few questions

Wook

-might be a silly question but who wrote the original bible ?
-do you still try to uphold the ten comandments ?
- several types of religion speak about the same god, just use different aproaches, would that not make you all equal ?
-i see a lot of people running around with crucifixes around the necks and yet i still have to see them behaving like a follower...any opinions on visible signs of religion ?
-do believers in christianity also seek knowledge in different religions ?

Saruman

I try to uphold (the ones not relating to God himself) but im not considering myself a Christian!! They are just some good rules to try and live by to me.

Kambika

Well to the first question I can say, the bible includes 66 books, which is the New Testament and the Old Testament. The Old Testament is basically about the time before Jesus Christ and the New one the time afterwards. Its written by over 40 different people during a time period of 2000 years, some of them were "eyewitnesses", some wrote the stories down that they heard from other people. The writers of the bible come from very different social structures, for example Salomo was naturalist and poet, Amos a herder, Lukas was a doctor, Daniel statesman, and Lukas and Johannes fishermen.
If you wanna read the whole story go to http://www.bibleserver.com

Wook

but what made them form a collective and write a book together ? or was this just accidental that several people wrote about the same subject ?

even now if you would try to organize a group to write about a religion, it would be extremely hard.

Manach

Off the cuff reply
1 - Bible written by various people,who were divinely inspired. The various books (72 in total) were then collated into the Bible by the Church in the early 4/5 th Century.

2 - Try to, which is a bit difficult cause I keep getting them mixed up.

3 - IMHO, each group has it's own relationship with God, emphasising differing traditions.

4 - Well my cube at work is plastered with printouts of El Greco so I'm not one to cast any stones.

5 - It's alway interesting to see how other religions get on. Looking at the moment at a book on Bible commentaries by Alan Dershowitz "The Genesis of Justice." How biblical traditional is the basis for Western legal practice.

jesus_freak

Originally posted by Wook
-might be a silly question but who wrote the original bible ?

The old testament (which is the Bible Jesus read) is a collection of a lot of different kinds of books. Some of them are written versions of oral tradition, some of them are records of kings of the state, some are poetry, some prophesy.

The new testament consists of four gospels (eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life), one book called "Acts" or "Acts of the Apostles" (written by Luke, one of the gospel writers) which is an account of the very early Church, (about) 21 letters from various people to various people (though most of them are from Paul to various churches) and a prophetic book about the last times.

Originally posted by Wook
-do you still try to uphold the ten comandments ?

I try to act the way God wants me to act. The ten commandments are some very specific cases of how God wants me to act, so yes, I do try to uphold them. But as I'll expand later, I fail sometimes.

Originally posted by Wook
- several types of religion speak about the same god, just use different aproaches, would that not make you all equal ?

There is no religion except Christianity which speaks correctly of our God. The Jews have an incomplete picture of Him, and the muslims have a skewed picture of Him.

Originally posted by Wook
-i see a lot of people running around with crucifixes around the necks and yet i still have to see them behaving like a follower...any opinions on visible signs of religion ?

It is part of my responsibility as a Christian to appear to act in a Christian way to others. Just like all my other responsibilities, I fail. All the time. But when I do, I repent, pick myself up, brush myself off, and ask God to help me try again. One of the most compelling aspects of Christianity is that it can explain the human condition.

We are created in the image of God, so we have the potential for incredible good. But we are fallen, so we fail.

Originally posted by Wook
-do believers in christianity also seek knowledge in different religions ?

As an individual, I seek knowledge everywhere. But I believe Christianity to be true, so where other religions disagree with Christianity I believe them to be wrong.

JF

Wook

There is no religion except Christianity which speaks correctly of our God. The Jews have an incomplete picture of Him, and the muslims have a skewed picture of Him.

well the strange thing is that several cultures have 'a' god and sometimes they do look alike a lot.
And would they not say the same thing about christians ?
and even among the christians theyre several seperate groups not agreeing with each other on how to follow the path, would that not make jews and muslims as 'correct' as anyone else, who are following christianity ?

how do you repent ?

sanvean

Originally posted by Wook
but what made them form a collective and write a book together ?

Essentially, it depended on who was in power at the time (power of either the state or the religion, or both). A lot of Biblical scholars believe that there was a 'Yahweh Alone' Party (Yahweh being the best way of pronouncing the Jewish word for God) which emerged and began to reconstruct the Bible to fit their agenda (that is: destroy the 'cult' of Asherah - Yahweh's consort, and also Baal, the Caananite God, both very powerful and popular deities at the time). You can see evidence throughout the Bible of the denegration of these deities in favour of the War God, Yahweh. Another bit of the Bible supporting this hypothesis would be the 'find' of the secret book of the Law (can't remember where in the Bible this happens, maybe Ezra) which conforms to the Monotheistic vision of the priests. But whether or not you believe in this hypothesis, it doesn't matter: it wasn't all that surprising that there came to be a collective work, but this collective work was only made authoritative in the 3rd or 4th century AD (the Jewish canon, that is).

As for how the Christian Bible retained many of the Hebrew scriptures, well it's not surprising really as Jesus, the leader of the movement, was a Jew, and was therefore highly influenced by the Jewish theology, as were the founders of the Christian Church (such that it was).

There is no religion except Christianity which speaks correctly of our God. The Jews have an incomplete picture of Him, and the muslims have a skewed picture of Him.

Or you could put it a slightly different way: The Jews and the Muslims see us as worshiping a prophet (a false one, according to the Jews, while the second highest one according to Islam). The problem of salvation as interpreted by Jesus Freak (very apt name) gives rise to a lot of problems: if Christianity is the only correct way of intrepreting the nature of Christ, and if therefore salvation is only obtained through explicit knowledge of Christ, then are the 'infidels' damned? I asked this question before, somewhere else in this forum.