The Greek word for “inspired” could be literally translated “God-breathed.” God has intended and inspired every word of Scripture. He is the primary author of the Bible. And yet, God has used human authors as the agents through which He has written the Bible.
Scholars now believe that the stories that would become the Bible were disseminated by word of mouth across the centuries, in the form of oral tales and poetry – perhaps as a means of forging a collective identity among the tribes of Israel. Eventually, these stories were collated and written down.
The biblical basis for this clarity is derived from two sources. First, the words of Scripture are self-attesting because they claim to be from God (2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:20-21). Second, the Holy Spirit's dynamic power applies the truth of Scripture, resulting in a confident assurance in the Word itself (1 Cor 2:4-16).
“If God wished to give His people a series of letters like Paul's, He prepared a Paul to write them, and the Paul He brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write just such letters” (The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 1948, p.
According to tradition, Moses was divinely directed to write down foundational events in the history of the world: the creation of humans, the worldwide flood, the laws as they were handed down at Mt. Sinai, and the cycle of Israel's enslavement and liberation from Egypt.
The Bible is the word of God
The Bible is a collection of sacred books written by ancient prophets and historians. These authors recorded the relationship between God and His people for over 4,000 years. Their inspired words are what we know today as the Holy Bible.
Christians believe the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God because Jesus validates it. Jesus confirms that God has chosen the written, recorded word as his primary means of communicating his thoughts and his will to mankind. Christ clearly puts his stamp of approval on the Old Testament.
Bible #1. The oldest surviving full text of the New Testament is the beautifully written Codex Sinaiticus, which was “discovered” at the St Catherine monastery at the base of Mt Sinai in Egypt in the 1840s and 1850s. Dating from circa 325-360 CE, it is not known where it was scribed – perhaps Rome or Egypt.
We have copies of this that were written before Jesus' birth, so we know the prophecy existed before his life and the meaning hasn't been changed. It uncannily predicts what happened to Jesus, and clearly explains why he died – so that we could be declared righteous despite our sins and mistakes.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
Starting around the 7th century B.C., different groups, or schools, of authors wrote them down at different times, before they were at some point (probably during the first century B.C.) combined into the single, multi-layered work we know today.
Written over the course of almost a century after Jesus' death, the four gospels of the New Testament, though they tell the same story, reflect very different ideas and concerns. A period of forty years separates the death of Jesus from the writing of the first gospel.
The final redaction and canonization of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) most likely took place during the Babylonian Exile (6th–5th century BCE). The entire Hebrew Bible was complete by about 100 CE. The books of the New Testament were written in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.
Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, adam is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as "mankind".
The Confession provided the rationale for the exclusion: 'The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings' (1.3).
Traditional Jewish exegesis such as Midrash says that Adam spoke the Hebrew language because the names he gives Eve – Isha and Chava – only make sense in Hebrew. By contrast, Kabbalism assumed an "eternal Torah" which was not identical to the Torah written in Hebrew.
Of course, Jesus was a Jew. He was born of a Jewish mother, in Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates, colleagues, disciples, all of them were Jews. He regularly worshipped in Jewish communal worship, what we call synagogues.
The Bible's Old Testament is very similar to the Hebrew Bible, which has origins in the ancient religion of Judaism. The exact beginnings of the Jewish religion are unknown, but the first known mention of Israel is an Egyptian inscription from the 13th century B.C.
The Bible as a living Word of God, came by divine inspiration, as attested to by Apostle Peter as he writes, “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20-12) ...
The Bible is used by Christians to give them guidance about how they can live their their lives in the way God would want them to. There is guidance in the Bible on many areas of life and Christians will turn to this advice when they are faced with a dilemma. Some Christians may use a lectionary .
The New American Standard Bible is a literal translation from the original texts, well suited to study because of its accurate rendering of the source texts. It follows the style of the King James Version but uses modern English for words that have fallen out of use or changed their meanings.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.