Searching - My Journey Along a Spiritual Path

  I don’t see it as often as I used to, but while driving – especially in the politically and religiously conservative South where I live – I still occasionally spot a bumper sticker bearing the slogan, “The Bible Says It, I Believe It, That Settles It.”   For those raised in a conservative and/or fundamentalist Christian church (again, which is much of the South), this message resonates.  For much of my religious upbringing, I was taught that the Bible was divinely inspired and the inerrant word of God.  According to the Mirriam Webster dictionary, “inerrant” means “without error”.  The general idea was that if the Bible was indeed The Word of God – a phrase which is still in very common usage in Christian churches around the world – then it couldn’t possible be incorrect or in error in any fashion.  God wouldn’t make mistakes.    Interestingly, the concept of the inerrancy of the Bible didn’t begin taking shape until the late 1500s with the Re...

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Bible is a collection of 66 “books” (73 in the Catholic version), although none of these could truly be considered books as we understand the term today.   Rather, they are letters or short stories written by a variety of authors, in most cases decades and even centuries after the events which they attempt to describe.   I will concentrate almost exclusively on the New Testament, as that is the definitive and often authoritative collection that is part-and-parcel of the Christian church and faith.   The majority of the New Testament consists of Paul’s letters – including the disputed ones – and the four gospels.   I have already presented a timeline for those writings.   Nearly all the other letters and books were likely written between 70 – 100AD, some 40 – 70 years AFTER Jesus’ ministry.   The books dubiously ascribed to Peter (almost certainly NOT the apostle Peter) weren’t written until 100 – 150AD.   The N...