8 Things Your Pastor Will Never Tell You About the Bible 1) The Apostles of Jesus Seem to Have Known Nothing about a Virgin Birth The earliest mention of the birth of Jesus to be written is not the nativity stories in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but verses in Paul’s letter to the Romans. He wrote it after having met with Peter and others who had known in person not only Jesus but also his mother and brothers. Despite learning from them everything they could tell him about Jesus, Paul shows no sign of having heard of a virgin birth. Instead, he wrote that Jesus “was descended from David according to the flesh” and was declared to be the Son of God not through any special birth that Paul mentions but by his resurrection (Romans 1:3-4). 2) Jesus Said He Wanted to Offer Nothing to Gentiles(Someone who is not a Jew) Matthew 10:5 shows Jesus giving his disciples firm instructions to “go nowhere among the Gentiles.” 3) Jesus Tells Everyone Not to Think of Him as God in the First Three Gospels The Gospel of John shows Jesus saying he is divine — again and again. But nowhere in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, widely acknowledged to have been written before John and thus closer to the events they describe, does Jesus claim to be a deity. 4) The Resurrection Appearances in the Gospels Have Irreconcilable Differences The gospel accounts of the resurrection appearances of Jesus differ substantially, including where the risen Jesus is said to have appeared to his apostles. The gospels of Matthew and Mark place the appearances solely in Galilee. However, Luke, as well as the book of Acts, has Jesus appearing only in and around Jerusalem. 5) Jesus Was Against Public Prayer In Matthew 6:1, he warns against practicing piety before others, saying that those who do will “have no reward from your Father in heaven.” In Matthew 6:6, as a preface to the Lord’s Prayer, he says that to pray one should go into a room, close the door, and pray in secret. In fact, the King James Version of the Bible translates that as going into a closet to pray. 6) Some Books of the Bible Are Forgeries My seminary professors mentioned that some books of the Bible, notably some letters attributed to Paul, were probably written by people who lied about who they were to gain Paul’s authority for their own ideas. But they never put it that bluntly. They couldn’t even bring themselves to use the word “forgeries.” Instead, they used “pseudepigrapha,” a fancy word meaning wrongly attributed authorship that tells the truth while in its pompousness also disguises it. Especially suspect are the so-called pastoral epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. Because these made it into the Bible under Paul’s name, some find reasons to insist that they must be authentic. However, there is wide agreement among many Bible scholars that they differ so much from Paul’s vocabulary, style, and teachings that they could not be by him. 7) Parts of the Bible Were Intentionally Written to Disagree with Other Parts of the Bible Not only does the Bible have many contradictions, some of them are clearly intentional. An Old Testament example is found in Psalm 51. 8) Apostles Who Had Been Taught by Jesus Himself Insisted that Paul Was Wrong about the Gospel The Apostle Paul was a man under attack for his beliefs. In Galatians 1:6-9 he complains about those who thought that his gospel was wrong and were causing people to turn away from what he had taught them.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 16:50:24 +0000
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