(Originally written January 5, 2006 in Notebook 20)
Book Notes
The Promise and The Blessing
Michael Harbin
- There are many ways of studying the Bible, this book will approach it from its historical context
- This book will help us to understand the books of the Bible as the original readers would have
- There are two basic approaches to understanding the Bible
1) The Traditional View
2) The Modern View
- The traditional view is a more conservative view and has been the widely accepted view until recent times
- The traditional view accepts the Bible on face-value and believes it to be historically accurate
- The Modern View is a more liberal view of the Bible that assumes it to be mythical until there is corroborating evidence
-The Modern view began to gain ground in the 1800's especially after Julius Wellhaven produced a theory that the Pentateuch was written much later than previously assumed
- Willhausen's theory (The Documentary Hypothesis) argues that God is limited and could not (or at least would not) perform miracles, or interfere with he space-time history
- The Traditional View holds that God will on occasion and has intervened in the time-space history
- Miracles cannot be proved or disproved by scientific research. Science can show us what is normal and by nature miracles are unnatural. This makes them out of the scope of science
- Archaeology constantly shatters the modern view's beliefs and presuppositions
- Archeology does not prove the Bible
- Archeology has limitations and problems
- One problem is that of historical loss. This occurs when items are destroyed either by disaster, humans or time
- Another problem is that of limited excavation. This occurs when archeologists cannot excavate areas because of politics, weather, funding or other restrictions
- Another problem is that of non-written sources. This problem occurs when we find artifacts that aren't written ones, like tools or pottery. These items sometimes cannot be figured out what exactly they were used for and that sometimes we can only deduce small amounts of information from them
- Another problem is that of dating. This is when artifacts are attempted to be dated. There is no exact way of being 100% accurate all of the time
- Another problem is the problem of history. Sometimes people in history were not thought of as important until after the fact.
- History is defined as "the recording of eyewitness accounts in written form"
- History begins with writing, so any culture without writing is prehistoric by nature
- History began no earlier than 3200-3100 B.C. in Sumer at the mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers.
- All writing began as pictographs:
Mesopotamia: Cuneiform
Egypt: Hieroglyphics
- All writing began as financial records
- Originally God intended to speak to Israel himself the books of Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus but after God spoke the 10 commandments to them they were frightened and asked Moses to tell them what God said
- Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus became the first canon (and probably Job)
- The canon is a group of writings regarded as authentic and used in the Bible
- The canon as we have it today gradually developed
- The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (except for three passages in Aramaic)
- The Old Testament was translated into their everyday languages after the exile to Babylon
- The most important Greek translation is the Septuagint
- The Early New Testament books fell into two basic categories:
1) Eyewitness accounts of the Messiah (the Gospels)
2) Letters from key witnesses to believers (the Epistles)
- Numbers and Deuteronomy were added to the Old Testament Canon 40 years after the original canon
- To be in the canon a book must be inspired by God. It must have two roles of the Holy Spirit:
1) Inspiring the writer
2) Verifying the inspiration to the community
- Christianity began with the assumption that the Jewish canon was authoritative
- The concept of the Messiah comes from the Jewish canon
- The New Testament was primarily written to groups of God's people throughout the Roman Empire
Review Questions
1) The traditional view of how the Bible was written is that it was written as a historically accurate account of events
2) The traditional view accepts the Bible at "face-value" and believes in its miraculous events
2) The Modern view looks at the Bible with skepticism and does not accept it until other evidence is produced to verify it.
3) The canon is the books believed to be inspired and authoritative. It's important because it makes up the Bible
4) The epistles were written before the Gospels because the apostles felt that a written account of Jesus as the Messiah was not needed because Christ's return was just around the corner.
5) It took so long for a New Testament canon to be agreed on because there were so many letters to be found and decided on.
6) The significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that it gave use written documentation of the Bible 1,000 years older than our previous oldest copies. With that we could compare the accuracy of the copying process.
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