Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
Since the New Testament is exactly that -- New -- perhaps you meant the Old Testament. After all, how can one understand Christ's teachings if one doesn't understand the religious world of Christ, which was Judaism and what we call the Old Testament.
Sadly, if the standard were the New Testament, no one could truly ever be called educated based on your criterion because there are so many variations and interpretations of the New Testament, it is impossible to know which is truly the authentic word of God.
The New Testament is much like the child's game of telephone -- it depends who heard it, who wrote, and who interpreted it. Even the committee members who finally came to compromise on the King James version had to come to compromise. Seems to me that the word of God is not subject to compromise so that if interpretive compromises had to be made, they cannot be the word of God; they are the word of the interpreters.
Of course there is the belief, which has as much validity as any of those espoused by organized religion, that religion is simply the opiate of mankind.
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Wow.
I could not have put it better.
Presumably none of the group around Jesus ever kept diaries, so at what stage did the oral tradition become writing, and in that time-line how much of what was remembered is
really what happened. And then one has to consider the different interpretations placed onto available scrolls (etc) by individual popes, and one definitely wonders how much of the original can remain untouched. It may be the Word of God, but how many editors and sub-editors and copyists had their opportunities to adjust the story along the way!
A nice quote in a recent newspaper suggested the Bible is how one is expected to travel on the journey to Heaven (and Hell); whilst Science explains how they exist.
But no matter what any book of religion states, it is the
interpretation by groups/individuals that matters now.