Do You REALLY Know What the Bible Is?

By Ed Davidson
What, exactly, is your Bible?
On what, exactly, are you placing your hope of eternal life and forgiveness of sins? Ask yourself these questions and make yourself give you a clear answer!!
The following article contains thoughts that have helped others in the past to grasp the seriousness of this issue, and get their thinking sorted out.
You are currently in one of two positions, whether you realise it or not ;-

1. you have a book (or books) that you call your "Bible", but you don’t actually believe every word in it (them), or,

2. you have a book that you call your Bible and you do really and truly and completely believe every word in that book.

The authority for the Christian church is the Bible.The Christian believes what he believes because the Bible says so.
E.g. 1 - "the Creator visited the earth in a man’s body, as a Jewish carpenter". How bizarre, yet the Christian believes it because his Bible says so.
E.g. 2 - "that carpenter walked on water and made the waves and winds to calm down". A big call, but again, the Christian believes it because the Bible says it happened.
E.g. 3 - "that same carpenter raised dead bodies and gave sight back to blind people etc " - and once again, the Christian believes such startling and amazing things just because the Bible says they happened.
Eg. 4 - "that carpenter was born of a virgin", - something which, at the most, only TWO witnesses on the face of the earth could even claim to have knowledge of, yet the Christian believes such an astounding and unnatural event simply because his "Bible" says it is true!

Now if the Bible is a divine revelation in writing, then it is the most rational thing to do to believe such hard-to-believe, hard-to-prove things as those four examples given above, as well as believe the hundreds of other equally hard-to-believe things the Bible talks about.
If the Bible is really God’s written revelation then of course you would believe it, and study it, and base your actions on it, to the best of your ability.

But what, exactly, is "the Bible"?!

There are hundreds of different versions of the Christian Bible available, with different but similar titles, all claiming that they are the "Bible" or the "Holy Scriptures" or the "Word of God", but, the wording is different in each one.
When I ask the readers/owners of one of those versions this question - "Is that book you have there REALLY the Bible?" they tell me that it is only a TRANSLATION of "the Bible".
When I ask them, "OK then, can I get the REAL Bible, the one that your one is translated from?" then the conversation goes something like this ; -"Oh, you'll have to go the originals, the Greek New Testament".
"OK then, where can I get that?"
"Well, there are many different ones of those too"!
"OK, so which one is the REAL one?"
"Well, the scholars are still working on getting back to the original Bible".
"So where is the actual ORIGINAL Bible then?"
"The ORIGINAL Bible is lost, but the scholars are working on deciding exactly what it originally said. They are nearly there, and nothing important is affected anyway".
"But , if they dont have the actual original Bible then how will they know what it originally said?"
How will they know whether they are getting closer or whether they are getting further away if they don’t know what the original words were anyway?"
Aren’t they just guessing or hoping?
And if you don’t have the "originals" how do you even know what LANGUAGE the original words were in?
Would the eternal God give us such an important written record of his words and his will and his commandments and his purposes then go and LOSE it?
Does that make sense to you??
Why would he do that?
And, on top of that, then tell us not to ADD anything to his words, and not to take away anything from his words, and tell us to live by every word , when we cant even FIND them all?
Do you really believe he would do that?

ASK yourself these questions, and get the answers!

More on this matter in the next issue of the NZ Beacon, Lord willing.