thousand years, but the Protestant leaders of the Reformation movements demanded access to the Bible in vernacular languages, and the invention of the printing press meant that these translations could be made widely available.

The most famous of these in English is the King James Version, which was commissioned by King James I of England in 1604, and was finally published in 1611. It is considered by many to be one of the most significant works ever written in the English language, not just for content but for beauty and style, and many fundamentalist Christians accept the KJV and only the KJV (sometimes even to the exclusion of the original Greek and Hebrew texts) as the inspired word of God in English. The KJV is not universally accepted as a reliable translation, though, being a) largely a mass correction of earlier English translations and b) based on later manuscripts thought to be at greater risk of corruption by mistranscription.

Other popular translations include:

The New International Version (used widely by many Protestant denominations)
The New American Bible (the standard translation of the American Catholic church)
The New American Standard Bible (considered to be the most literal English translation available)
The New Revised Standard Version (used by numerous denominations in English-speaking countries, including some Jewish and Canadian Catholic congregations; created by people who thought the NASB too liberal in its theology)
The New English Translation (the "NET Bible") (A freely available, wholly-online translation)
The Reina-Valera translation into Spanish (the most widely available Protestant translation for Spanish speakers).
The Jerusalem Bible, a series of Catholic translations into western European languages (the flagship language being French).
The Douay-Rheims Bible, a Catholic translation of the Latin Vulgate (not the original Greek and Hebrew documents) into early modern English; used primarily by traditionalist Catholics

As can be seen, the issue of Bible translation is often just as fraught with knee-jerk sectarianism as Christianity itself.

The issue of translation accuracy, often seen as something of a tempest in a teapot by non-believers, is taken very seriously in some quarters, from squabbles over inclusive language in some of the modern translations, to issues of nomenclature (some particularly literalist sects prefer to see the names of the characters in the original Hebrew and Greek rather than their more popular Anglicized forms), to outright accusations of apostasy due to differences in source texts (KJV-onlyers often blame a Satanic conspiracy for certain places where the names of God and Jesus do not appear in non-KJV translations, for example). Except in cases of blatant textual corruption,^[6] however, most Bible readers simply consider choice of translation to be somewhat unimportant, and largely a matter of the churches' and individual readers' choices.

[edit] Legal issues

A problem that has come to light in the Information Age for many users of the Bible, ministers and skeptics alike, has been that of copyright. While the original texts of the Bible are in the public domain, most translations are under copyright, and not always under terribly permissive licensing. In practice, this has resulted in the use of the King James Bible and other older translations almost exclusively for free distribution of the Bible, a somewhat problematic matter given that many prefer to read more modern language.

While most versions of the Bible are readily available in online form from their publishers, such translations cannot be readily reproduced en masse; as a result, some groups have begun translations with the express intent of making them available for freer use, the most important in English being the New English Translation^[7] (i.e. the NET Bible, copyrighted under a liberal reuse license) and the World English Bible^[8] (public domain). ^[9]

[edit] Supremacy of the Bible in Christian thought

While it is acceptable to question God or His motives, questioning a literal interpretation of the Bible is frowned upon by Christian fundamentalists. ^[10] The Protestant dogma of sola scriptura^[11] holds that everything necessary for Salvation is contained in the Bible; the Bible is venerated, not only for its history and the major themes of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, but in its own right as "The Word of God". The Bible itself has become an idol for some in modern Christianity, especially those who espouse a specific translation (the most notorious being the Anglophone King James Version only movement); such people expand the concept of sola scriptura to the idea of all-sufficiency, whereby everything worth knowing is to be found in the Bible and anything that contradicts it is heresy. Such Biblical inerrancy is the hallmark of Christian fundamentalism.

A major reason for the primacy that fundamentalists place on the Bible, and a literal reading of the Good Book, is that placing greater emphasis on the Bible enables the community of faith to interpret the "Word of God" directly without the mediation of a priest. Protestants insist on a personal relationship with God, which is more difficult with an entire Church hierarchy standing between the individual and God. (At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. Ignorance of Biblical context, combined with the authoritarianism displayed by many conservative preachers, makes that more dubious in practice.)

[edit] Times the Bible has been proven right in science

Sometimes it rains a lot.
If you hang on a crucifix for three days, you'll die.
Whales are big.

[edit] Unsuitable reading

A great many sins are described in the Bible, therefore children should probably be protected from this dirty, dirty book.

[edit] Problems with using the Bible as a literal guide to truth

Some people claim the Bible is a) the word of God and b) is a reliable source on historical events. It is easy to observe that unlike, for example, the Quran, most of the Bible does not even purport to be quotation from God and that most people who believe it is literally true are unfamiliar with most of its contents. Here are some more detailed problems:

The Bible is a hodepodge collection of oral history, poetry, legend, myth, geneology, prophesy and visions, some of which date back to nomadic tribes in the Middle East. The problem with oral histories is that they change over time, and there is no way to verify what the original version of any of the accounts in the work might have looked like.

The oral histories that were eventually included in the Bible were written down by different groups of people over centuries, and copied by hand numerous times, introducing changes and inaccuracies in the process as with any text that is copied (witness the variations in Shakespeare's folios).

Numerous versions of chapters that have been included in the Bible by various groups (Jews, Gnostics and Christians) exist, and arbitrary decisions have been made as to which ones to include in what is accepted as the modern Christian version of the Bible. Chapters that have at one time or another been included and then removed from the Bible are called the Apocryopha. Some of these, most notably what are believed to be Gnostic texts, differ radically from the currently accepted version of the Bible.

Both the Old Testament and the New have numerous internal contradictions that render any attempt to deem words of the Bible literally true impossible. For example, there are two different accounts of creation in the Old Testament and major contradictions among accounts of the life of Jesus in the New.

Linguistic and textual analysis of the Bible has demonstrated that some chapters have elisions or additions made by different authors, making a determination of the 'original' or 'true' version of the Bible problematic.

There is ample evidence that some elisions and additions to some chapters were made for political reasons, or to express a religious viewpoint that differed from that held by the original author of the chapter.

Taken literally, anyone who has sex with a man is a sinner. Leviticus 18:22 says "thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is an abomination." Since it says "thou" and not "men", read literally, this prohibition applies to everybody. That means that all women would have to be chaste or lesbians, and all men would be out of luck.

Historical sources show that the New Testament is factually inaccurate on matters including the reign of Herod and the Roman census.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Skeptic's Annotated Bible
A time line of biblical events
An excellent "multi-version" Bible passage lookup site.
The Bible in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and the King James Version.
Psalm 59
The Brick Testament (This illustrated version is hilarious.)

[edit] Footnotes

↑ Except for the exciting bits (i.e. the blood and gore and immoral parts).
↑ We linked to wikipedia for "chapter and verse", but you're on your own with this delightful bit of Latin!
↑ see Wikipedia for a more informative article on the Apocrypha
↑ The exact term used is deuterocanonical, roughly meaning "secondary canon"; despite an apparently equivocal name, the RCC does consider them fully inspired scripture.
↑ The debate of if almah means "young woman" or "virgin" is even more complicated in languages other than English. German, for instance, makes the difference between "junge Frau" ("young woman") and "Jungfrau" ("virgin"). Culturally a "almah" was unmarried, and thus was automatically presumed to have been a virgin. Disentangling "virginity" from ancient terms for "unmarried women" is perhaps impossible from some cultures.
↑ The Jehovah's Witnesses' New World Translation mentioned above, due to major doctrinal deviations (particularly in John 1, where "was God" becomes "was a god"), is often cited as an example of twisting Scripture to match doctrine.
↑ http://www.bible.org/netbible
↑ http://ebible.org/web
↑ Neither one, however, includes the complete Apocrypha, making them unsuitable for use in Catholic study. Both translations expect to make them available eventually.
↑ Except in that bastion of free thought and skepticism, Conservapedia, where they've discovered that some parts of the Bible are, in fact Liberal Forgeries.
↑ http://www.the-highway.com/Sola_Scriptura_Godfrey.html