""The Holy Bible"

 

“The Holy Bible”

By Jim Culp

May 11, 2022

This is a response to a request. It is my view.

 I was raised as a Christian when I was ages 5-17. We went to church 3 times per week, and for 4 years of that period, I attended a Christian school that was part of the church. So…needless to say, I was indoctrinated very early in life. I’ve read the King James version of the bible at least six times, and it is broken into two testaments…the old and the new. The Old Testament is all the stories about how the Jewish were persecuted over the years but prevailed at different times because they had a “man of God” leading them. It lays out the rules that God says should never be broken, and these are called the Ten Commandments. It’s long and tedious.

Fairly early in this tome, you can find that first purge of the Earth by God, recorded in the Book of Genesis (Chapters 6-9) where mankind is wiped out by water that covers the entire expanse of the Earth. However, God saved a man named Noah, his family, and two of every species on Earth so that life could begin again. This story is repetitive in hundreds of cultures…South American, North American, Egyptian, Chinese…the list is too long to mention all of them. There is scientific evidence of this flood, so there is some proof of it.

Then you have the New Testament, and it starts out with four men giving you their stories about the life of a man named Jesus the Christ. I say it that way because a man name Jesus Christ never existed. “Christ” is a title, not a name. He was supposedly called Jesus of Nazareth, because he was from that area of Israel. To date, there is no absolute proof that a man named Jesus, Jesus Christ, or Jesus of Nazareth ever existed anywhere. The only people that ever claimed to know this person were his disciples (a religious group of guys that supposedly followed him around the holy lands and witnessed him performing miracles).

The gospels (as these four books are called) tell of the life and death of this person, and of him being the Son of God…but in human from for 33 years on Earth. Ultimately…each gospel tells of his imprisonment, his trials, and his ultimate execution at the hands of the Roman Empire. They all claim that Jesus was crucified, but anyone that has studied Roman law during that period knows that crucifixion (a brutal way to die) was only reserved for persons that had committed the most violent of crimes (rape, murder, incest). Am I saying that no one was crucified for other reasons? No. Roman Emperors for many years had their own policies,

The rest of the New Testament is written by various Christians (as Jesus’ followers are called) such as the Apostle Paul, John of Patmos, Peter, and several others. It ends with the Book of Revelation… a story about the end of the world, and the return of Jesus the Christ to Earth where he takes all his faithful followers to Heaven, a place in some part of the Universe where everyone (Christians) lives forever with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

I’ve read four versions of the Bible, and these includes the King James version, the Hebrew Bible or “Tanakh,” the New Standard Version, and the Tree of Life Version. These all express the Bible in different ways, but the Hebrew version caters to the Jewish peoples.

The Bible (as a whole) is a boring read, unless you are into endless diatribes expressed by hundred of prophets, apostles, and disciples.

Do you like the Holy Bible? Well, I say read it, and judge for yourself.

-Jim

 

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