glorydaz said:
My goodness. I think man is busy out-smarting himself again.
I can say with all confidence that the Bible I hold in my hand is the very one God wants me to hold.
If the Lord wanted it to come in some circuitous manner, I'll thank Him for that.
I know we live in the last days, but I would have never imagined there would be such an all-out assault on the Word of God. It's served Christians quite well down through the ages, and suddenly we have people coming out of the woodwork to try and spread doubt among the believers. :bigfrown
Pardon me, but I have to ask, " Are these your true personal views? Occasionally non-believers will characachurize Christian views. If this is the case, I suggest moving it to Landover Baptist. My answer assumes that this IS your actual beliefs.
Have you studied any of the history of how the Biblical canon was assembled? A good first book is "Who wrote the New Testament" by Burton Mack, Professor of early Christianity at the School of Theology at Claremont College. Also, Bart Ehrman, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the U. of North Carolina. has written several introductory texts. If neither of these are available to you, read the Christian history section in any good Encyclopedia such as Britannica.
If you do your homework, you will see that the Bible you use has evolved considerably over the years. The genuine Pauline letters were the earliest written texts, sometime around the mid-first century. Next was the Mark gospel, around the year 70. The authors of the Matthew and Luke gospel (all the gospels were anonymous so we don't know the names of the authors) used Mark and another lost source called Q. Much of the rest of the canon involves works were written in the second century; 2 Timothy falls into this category.
The first Christian 'canon' was assembled in the second century by the Gnostic, Marcion. He used an early version of the Luke gospel and the genuine Pauline letters. In the fourth century, some Catholic Bishops took a vote on what eventually became the modern Bible. Rather, several church councils voted for conflicting lists, the contradictions of which took centuries more to resolve. Because of differences over the Apocrypha, there remains no agreement about which books are in the Christian Old Testament.
The actual works themselves have changed over time. Church Patriarch, Origen, complained about the many various versions of each of the gospels. Some of these changes came quite late. For example, the fourth century version of Mark ended at 16:8.
To blindly accept the present Bible as infallible is to put faith over reason.
