Are there still people who honsetly believe the Bible is God's word?

Question

When we know the Bible is a compilation of anonymous writings selected to fit a particular story-line and edited and added to at will to achieve this purpose, later attributed to saints to give the whole thing more respectability. Why persist in saying this is the word of God when it so very clearly is not?

Reply to iluvtogethi:
I don't believe you do just happen to believe in God, that is not how it works, I think you have been got at by someone who has pushed that belief onto you and the Bible is the propaganda they will have used.

Reply to A WOMAN KNOW'S:
please don't call me ignorant, I am not!

reply to A WOMAN KNOW'S
Please don't call me a homosexual to try to discredit my thoughts, you play dirty by anyone's standards not just for a Christian.

reply to racam_us: I live in a house almost 200yrs old. 200years is very recent relatively speaking, and there are still the previous 1800yrs prior to that to consider before making such confident statements about consistency and no change occuring.

Answer 1

Yeah, Scary, really, isn't it?
The belief is that, rather than a select few books being chosen by Men out of the many thousands of potential inclusions, and chosen to codify a faith that stood on the bring of enormous success or complete destruction, so as to give people a real idea of what they believed in (Can anyone say "Council of Nicaea, 325AD"?), that each of the writers of the Official books of the Bible was uniquely 'God-Inspired'...not just inspired, mind you, but God-Inspired, to put down what they wrote as the Word of God. And naturally, all those who didn't write one of these Official books were not God-Inspired, just heretical egotists, telling lies or their own stories, rather than God's. What's more, once the cover was on Revelations, that was it - God shut the hell up and stopped inspiring any more writers, so the book would remain static and immutable for the rest of time, in the face of history, society, evolution, you name it, the book stands in its way and does not change. Except of course it's changed several times, with much of the original meaning 'lost in translation', but we'd better not talk about that, cos it would mean our modern bibles (and those of 200 years ago, come to that!) are wrong.

The point is, the more we point out the factual, secular, thoroughly mundane origins of the bible, the more people of a certain mindset will believe it's the direct Word of God, because the more faith it displays to believe that. A caustic observer might caution these people who believe so loudly in the face of reason against the sin of vanity, but as I don't especially hold with the concept of sin, that observer won't be me.

Answer 2

You make a number of sweeping statements about the Bible, and your statements don't match up with the facts, which have been very clearly understood for many generations.

There's no evidence that anyone ever edited and/or added to the Bible at will. If anything, whenever we discover lost documents (like the dead sea scrolls) we find a very close correlation between the contents of the old and the contents of the current canon.

The late attribution claims you make also have no support.

We know wth reasonable certainty who the writers of the old testament books were.

We know with a high degree of certainty who the writers of the new testament books were.

There's no need to credit saints with the writing of books they didn't write or cause to be written, simply to bolster the "respectability" of scripture.

The Bible stands up on its' own pretty well.

Any reasonably talented old testament scholar can easily match o.t. prophesies with actual history to track exactly which prophecies came true and when.

Any reasonably talented o.t. scholar with a computer can study the o.t. in all the original languages, to see if any undue liberties were taken.

Some translations are clearly better than others, and a few translations have been slightly altered to match up wth the particular beliefs of those who use them.

This is well known, and well documented, and it doesn't invalidate scripture in any way.

We can always go back to earlier works and accurately recapture the original language, phraseology, and author intent.

All the messianic o.t. prophecies (well over 200) were fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, and a huge proportion of them were fulfilled over the course of only a couple of days, yet the last o.t. book was completed some 400 to 500 years before Christ walked the earth.

That's way beyond a coincidence, and it's way beyond what any human authors could engineer on purpose, let alone by chance, especially a collection of human authors who worked separately, and over a period of 1300 years or so.

Turning to the new testament, we have additional non-scriptural writings and church tradition to back up what we already know of the inspired works.

Except for some recent modern critical scholarship, much of it based solely on personal opinion and hearsay, there isn't much doubt about who wrote the various n.t. gospels and epistles, or when they were written.

You can verify this yourself, if you care to.

As to whether the Bible is the Word of God, my church, the Catholic church, originally compiled the canon of scripture, had people alive and "on the ground" at the time the n.t. was being written, has a steady stream of scholarly writings and higher biblical criticism that are contemporary to the 1st thru 20th centuries, and has always officially maintained that the Bible is indeed the inerrant, inspired Word of God.

St. Augustine and St. Jerome did much groundbreaking and very extensive scriptural work in the 4th century, having access to many original documents and codices that no longer even exist in the modern world.

They found no significant problems with the great majority of scripture, and the few issues that were raised were soon settled. They're still settled.

My own independent, comprehensive, and totally unbiased studies also confirm this.

If you have some evidence to the contrary, other than your own personal opinion, I would appreciate knowing about it.

You have a perfect right to have an opinion about whether the bible is or is not the Word of God.

I do too, and my opinion, based on over 40 years of study, much of it as a biblical skeptic, is that your opinion is absolutely incorrect.

Answer 3

Yes, there are many people who believe that the Bible is the word of God. I am one of those people.

I think questioning things in the Bible is okay, just as long as you are questioning for the purpose of gaining insight and that you are doing this not to scrutinize but to gain better knowledge of the Bible and what it really says and means (Acts 17:11).

I'm sure you've heard the Bible referred to as the "Word." In the Bible, it also says that the word was "with God (John 1:1)." This can help you to feel comfortable with the Bible being backed my God. No, God did not write the Bible physically, but he selected prophets, apostles and disciples to write it for him. It is also important to note that the Bible is "inspired of God (2 Timothy 3:16)" This means that the inspiration, not the physical writing of it itself, was done with God's blessing and backing. Thus, the Bible truly is "the word of God (1 Thessalonians 2:13)."

The complilation of the different books of the Bible is the way it is because all of the writers were not alive at the same time. The Bible was written over a 1,600-year period. So the Bible takes you on a journey throughout different time periods, which I find fascinating because you can see the differences in traditions, law and commandments due to the circumstances of society and civilization.

Answer 4

>>“When we know the Bible is a compilation of anonymous writings…”

This is false. We know who wrote each book. There may be a few books whose authorship is debated by scholars, but they are not anonymous by any stretch of the imagination.

>>“…selected to fit a particular story-line…”

The books of the bible were never selected to fit a story line, because there is no story line. Those books were written by many authors spanning several centuries, it is about God who reveals Himself to the Judaic/Hebrew people in the Old Testament, and how He reveals Himself further in the New Testament. You confuse truth with "story line".

>>“…and edited and added to at will to achieve this purpose…”

This too is totally false. Preservation of each letter of each word was part of the Hebrew religion. Of New Testament extant manuscripts, the earliest go all the way back to around A.D. 130, though most are probably extant to the 3rd and 4th centuries. In any regard, this is remarkable. There is no other writing of antiquity where the copies are so close to the originals. Even standards that we think nothing about, like Plato, the extant copies of Plato are 1200 years after Plato's death, and no one questions its authenticity. For the New Testament it is mere decades giving the New Testament an unheard of historical and documentary veracity.

>>“… later attributed to saints to give the whole thing more respectability...”

This further reveals your prejudice, ignorance, and bigotry. Your claiming that the books of the New Testament, contrary to being accepted as historical evidence by numerous disciplines, including unbiased non-Christian ones, are all forgeries, and you don’t offer a single shred of proof or documentation to support your anti-intellectual opinions.

>>“Why persist in saying this is the word of God when it so very clearly is not?”

No one has any business interpreting the bible apart from Tradition, otherwise they would have an explanation for its canon, its inerrancy, and its authority. The bible itself is Tradition.

>>“Why persist in saying this is the word of God when it so very clearly is not?”

Well, one thing is certainly clear.

Answer 5

I have a King James Version family Bible that is more than 200 years old. I also have a King James Version Bible that is brand new. When I compare the two Bibles every word remains the same. Some people talk like the Bible changes like the weather. This is just not true. Besides all of this, who are you to try and tell believers that God's word is wrong. I really hope you come to an understanding about this before it is too late. One day every idle word and thought is going to have to be accounted for. In other words you need to load your brain before you shoot off your mouth. God bless you and I hope you will give this more thought.

Answer 6

Well, clearly there are. By the millions, apparently.

Most people will answer you by saying that God 'inspired' the writers. But clearly a lot of people really believe that God picked up a pen and paper to tell these stories. Why? Because the book is the centrepiece of their religion, and if you accept it as only human, then you can accept that it needn't be valid. You'll get God-believers who turn away from the Church because they can see that it doesn't provide any special or unique insight or reason to be.

Churches don't want that.

Tell people that it's the word of God and they'll keep paying their 10%.

Answer 7

Yes. They are called Christians.

"we know the Bible is a compilation of anonymous writings selected to fit a particular story-line and edited and added to at will to achieve this purpose, later attributed to saints to give the whole thing more respectability" - Can you substantiate even one percent of your baseless statement? It is easy to make a statement without any factual basis.

Answer 8

Of course!!! millions do and will continue to believe it's truly the word of god, half of the world population does and numbers are increasing by the day.. and not only the bible by the way, millions of people believe in all sorts of weird and distorted things. None of us is 100% intelligent and none is 100% stupid, therefore you can find world renowned scientists believing in absolute garbage..
As to "why", well that's a good point. People need to believe in something, people don't want to believe that we're alone in this world with no one up there looking after us. It's fear and uncertainty. Also, people want to believe they are better than others, believers in any faith always feel they are superior to non-believers. Bible lovers wouldn't reply to your question logically, because it's a matter of faith, not logic. Logic has no place where faith dominates..
I also need to repeat it's not only the bible that's full of garbage but all world religions, it's a way of controlling the blind masses.. and it’s obviously working!

Answer 9

Yes, millions of people still believe that. Apparently faith is more real to them than evidence. Or maybe they just haven't had the courage to consider other options.

So many people need to feel that there is an unseen force, controlling everything, who has the power to fix everything whenever they see fit. This helps them sleep at night because the alternative is that humans have to fix their own problems and take responsibility for their own faults - and these same people simply cannot believe that is possible. Out of fear...? who knows.

Answer 10

To determine wether it is actually "gods" word, you first have to come to the conclusion that there is a "god."

The very foundation of the book is flawed. Multiple story flaws. Multiple periods of Jesus's life excluded. (I thought they had to strive to be like him?)

If fact, it is a book written by men. Men are not perfect and neither is the christian religion.

A lot of the stuff in Revalation has been deemed by scholars to be about Nero. It was written about the same time as well. Most of the men who wrote it were on the popular drugs of the day I am sure as well.