by Dwight Jeffress, Updated Jul 1, 2019
"Upon many shoulders, I stand…
Upon the labors of those who came before me, do I prosper…
All knowledge and wisdom I have accumulated, is from those who worked tirelessly before me." (A quote from my own journal, influenced by comments and writings of others...)
It is so important to read the Bible in its context... so many believers (including myself) have taken snippets just one or two verses and built entire life assertions on them. Those among unbeliever's criticize the Bible as being irrelevant and untrustworthy, yet not many (of both camps) can truly and honestly say they have read every page. And I don't mean just read it, read it and understand what its saying, its context (in terms of cultures, history, geography, psychology and sociology). I have read the Bible two times all the way through. I have listened to it much more, Old Testament, 3 times, on my fourth... New Testament, over 30 times... and I am still encountering and learning new things that I feel God has revealed to me, things that others who have studied it through the centuries had already discovered before. Mix in then, my obsession with ancient history, not only Greco-Roman, but also Near Eastern, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and their mythology of those civilizations... a clearer picture begins to be seen. I believe many do not realize when they say that the Bible cannot be trusted and is irrelevant... really, they may not know what they are talking about, because they really haven't studied it... also its a slam to centuries of scholars who have devoted their lives to studying it (it would be like slamming NASA and saying they don't know anything about science). Considering that the Bible is just one piece of the plethora of ancient writings we have today (including historical, religious and literature)... it could also be considered a slam to the researchers through the centuries and ancient historians of many books that I have on my shelf... such as the writings of Julius Caeser, Tacitus, Polybius, Herodotus, Josephus, Livy, Arrian, and I really could go on and on. These books are used today in universities all across the world, along with what we have learned through archaeology to gain a picture of the ancient world. Simply because the Bible in the popular mindset falls in line with religious studies, its historical merits are often ignored by the mainstream. It is too used by scholars alongside secular manuscripts and literature to build a picture of what we know about the ancient world. So in closing maybe what is revealed within its pages has something to say about life, about ourselves and about a divine being who wants to have a relationship with us... in the end maybe it is not so irrelevant or untrustworthy.
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