Friday, March 10, 2006

Nabeel's questions

Nabeel asked a number of questions about the development of the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Books have been written on this subject. I will attempt to answer each of the questions briefly, Nabeel, but first I have some preliminary comments.

First, these questions are difficult to answer because different audiences have different thoughts and presuppositions in mind when they ask these questions. A Muslim has different concerns in mind than a Western secularist than a Zen Buddhist. Thus, my plan is to answer the questions you have asked in a very brief manner, and then we can continue the conversation on these matters through the comment section on this post or other posts in the future.

What is the Old Testament and the New Testament?

The Old Testament is also referred to as the Hebrew Scriptures....and tells the story of the people of God's (the Hebrews) journey with God before Christ comes.

The New Testament tells the story of Christ and the early church.

Who wrote the Old and the New Testaments?

Christians beleive that God inspired human authors to write the Bible in their own language, in their own way of speaking and thinking with his guidance.

Old Testament:

Most of the Pentateuch is believed to be written by Moses (you know except for the part where Moses dies).
Most of the rest of the works bear their author's names

New Testament:

Mostly written by apostles or others who knew and interacted with Jesus within 30-50 years after his death.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

one difficulty aobut using the term Hebrew scriptures is what to do with the apocrypha. That isn't in the protestant Bibles but was in the KJV early on. and for some is still considered scripture - OT written in Greek.

rubyslipperlady said...

amazinly concise.

Friar Tuck said...

Actually...Lorna, I would disagree. The council of Jamnia declared that the Apocrypha was not cannonical in AD 90.

This is why Luther eliminates the Apocrypha in the reformation...they were not historic Jewish Scripture, and even in Catholic circles dont usually carry the weight of other portions of Scripture

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