The Word: How the Bible Came About
I thought I would post this PowerPoint presentation I used last night in a talk I gave as part of a trilogy of talks about the Bible at a UCF Pizza Theology. The presentation doesn’t stand very well on its own; it is best accompanied by a good explanation… which you don’t really have here. Feel free to ask me any questions about what I have to say. It is also somewhat similar to a talk I gave in a Bible study a while back. Also, for the bloggers out there, I was able to embed a powerpoint (or many other files actually) directly into the post using Docstoc.com (my profile there), you might want to check it out.
The Word: How the Bible Came About
The Canon and the Community of God
Text and Translation
(download: 4.9 MB)
I love to study origins of religions. I posted a section of my blog on Canonized scripture… feel free to take a look.
Have a great day and God bless you.
http://artofchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-words-never-cease.html
Thanks Alicia, I appreciate your thoughts on the issue. I would, however, take issue with some of the ideas in that post. While I agree that the canon is not required to be closed, it is functionally closed.
Canon is defined by the community of believers, and in that sense LDS folks have complete license to choose additional scripture. That does not mean that the Christian Church at large should buy into that scripture, not to it imply that that scripture is necessarily divine in any sense.
The point of canon being defined by community is that there is a certain level of accountability that comes along with that. When an addition to scripture is done by someone saying “this is directly from God, sorry I don’t have the originals, but I found them in the woods, they are divine,” I am not very impressed by any sort of legitimacy of those claims. We are just having to agree to whatever that one person says and they can’t be wrong because “it was from God.” But that just is not how the canon works.
Sure it could be possible for additional scriptures to be added to the Christian canon, but it is EXTREMELY unlikely. After the first few centuries, revelation through scripture was done. Fortunately we have revelation through nature and relationships, but they can always be compared to the scripture that was agreed upon by the community of faith… and nothing else.
thanks for this info. i am updating bible names for my blog. my source is Hitchcock’s Bible names Dictionary. can anyone give me other links. thanks