Opening Up the Bible [antikvár]

INTRODUCING THE BIBLE A book that reaches the bestseller list usually contains suspense, adventure, love, and a whole range of human emotions, raw and subtle. The Bible — the world's bestseller of all time — has every one of these ingredients. In the Bible we read about men and women who are not fictional or idealized creations but flesh and blood people. Their feelings, their faults, their failures and successes ring true today. But their stories are not the main reason for the Bible's enormous popularity. It fascinates and draws readers because it deals with the deep-down questions to which everyone wants answers: Why are we on this earth? What is the purpose of life and what happens when it ends? How can we cope with the burden of guilt and anxiety? Is there a God? In fact the Bible never argues for the existence of a God. It begins with the plain fact of God and tells us what he is like and how he reacts to men and women and wants them to respond to him. Even a quick glance at the pages of a Bible makes it obvious that we are plunged into a world that is largely foreign to us. The culture is that of a bygone age and, for most readers, of faraway people. Yet millions find the Bible highly relevant today. Clothes and customs may vary but people are the same, deep down. They have always experienced the same human feelings of love, hate, jealousy, pity and greed. All share the mystery of life — are born, and go forward to certain death. All know a hunger — whether confessed or not — for something more than food, sex and creature comforts. All share the deep human urge to understand the meaning of life and to have their deepest needs satisfied. There is another difficulty to be overcome when we read the Bible. It is a book written in a language other than our own. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. We are seeing the original only through the skills and knowledge of translators, however expert. Although we speak of the Bible as one book, it is made up of sixty-six different books. These vary in length, in content and in the form in which they are written. For example, some are poetry, some narrative, others wise sayings or letters. Their authors include kings, courtiers, priests, shepherds and fishermen, as well as many whose identity can only be guessed. The writing of these separate books covers a time-span of very many centuries. Yet the Bible is a whole, not just a collection of separate parts. The books together make up a unity. The many different authors are all demonstrating in their own way what God has to say about his world and the people he has created. They show what God is like by the way in which he acts towards men and women and by making it clear that he wants to make a relationship with them of the closest possible kind. The sbcty-six books of the Bible are divided into two main groups, the Old Testament, which is made up of thirty-nine books, and the New Testament, which consists of twenty-seven. There are also a number of books known as Deuterocanonical, secondary to the