I am writing my fifth book, which is a book about the Bible for people who want to know what the Bible says, but don’t want to have to read the whole thing. And in the introduction, I review how the Bible was put together. And when I did that, I began to wonder how we can know if what the scholars decided was “biblically valid” really is.
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The Tanakh was (supposedly) put together by Yeshua ben Sira (cir.180 BCE), and we also have the Septuagint (called the LXX, because there were 70 scholars who translated the Torah into Greek) which dates to sometime between the 2nd and 3rd Centuries, BCE in Alexandria, Egypt.
Some of the requirements were that the writing had to be in Hebrew, except for some Aramaic exceptions, it had to be sanctioned by usage in the Jewish community (such as the Megillah of Hadassah being accepted because it was read every Purim), the writing had to contain one of the great themes of Judaism, and to be in the Tanakh it had to be done before the time of Ezra because it was widely believed that after Ezra, there was no further spiritual inspiration coming from God.
The ones who created Christianity also had rules for what they found acceptable. To be included in the B’rit Chadasha (Good News, also used for the New Covenant), the writing had to be written by a prophet of God (interesting, since Judaism believed after Ezra there were no longer any prophets), the writer had to be authenticated by miracles, the book had to tell the truth about God without falsehood, it had to be able to transform lives, and it had to be accepted as God’s word by the ones who first heard it.
All of these requirements seem to be rather subjective, if you ask me.
Who is to know what these people talked about, what they looked at, what they knew or what socio-political pressures they were under when they decided, “OK- this is in, this is out.”?
Look at the Talmud- it is considered scripture by some factions within Judaism, but it is really full of mythology and superstitious drek. It has a lot of good things, such as commentary on the Torah, but in the end, it is a bunch of rabbis and scholars arguing about what God really meant, and how we should obey him.
And as for the New Covenant, 2/3 of it are letters from Shaul that aren’t really God-breathed or prophetic, but rather managerial instructions to the congregations he started who were having problems with maintaining their faith.
I did an entire study on the Epistles of Paul- here is a link to that study:
The Pauline Epistles: What They Really Are
The only scripture in the entire New Covenant is what the writers referenced from the Tanakh and except for the time Yeshua was transformed on the mountain, God doesn’t say a single word in the entire New Covenant. Every original writing in there comes from a human being.
So, again I ask you: who is to say who is right?
My answer is that the only totally verifiable word of God in the entire Bible is found in the Hebrew language Torah, and I justify that statement by the simple fact that each Torah is copied exactly from another Torah, even to the point of counting every letter on every scroll page, and that Moses didn’t write from a prophetic vision but took dictation directly from God. The Torah is the only place in the entire Bible where you will find the ultimate qualifier, which is:
And God said to Moses, “Tell the children of Israel that the Lord says….”
The next best thing is when a prophet tells us what he saw in a vision or what God said to him to relate to the people, but that might be somewhat in his own words. We can’t be sure.
For myself, when we know the entire Bible, and what we read in one part of the Bible can be validated by the same thing being said in another part of the Bible (this is called Hermeneutics), then I feel confident that it is something that is correctly teaching me about God or Messiah.
To finish this diatribe of mine, I do not want to dissuade anyone from believing what they read in the Bible, but to question it, to test it, and to pray for God to give you discernment and understanding through the Ruach HaKodesh, which is the Holy Spirit. Never be afraid to test what you believe in, because the truth will always win out.
Oh, I should mention that you will not be able to utilize the Ruach unless you have accepted Yeshua as the Messiah God promised to send and asked for the indwelling of God’s spirit.
That’s it for today, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!
