The Bible

I have been read­ing with inter­est the last few exchanges regard­ing the read­ing of Jere­mi­ah 8:8 — ​“How can you say ; ​‘We are wise, and the Law of the Lord is with us’? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie’ ” Note : When­ev­er you see that term ​‘Law of the Lord’, the Hebrew word is Torah To me with all due respect to my Chris­t­ian brethren, I think what is stat­ed is crys­tal clear. This will also hope to explain, insha’al­lah, why Jesus (P) was always so hard on the scribes. I think for those who don’t believe that the Torah was lost to pos­ter­i­ty at one time would do good to read the fol­low­ing, insha’allah.

Before 1881, all trans­la­tions of the New Tes­ta­ment (includ­ing, most impor­tant­ly, the 1611 King James Ver­sion (KJV), also known as the Autho­rised Ver­sion (AV)), were based on copies of Greek man­u­scripts known as the Tex­tus Recep­tus, which is Latin for Received Text. (Abbre­vi­at­ed to TR). But in the 19th and 20th cen­turies, old­er Greek man­u­scripts were dis­cov­ered. These man­u­scripts have caused Bible schol­ars to revise what they believe is the cor­rect text of the New Tes­ta­ment. The lat­est revi­sion of this Greek Text is the Unit­ed Bible Soci­eties’ ​‘The Greek New Tes­ta­ment’ (pub­lished by Unit­ed Bible Soci­eties, 4th Edi­tion, 1993); (which I will abbre­vi­ate as UBS4). The suc­ces­sive revi­sions of the UBS New Tes­ta­ment are wide­ly accept­ed in the field of Bib­li­cal Stud­ies, and have been used for mod­ern trans­la­tions such as the Revised Stan­dard Ver­sion (RSV), New Inter­na­tion­al Ver­sion (NIV) and New Revised Stan­dard Ver­sion (NRSV).

From the stand­point of the ordi­nary the­ol­o­gy of the day it is a psy­cho­log­i­cal rid­dle how the Paul of the Four Let­ters can have fol­lowed the his­tor­i­cal Jesus at so short an inter­val. Pier­son opened the eyes of Loman to this fact. It seemed to him that the devel­oped Chris­tian­i­ty of the com­mu­ni­ty and the activ­i­ty of the­o­log­i­cal thought, which form the back­ground of the Four Let­ters, jus­ti­fy the hypoth­e­sis that they pos­si­bly belong to a lat­er time. Loman per­ceived that the work in this direc­tion begun by Bruno Bauer must be done over again. A thor­ough study of Bauer’s work showed him that the let­ters of Paul do not fit into the peri­od where it is usu­al to place them. True, attempts have been made to solve the dif­fi­cul­ty by the sug­ges­tion that Paul was a very extra­or­di­nary man, and not bound by the laws which gov­ern ordi­nary men. It is pos­si­ble, it is true, to go a long way in the expla­na­tion of the let­ters with the help of this sup­po­si­tion ; but the duty of crit­i­cism, when seek­ing an expla­na­tion of his­tor­i­cal facts, is to reject as much as pos­si­ble all solu­tions which assume any­thing unusu­al and extraordinary.

In the first cen­tu­ry of the Com­mon Era, there appeared at the east­ern end of the Mediter­ranean a remark­able reli­gious leader who taught the wor­ship of one true God and declared that reli­gion meant not the sac­ri­fice of beasts but the prac­tice of char­i­ty and piety an the shun­ning of hatred and enmi­ty. He was said to have worked mir­a­cles of good­ness, cast­ing out demons, heal­ing the sick, rais­ing the dead. His exem­plary life led some of his fol­low­ers to claim he was a son of God, though he called him­self the son of man a man. Accused of sedi­tion against Rome, he was arrest­ed. After his death, his dis­ci­ples claimed he had risen from the dead, appeared to them alive, and then ascend­ed to heav­en. Who was this teacher and won­der-work­er ? His name was Apol­lo­nius of Tyana ; he died about 98 A.D., and his sto­ry may be read in Flav­ius Philo­stra­tus’s Life of Apollonius.

CHAPTER III THE CANON OF THE NEW TES­TA­MEN­TRe­pro­duced from F.F. Bruce, ​“New Tes­ta­ment Doc­u­ments : Are They Reli­able?” (2003) Even when we have come to…

Bib­li­cal schol­ars agree almost uni­ver­sal­ly that Mark is our ear­li­est gospel which was lat­er used by Matthew and Luke as a major source. As…

Some Chris­t­ian apol­o­gists and mis­sion­ar­ies cite A. N. Sher­win-White, who declared Luke to be a mar­velous his­to­ri­an. ​“For Acts the con­fir­ma­tion of his­toric­i­ty is overwhelming…Any…

Chris­t­ian apol­o­gists in recent times try to prop­a­gate the idea that the Bible is the word of God, writ­ten by ​“inspired” scribes. Despite what…

The strongest ​“evi­dence” for the Trin­i­ty in the Bible is the verse 1 John 5:7 or oth­er­wise known as the ​‘Johan­nine Com­ma’. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for…

The pur­pose of this rebut­tal is only to prove that the con­tent of the Diates­saron is not the same as the cur­rent con­tent in the New Tes­ta­ment gospels.

For the ear­ly Chris­tians before the late 2nd cen­tu­ry C.E., there was no such thing as an ​“Old” or ​“New” Tes­ta­ment as found in the mod­ern-day Chris­t­ian Bible today. The writ­ers of the New Tes­ta­ment were basi­cal­ly unaware that they were pro­duc­ing writ­ings equiv­a­lent to the sta­tus of ​“scrip­ture”.

Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi Three hun­dred years after the time of Jesus(P), there were many dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Gospel sto­ry and the teach­ings of…

Here is a par­tial list of rea­sons for why the death of Jesus on the cross could­n’t pos­si­bly have served as a valid sac­ri­fice — any one of these would ren­der a sac­ri­fice as unac­cept­able for the pur­pose of expi­a­tion of sins. Giv­en that, at the time of Jesus’ death, the Sec­ond Tem­ple was still stand­ing in Jerusalem and the Hebrew Bible was the Scrip­ture in force, here are some of the rea­sons why the death of Jesus on the cross can­not be a valid sac­ri­fi­cial offering.

We will put our expla­na­tion regard­ing the main issue (I AM) in steps so that it shall be eas­i­ly fol­lowed by those unfa­mil­iar with issues involved. The focus of the paper is to exam­ine whether the use of the word ​“I am” in John 8:58 has some­thing to do with ​“I AM” in Exo­dus 3:14. We will give the com­plete vers­es of John 8:58 and Exo­dus 3:14 lat­er on in this paper. First, we would like to intro­duce to the read­er the Sep­tu­agint, which shall be the main ref­er­ence in this dis­cus­sion oth­er than the Bible itself. Let us delve into the expla­na­tion about the Sep­tu­agint : The word ​“Sep­tu­agint” is tak­en from the Latin word sep­tu­ag­in­ta which means ​“70”. There­fore, this book is also known as ​“LXX”, which sim­ply means ​“70”.

Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi In two of the Syn­op­tic Gospels, Jesus (P) is depict­ed as cry­ing out on the cross ​“my God, my God, why…