Why do you read the Bible?

Question

Some people read the Bible and the use it to bash the Catholic Church. This does not make sense because it was Catholic bishops that decided which books to keep and which to exclude. If you use the Bible as your religious text are you not actually acknowledging the authority of the Catholic Church in matters of religion?

The books in any Protestant translation came from the list we already had. The New Testament is identical no matter where you go. It was finally agreed upon in the third century.

Answer 1

Maybe some people read the bible to bash different religions not just Catholic Churches.
Many other people read the good word to know how to live and to love. How to treat others as you would want to be treated and the commandments of God. Let the word teach them of Jesus Christ and how the devil attacks and how to overcome evil. What will happen in the future by revelations, revealing the truth. How to get close to God, so you will be written in the lambs book of eternal life.

Answer 2

Dear David,

You are very much mistaken in your assumption that "Catholic" determined which books were to included in the Bible. The catholic church originally did not want anyone to have a copy of the Scriptures--they wanted to control people by saying that if they missed church or communion they had committed a mortal sin. This way they could make money from "indulgenses" and the lighting of candles-(they believed that this had some spiritual benefit). The catholic church' s bible also uses inferior manuscripts to make the English translation. In addition to that, they also included the "Apocryphal Books" which are not a part of the word of God. These books were not inspired of God, neither are they included in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Answer 3

People see what they want to see in the Bible. There are small differences between the Catholic and some Protestant Bibles, aside from the Apocrypha, because the source documents are different. In the 16th Century, as the Enlightenment was getting underway, intellectuals realized that the original New Testament had been written in Greek, not Latin. The Vulgate was the best translation available for its time (5th Century), but it was a translation. The intellectuals took crash courses in Greek so they could understand the new manuscripts they had gotten from the Byzantine churches back East.

The problem was, they were using contemporary manuscripts, dating from about the 12th Century, and the copies they were given were not all complete. Erasmus Desiderius made a heroic effort to cobble together a master Greek text from a half dozen fragments. (He actually didn't have the last page of Revelation so he back-translated from the Vulgate.) The result was dubbed the "Received Text" ("Textus Receptus"). Its effect was to liberate the text from the control of Rome.

Rome had legitimate concerns about misinterpretation of scripture, and prohibited translations (forgetting that their master document was a translation itself). Most peasants couldn't read anyway. Stained glass windows and Mystery Plays were their "Bible". But experience taught Rome that those who actually read the scriptures tended to form individual opinions about their meaning.

Of course the fact remained that the Church was sitting on the scriptures and enforcing an interpretation that had not been re-examined in centuries. So the revolution was inevitable. Once the TR was released and vernacular translations made, the Church had to play catch-up and began translating, from the Latin, of course. They had no way to verify Erasmus' compilation.

Which was better, a 12th Century "source" or a 5th Century translation? Things got complicated in the 19th Century as older Greek New Testaments, from the 4th and 5th Centuries came to light. The TR crowd took comfort in the fact that there were a lot more of their source texts around than the "new" ones and began to refer to TR as the "Majority Text". The upstarts countered that a lot of copies could by copied of a corrupt intermediate source and that generations of copies tend to collect errors and interpolations over time. Few minds were changed.

Then there is the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. From its beginnings, the Church had known its ancient scriptures only in the Greek, as the Septuagint. But this, too was a translation. The Church only became acquainted with the Hebrew when Jerome began producing the Vulgate. He discovered that the Septuagint had more books than the Hebrew canon. He did not want to discard them because they were in his Bible, but he did want to make it clear that there were no extant Hebrew versions of the books. So he separated them into their own section, labelled "Apocrypha". They had never left Christian scripture and were only rejected by the Jews. Only when Martin Luther was building his case against Roman authority did their inspiration come into question. A few books hinted at ideas that contradicted his theology so he took the opportunity to delete the offending passages by rejecting the whole package. (He would have liked to drop the Letter of James as well but there was no convenient excuse.)

The translation authorized by King James was based on the Textus Receptus, and was regarded as an improvement over its predecessor, the Geneva Bible, simply because it was not filled with anti-Roman footnotes. Its prose borrowed heavily from the Wycliff translation of years before and there were numerous word and syntax errors that had to be corrected in later editions. It could hardly be regarded as divinely inspired.

But the real argument is about the inspiration of the source manuscripts. There will likely be no agreement over how faithful the manuscripts are to the long-vanished originals. Each "side" is guilty of manipulating scripture to damn its "enemies" and legitimize its interpretation. Many Christians read the Bible looking for guidance for their lives. Others just look for ammunition, ready-made or DIY.

Answer 4

I was raised as a Christian, when I was getting ready to be baptized my pastor came to the house to answer questions I had. I was nine at the time. Thinking back he never really answered my questions. The bible can be a source of comfort at times, however much of it doesn't seem historically right to me. I believe in God but like you said if bishops are deciding what to put in and what to exclude then the full story is not being told. I can't understand why Christians who are supposedly about love and peace would travel the world as missionaries destroying so many lives. And Catholicism - is such an angry religion. I have seen and heard of some "christians" "catholics" do some evil and disgusting things. I believe in God but skeptical about other things taught. So now I am a spiritualist.

Answer 5

You know, I find it ironic. Because with Constantine at the Council of Nicea they came up with a pretty good rendition of scripture. Of that I am grateful. But why then did the Roman Catholic church make having a Bible illegal? You see, that's the kind of stuff that gives evidence that Satan worked his way into the Roman Catholic Church. The Inquisitions were not just after Marcians, they were after any non RC faith. They began the doctrines of evil things, including the non Chirstian purgatory, and all had to recognize the Pope as their spiritual leader.

I am not writing this to attack the RCC. I am merely stating that they were not alway on the up and up. A good beginning perhaps, but a monstrosity thereafter.

Answer 6

Actually, the Catholic Bible includes some of the books of the apocrypha, which are not included in the Jewish, protestant and orthodox canon. These are Tobias, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, and Maccabees. They were decreed divine by the Council of Trent in 1546. The Protestants rejected these Deuterocanonical books during the reformation.

Answer 7

Not acknowledging the authority of the Catholic Church in matters of religion.

Answer 8

Maybe the Catholic bishops decided what books to keep in the Duaoy version. My version I read had no authority from the bishops in which books to keep. I have less books in the Bible I read than yours. Learn a little more history

Answer 9

The Bible wasn't written by the Catholic Church.

Answer 10

Your basic premise is false. The Bible used by Protestant, Gnostic and Eastern (Greeks, Russians, Copts, Ethiopian, Armenians, Syrians, etc.) Christians differ to varrying degrees from that of the Catholic Church, so no, it does not acknowledge the authority of Rome.