The World of the bible

Nowadays, we are full of different customs on all over the world. We practice different kinds of stuff and always try to have a good time while practicing them. Some of the customs that are practiced all over the world are Christmas, the New Year, Mother´s day, Father´s day, etc. We always practice these things with joy, but I believe that there is one thing that the majority of us don’t pay attention to. It is that with these kinds of things we have always happiness, but in some of the cases we don’t know what the real meaning of these things is; we don’t try to find out when, how, or where they were firs celebrated. Also, some of us don’t know who the first people in celebrating them were or why these things are celebrated. These kinds of questions called my attention because I have always wondered something that I believe is very important for all of us to realize. It is about the catholic religion. I believe that it is something that almost the entire world practices, but few know about its meaning and mysteries. Nowadays, some people read the bible almost every single day. Also, they go to mass at least one or two days per week to hear the word of the lord and pray almost every day. Some of these people believe that they are good Christians because they have the custom of doing those kinds of things. But, do all of them even know what the word Christian means? I am sure that I would go one day to mass to ask all people what the word Christian means and the majority of them would not know. I believe that all Catholics should have knowledge about the world of the bible, its secrets and history. I have always wondered these kinds of things, and that is why I would like to explain and talk about the world of the bible. Here, my topic is that I would like to explain

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why the bible was written; I want to show what the real purpose of writing the bible is, how it was established or what the writers did in order to write it.
The world of the bible is very interesting, but at the same time very hard to explain. I am going to make a very big effort, so that all readers can understand what I am trying to explain here. As you can see, to talk about the bible is to talk about many and many years of work and history; it is like trying to solve a very hard puzzle. But, I would like to make it very easy to understand by talking very carefully about its structure, its etymology, bibliography, etc. I am going to explain the most important points about the old and the New Testament. In my opinion, I believe that almost everybody knows it that there are old and New Testament. But, do you know how they were written, do you know who wrote them, or do you know the real meaning of both of them. I think that most of these questions may be tricky, but I am going to try to explain all of them. I know that all readers will enjoy this reading; the world and mystery of the bible may be very interesting. So, are you ready? Let’s talk about the most important things about the world of the bible.
First of all, I would say that scriptures are around us. God let the writers fulfill a book that would guide us to him and now these writings may be present in our daily lives. For example, we quote the bible when we say things like “apple of your eye, a fleshpot, or a painted woman”. It means that sometimes we may mention some of the scriptures without realizing that we are really doing it. Who knows, maybe it could a God´s will that

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we quote the sacred scriptures in our daily lives. Don’t you believe it is something strange? Well, for me it is, and who knows what other mysteries are behind the bible.
There is another mystery of the bible that some people may believe that it is one of the strangest. It is that more than three fourths of the bible is identical with Jews scriptures, and they were written before Jesus was born. All these are books that never mentioned Jesus. So, if by that time people were expecting the coming of Christ, why is it that the bible don’t even mention the name of Jesus once? It is true that there is mentioned the coming of the messiah but for some reason, some people may argue that the coming of the Christ was not clearly mentioned in the Old Testament. For me, it may be a matter of how we interpret the bible since it is not just a matter of reading the scriptures, but to try to figure out its real meaning. For example, there is one question that the majority of the Christians argue: were all these books written before the coming of Jesus Jewish scriptures or was it the Old Testament? Again, here interpretation may play a very important part. According to Philo, “the answer to this question is very simple: it is all a matter of interpretation, and we can also find the right interpretation of the bible by allegory”. It means that interpretation may be the key to find the real meaning of the bible. However, how do we know that we are interpreting the bible in the right way? The ones that may have known the right answer to this question were the writers of the bible. According to the catholic religion, “the writers of the bible were inspired by the Holy Spirit”. Does it mean that they could interpret what they were writing just because they were being inspired by the Holy Spirit? So, what about us? How can we know that we are
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giving the real meaning to the bible? I say this because according to believers, “sometimes, it is very hard to understand what the Holy Spirit is trying to teach us”. Does it mean that we have to find the key that can lead us to understand the bible? If it so where can we find that key? Where can we find the truth of the bible? Some people believe that the key to understand the scriptures is Jesus himself. It could be that through Jesus we may find the real meaning of the bible since he as the holy spirit are part of the trinity, and as I have just said the holy spirit is what inspired the writers when it comes to developing and organizing the ideas of the bible. Also, if we have faith in Jesus Christ, he may help us to understand the world of the bible since we must first have faith in the creator of all things (including scriptures) so that then we may want to find a real meaning to the sacred scriptures.
Another important thing that we should know about the scriptures is that without reading the New Testament, we can not be able to understand the Old Testament. Why is it? Well, it is because the New Testament was made to fulfill the old one. If we don’t read the New Testament, we would find the old testament as a very, very hard thing to understand. There was one time when a man called Marcion read the Old Testament and misunderstood it. He read a passage where this God (Jesus) was looking for Adam and was asking “hey where are you?” Marcion believed that the Old Testament did not have any sense since he thought that God was so stupid. In this case, he was interpreting the Old testament in a literally way. It means that he just analyzed what was written, but did not find the way to interpret it in the right way. However, if he had had the New Testament,
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he would have found what the real meanings of those passages were. Just as Irenaeus believes, the bible is like many jewels that have to be arranged; we just have to find the way to join them together so that we may find the answer to that puzzle. Nevertheless, he also believes that we should apply the rule of faith as the norm for interpreting the scriptures correctly. But, what is the rule of faith? It is just the meaning that we give to scriptures, but it also encourages that we should trust everything that is written. According to Irenaeus, “The heart of the rule of faith is belief in one God who is the father, son, and spirit, and the incarnation of the son of God to deliver us from sin”. Again, it is all a matter of trusting in all things that are related to Christ (God), and giving our hearts because the rule of faith should always be in our hearts. On the other hand, there are other explanations of how we can find the real meaning of scriptures. According to Origen, in order to find the real meaning of the gospel we have to look for something beyond the words. What he means by this is that words are not enough to understand the real meaning of the gospel; we have to look for something else in order to figure out what the scriptures really want to say. However, Theodore did not think in the same way as Origen; for Theodore, the real meaning of the scriptures is found within the words. It means that for him, we don’t have to look for something else than what is written in the scriptures. For him, the meaning of scriptures is found in the words; we just have to try to find the real meaning of what is written, or what the real meaning that writers gave to scriptures is.

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However, in order to achieve the New Testament, there had to be something that would fulfill it so that all prophesies from the old one would be fulfilled. Of course, what fulfills the Old Testament is Jesus himself. All prophesies that the prophets made are fulfilled in Christ, and that is one of the reasons why there emerged a new testament. Everything is perfect in the New Testament as some particular things show us. For example, seven was the number of perfection, and there were seven Catholic Epistles, and twice seven Pauline letters. There is also another good example which shows us how Christ fulfills the Old Testament. It is because one thing that called my attention was how Barnabas interprets this idea: Abraham circumcised 318 members of his household. Here Barnabas believes that it was really making a prophecy of Christ since for the Greek number, 18 is the first two letters of the name Jesus, and 300 is the letter tau (T), a picture of the cross. Again, it may not be a coincidence that Jesus Christ really came to achieve all prophesies. Since things like those were so perfect according to the New Testament, then it means that all prophesies made in the old Testament were perfectly fulfilled through Jesus Christ, so that the books of the bible could make sense. Nevertheless, there may be some scriptures that can be understood as types. For example, Jonah´s three days in the belly of a whale is a type of Christ three days in the tomb, and Noah´s salvation through the water is a type of baptism. Here, it scriptures show us that Jesus really had a purpose when these kinds of things happened during the Old Testament. And again, it shows us that all things that happened in the Old Testament really had a relationship with all things that happened in the New Testament.
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We can distinguish three stages in the development of the gospels: oral tradition, the composition of the gospels, and the acceptance of the four gospels as scripture. These three stages played a very important part in order to establish the bible. For example, Oral tradition was speaking and listening before they started to write it. It means that it was just everything that the prophets and close followers of God were telling to the other people. After that, there is where the other two stages start to arrange the gospel. Before we continue talking about the gospel, I believe that there is one thing that I think is very important to know, and it is the meaning of “canon”. Canon is the sacred books that were chosen by the authority of the church. All the books which are part of the New Testament are called the canon. The New Testament is a collection of 27 books, and all of them vary in lengths. Most of these books were written between A.D. 50 and 100, in the second half of the first century. All of them fall into several clear groups, and there are four gospels, or rather one gospel according to four authors: Mathew, Mark, Luke and John. There is a story which says that every apostles´ letters were collected, rearranged and summarized by other people. But in fact all the important ideas and thoughts were written by four authors. Sometimes, scriptures may be a very hard thing to understand since four authors wrote them, and they had different kinds of writings and different thoughts. However, one time, there was one person called Marcion (who established the first known canon of the New Testament) who only used Luke’s gospel because he believed that these four gospels sometimes differed, and in some cases contradicted each other. I believe that it is

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true that it was hard to understand the gospel, but again I believe that it was just a matter of how people interpreted it.
The gospel can also be hard to understand because there have been many of them, and also people have given different kinds of meanings to the word “gospel”. One clear example is the Septuagint. The Septuagint is a translation of the Hebrew canon into Greek. When writers translated it, they also took some Greek culture. For this reason, it may have become a very hard thing to understand since the Hebrew culture was different than the Greek one. For example, the interpretation of some words may have changed, and sometimes the authors may have wanted to give another meaning to some words since they could not translate some of them in the right way. However, I believe that it was necessary to do that since in the Septuagint is where the scriptures start to be written for all cultures and languages, so that it was not a waste of time.
Finally, all these I have been discussing can be called as one specific phrase. “The authority of the bible”. We may find the definition of this word as something or somebody that tells us “do this and do that” and we have to do it as we are told to. The authority of the bible does not mean that because it is not a power. It does not mean that way because it is our will to believe in the bible; there is not somebody who is always telling us “you have to believe in what the gospel says”. It is not that way because we are the ones who choose whether we want to believe in the scriptures or not.

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In conclusion, all these discussion has been very interesting. One of the things that called my attention is how things like the type of baptism really fulfilled the Old Testament. The Old Testament is a very hard thing to understand. However, by finding the real key or the right way, we may find its real meaning. The New Testament is just one gospel, but according to four writers. Again, there may be a little confusion since four people work on this gospel, but in my opinion just as Irenaeus thought we just have to use the rule of faith in order to figure out its meaning.
These are just some of the most interesting points of the bible, but I am very sure that there are more beyond it.