Scripture is not historically relative

Submitted by Peter Herz (United States), Jun 6, 2008 at 16:29

God, as maker and ruler of heaven and earth, controls what happens in history. His giving us His Word through prophets and apostles over the course of thousands of years between Moses and the apostles of Christ is one of the things that underscores this.

Further, the unchanging character of the Old and New Testaments works against the secularist lie that the Bible is simply the product of men as well as the Muslim charge that it has been corrupted. Christians and Jews did not cooperate in ancient times, yet have always wrangled over the same Old Testament. Different Christian sects have always wrangled over the same New Testament. If, as the likes of Dan Brown and the 19th and 20th century betrayers of the Protestant churches in the German universities charge, that clerics changed the Word to suit their purposes, how come centuries of hierarchically controlled churches failed to excise the plural bishops at the beginning of the Letter to the Philippians when it challenges their whole authority structure (and would anyone miss two Greek letters)?

We Christian fundamentalists may not, as charged, hold that the Bible was written once and for all in heaven, bound in Morocco goatskin, and thrown out the window to someone waiting to catch it below, but we do confess that holy men wrote as moved by the Spirit of God (II Peter 1:21). And, as for revisions, the ones of which I am aware are those necessitated by the changes in the languages into which the Scriptures are translated, not revisions of the urtexten themselves.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".