AFTER I HAD WRITTEN THIS, I WAS NOTIFIED THAT IT WAS TOO LONG. THE 8676 CHARACTERS HAD TO BE TRIMMED TO 6000. I THINK WHAT I WROTE IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANT, SO I’LL PUT IT DOWN AS PART I, AND PART II.
PART I
I read with interest ALL the responses my very first post to this forum provoked. I didn’t intend to cause such a flurry of activity, but I was somewhat naïve about how or what to say when introducing myself for the first time.
I was educated at private preparatory schools in suburban Philadelphia, and the only “Catholic” education I had, was as an undergraduate at Villanova. I was a Latin scholar, having studied the ''dead" language between the ages of 8 and 18. While an undergraduate I was required, as a Catholic, to take only 3 semesters of Theology for my degree requirement.
“Sola Scriptura” is literally translated from the Latin to English as: “The sole source of Scripture is the Bible.”
You can jockey the words around like; “The Bible’s sole source is scripture,” or other such mixing up of the words. Don’t forget that the English language has more than a half million (500,000) words more in it’s dictionaries than any other language. The closest languages that come anywhere near English for the actual number of words are; French and German.
Before I go on to my next point, I want to preface that by saying to you: “Have you ever head a verbal rumor, then about 6 months later heard the same rumor again, but this time it has been embellished?” Sure, we all have.
We consider that the first 5 books of the Bible (The Pentateuch) were attributed to Moses. But when were the books of the Bible actually written down on paper? According to recent finds and what Historians have been saying all along, the Bible was first actually written down when the Israelites were taken into captivity and taken as prisoners to Babylon. While prisoners of King Nebuchadnezzar II, the king set the Scribes of the Isralites to work putting down onto paper the oral traditions that had been nothing more than that, oral traditions, since the time of Moses.
Just like the Greek poet Homer, whose poems the Illiad and the Odyssey were oral poems handed down from one generation to another, the same thing held true with the scriptures of the Hebrews. No where can ANY written document be found that is older than c. 550 BC. 605 BC was the year that King of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar II came to power. His reign was notable for his undertaking of the restoration of Babylon, which became one of the wonders of the world. In 586 BC he marched on the Kingdom of Judah and destroyed the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Many hostages were subsequently removed to forced labour in Babylon.
It was during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II that he had the scribes of the captured Hebrews put down on paper their oral traditions, beliefs, and their sacred scripture.
Well just like Homer’s poems, the oral traditions that went onto become the Pentateuch were finally written down. In the case of the Israelites, the time between Moses, who lived c.1500-1300 BC and the time of the Babylonian captivity in 586 BC, was anywhere between 900 to 700 years of nothing but oral stories being handed down from one generation to another. There HAD to have been some embellishments! It is NOT possible that something like the Pentateuch was handed down verbatim for 800 years intact.
Going on that premise, and the story that the Books of the Bible (from where we get our Scripture [Scriptura] from ), were attributed to men (Human beings) on the inspired word of God. I will go on to point out some simple stories and embellishments.
As I said from the start I am NO Biblical Scholar. I only wished I had taken more classes in Theology. But as a practical individual, educated in the Liberal Arts (my undergraduate degree in the Humanities) I have to believe that most of the historical books of the Old Testament, by the time they were finally put down on paper had been embellished over the centuries since the stories were first told.
For Example: How do you tell a child, around the time of 1,000 BC, the reason that people speak many, many different languages. The Biblical story is told that during the building of the Tower of Babel God came down and saw that a Tower was being built, and he said:
“If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do. Let us go down and therefore confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says.” (Genesis, Chapter 11, vers. 6-7)
Now really, be practical. To a child asking a simple question like; “Why do people speak different languages?” That to me, (the above verse from Genesis) is a very simplistic way of mixing an answer that a child will understand with religious beliefs.
I don’t want to debunk the Old Testament, but many, very many, times in the Old Testament a very, very simplistic answer was given to a child like question. Don’t forget that at the time of Moses to, probably, the middle of the 17th century AD, the vast majority of people on the earth were illiterate, uneducated, poor Farmers and Shepard’s. Especially around the areas of the Middle East and the Holy Land.
My simple answer to people believing the first book of Genesis about the world and the universe being created in six days can be debunked by just reading the play “Inherit the Wind” but I don’t want to talk about that now.
But a better reason that God works on his own time is from Psalm 90. In Psalm 90, a prayer of Moses, he (Moses) states that “A thousand years in your (God’s) eyes are merely a yesterday to us.” (Psalm 90, I, 4)
END OF PART I, GO ON TO PART II
All joking aside, you are closer to the Tiber than I was on my journey.