Julian

Honestly, I have no idea what the answers to those questions might be and they are probably not BC&H material. I suggest that you try those questions in GRD where you might find some christians who knows this or, better yet, some ex-christians who might help you out.

I can tell you that we have some christians here who know all this stuff and still believe. *shrug* I will never understand it, but some of them are very knowledgeable and honest about church history.

Try GRD with those questions.

Julian

Amaleq13

I'm pretty sure that ministers and priests learn most of this in seminary.

No need to muddle the pretty little heads of the congregation with information, though. That ain't why they go to church.

Barefoot Bree

My impression is that most practicing lay Christians do not know anything about the history of their bible. They concentrate on reading what is within it, not reading about how it came to be. (If they even read it - many just listen to the preacher on Sunday and forget about it the rest of the week. I'm a lot more familiar with this kind of lazy Christian than the fundamentalist kind.)

The Carrier link is going to take me some time to get through. In the meantime, a related question:

I understand that there are currently a few books that appear in the standard Roman Catholic bible, but not in the mainstream Protestant version - or I may have that backwards. Which books are those again, and which version has them?

And I still wish you guys would make this thread a sticky. It's pure gold for us newbies.

Julian

The new testaments are identical in both.

At first the christians used one version of the OT (the LXX or septuagint) which was revised in 100CE to exclude some books that were considered recent. The protestant reformers in the 1500s decided to follow the Jewish canon and drop the books and put them in the Apocrypha section which was later dropped.

The catholic bible includes 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Baruch, Tobit, Judith, The Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), some additions to Esther, as well as some bits of Daniel namely Susanna and Bel and the Dragon.

Orthodox (Eastern) OTs also include 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and 3 Maccabees.

These lists are roughly correct but I have seen contradictory lists. Here is a good Wiki entry that shows them side by side. Very handy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_the_Bible

Julian

Doug Shaver

I'm not sure what you mean by "believing Christians." If you are referring to Christians who believe the Bible to be inerrant, the majority know little and care less about its true origins.

The minority, who are aware of what mainstream scholarship has to say on the subject, say that mainstream scholars are just wrong, at least insofar as their conclusions cast any doubt on the Bible's authority. According to them, the church leaders during the early centuries did not decided what was canonical, they simply recognized it. I have not yet heard any apologist for inerrancy claim that they were divinely inspired. The apologists instead just assume that (a) the documents that were eventually canonized were all written during the first century, (b) the Christians of the late first century and thereafter believed what today's inerrantists believe about those documents, (c) they had good reason to believe it, and (d) their knowledge of the documents' origins was reliably passed on to all succeeding generations of Christians.

Didymus

I'd like to add to Julian's remarks.

Mythicists don't agree on everything.

Not all mythicists think Paul believed Jesus to have existed only in a spiritual realm. Some of us think Paul thought of Jesus as an obscure god/man who did live on earth, but at some unknown time in the misty past.

On the other hand, the Jesus myths transcribed in Q and Mark were an amalgam of folkloric tales about various wandering teacher/philosophers, miracle workers and faith healers, common figures in first-century Judea. Some of the tales might have been based on real events, but many of the "messages" had philosophic origins in the Cynic and Stoic schools of Greek philosophy. It should be kept in mind that the New Testament was written by Hellenized Jews in koine - everyday - Greek. And that those authors quoted from a Greek translation of Hebrew scripture. So they were familiar both with pagan myths and with Judaism.

The Passion sequence stems from Paul's notion of a crucified and risen savior. It owes virtually everything to the Old Testament, called the Tenakh by Jews. Just about every sequence in the Passion can be traced to either Isaiah or Psalms, so, in the view of mythicists, it's highly likely that it was based on those sources rather than on historical events.

Didymus

triffidfood

Hmm, very interesting & helpful topic!

It's nice to read something on here that doesn't require about 12 different windows (wikipedia, Bible gateway, Int. Infidels search engine, samaritans.org, etc) open simultaneously for cross reference, or unhealthy amounts of black coffee (red wine when it gets really desperate ) to get you through. Keep up the good work guys!.......

triffidfood

I'd like to add a question too if I may....

I found a reference elsewhere (on another topic at IIDB) to the "Didache", apparently an early Christian writing, which people seem to attach varying degrees of importance to & place varying amounts of emphasis on (it seems anyway, from searching on Google & reading several sites linked to from there).

Please could someone give some sort of overview on the Didache, specifically in terms of how it's viewed by different camps ~ i.e. by Christian fundamentialists, Christian or secular researchers, 'Jesus Myth' subscribers, etc.

There doesn't seem to be much agreement about the date of the Didache, or even really about its significance, so please could someone attempt some sort of overview here (Didache for Dummies!) ... thanks.

Amaleq13

IMO, that's too big a question to be considered "basic" but Peter Kirby's website provides a good overview:

Didache

Dean Anderson

Here's a question I see a lot, but don't know enough to be able to answer it myself in sufficient detail...

What's the difference between (and the relationship between) the LXX, the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the Masoretic Text?

Which of them are the oldest? Which are the most "reliable"?

What parts of the Bible do they each contain?

Which modern English Bible translations are translated from which of the above?