But the Bible wasn't written by God himself, the words of the events were written by your amanuenses but.. later it was interpreted by mere humans. IMO, many of the inconsistencies within the Bible are at the hands of those the interpreted the old text.

So with that.. should not the copies of the Bible that are published today be considered a human artifact?

There is a reason for the different version of the Bible.. because man literally couldn't properly interpret the word.

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GBGUY....i believe the Bible cover to cover.
If you profess to be a Christian, i can't understand how anyone can't believe it that way. If you throw out the old testament, then you throw out half of what God said.
God said we are made in "HIS" image. If you throw that out, i guess that's where you can allow other truths to be thrown out as well.
"Pick and choose" is what has put this world into the moral decline we have today.
We have thrown out what we don't want to believe or follow. Thiking that we KNOW better.

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Pack93z....the Bible is the inspired word of God.
You can say you don't believe it was written by God, but that is only an opinion.
The Bible has no contradictions in it.
We believe so much in history books, yet if you really look at them, they are books written by men at events in history. Even though they also have the slant that each person has. Civil war history might be slanred by the writer, if they are from the north or from the south. Yet we take them as "gospel truth".

Two people can see the same things, and come to different conclusions.
I believe the Bible is TRUE history, cover to cover.

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I believe the bible as well, but that doesn't mean I believe it is all "History." Much of it is "Prophecy."

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I am not challenging the word of God, not in the least. But now as always, yes I hold suspect the interpretations of those words. The original words were not written in English (Hebrew, Aramaic).. and yes in study one can see how human bias and view shaped the different versions of the Bible and the religions that spawned from there.



I really don't want this thread to turn into a debate upon the beliefs contained within the Bible, my previous point shapes directly at whether or not that Bible is or is not a human artifact as defined by Wade's post.



This is basically my point upon the different versions of the Bible (even the name of the book varies); we as humans have influenced the interpretations of the original happenings of the events. So can one say one version over the other is "Truth"?

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That's why I used the capital-T Truth rather than the small-t one that human's are capable of understanding.

By definition, God's Truth, being God's, is incapable of being understood completely by humans. If you want to say that the XYZ translation/interpretation is God's Truth reflected through the (partial) understanding of his amanuenses, maybe. But as soon as we put a label of "fiction" or "nonfiction" on it, we have converted it to a document created by humans.

And it is not that.

"Inspired by God" means more than "as told to and as interpreted by Paul and the Council of Nicea." Inspired means God put the writer's hands and the interpreter's minds in motion, pushing them toward Truth.

Now, of course, Paul and the Council of Nicea being human, they likely mis-wrote and mis-interpreted from time to time. And certainly those of us coming after to re-translate and re-read will continue to do so. That's what fallen humans invariably do.

Put it this way: if you want to label the printed Bible on my desk as "Truth misread through the fictionalization of human interpretation" (large Divine T, small human f), you'd be accurate. But if you label it as "a volume of Fiction serving as interpretation of God's truth" (large human F), you'd be wrong.

When it comes to the Bible, the typist's typographical error, the interpreter's misinterpretation, these are all the errors of a human amanuenses trying to hear the Author's voice "through a glass darkly." The errors of a terrier trying to listen to the sound made by rotation of the Milky Way.


That's why "believing what the Bible says" isn't enough. You have to believe the Bible recognizing that your belief about what the Bible says is but a terrier's interpretation of what the Bible says. You can't get to Heaven "obeying the Bible's instructions" because your obedience is like all other human works, flawed because it is mis-shaped by human intervention via human interpretation. You can only get to Heaven by having faith and trusting that He knows what is True and that He recognizes you can only see pieces of the Word that He sees in His entirety.

Interpretation is unavoidable -- that part some of my fellow fundamentalists do get wrong. But it's unavoidability doesn't make the Word a human creation. Mary didn't create Jesus. God created Jesus. Man didn't create the Bible. God did.

And God doesn't do Fiction. God only does Truth.

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The physical thing is a human artifact, yes. The paper, the ink, the nice silk ribbon, the cover...those are artificially formed by human beings. truth, small t.

The individual words, the language in which the words is expressed -- those, too are human artifacts. Again, small-t truth, whether it is English, German, Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic.

The organization of words into sentences, verses, books, etc. Now the Divine influence, the Divine inspiration, the Divine creation, starts to show. Now we see the Hand of God at work in the Word of God. Now, big-T Truth is at work.

Changing translations, changing interpretations, those are again human. You are correct. Back to small-t stuff.

But here's the thing. Without the Divine intervention, no translation or re-translation, no interpretation or re-interpretation, if it is done by human beings is capable of adding any significant amount of Truth. The human added value at work in translation or interpretation, the "fiction" or the "history" or the "prophecy" or the "poetry" (lower case letters all) is the equivalent of one of those little tiny flashlights people put on keyrings. And God's Truth, the stuff that organizes and holds together, all the words and the interpretations and the translations and the fiction and the history and the poetry etc etc used by humans, God's Truth -- the heart and essence of the capital-B Bible? Compared to that tiny flashlight, God's Truth is as bright as the Sun when viewed from Mercury.

Since libraries don't have a shelf for Truth, yours of course has to decide. But the reality is, it doesn't matter whether you put a label of fiction or a label of non-fiction on it. Neither one is a more (or less) accurate label than the other.

Labels are all human artifacts. They're all tiny little flashlights.

My guess (yet another tiny flashlight) is that God doesn't care which you choose.

He only cares whether you believe that fiction/non-fiction contains the essence of His Truth.

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True. Good point.
Much of it has yet to be. The Bible is the only book where what it says will happen has happened, so far. There are still more prophecies in it for the future.


I do understand that "man" has a way of screwing things up. Including in his trying to understand and interpret God's word. We are imperfect humans, and mess up every thing we touch.
The problem i have is where man denies that we are created in God's image, and throw out alot of what the Bible says because "we" think we KNOW better.

Even eye witness accounts can be different, and "history" as we know it can change. For example, up until the wreck of the Titanic was actually found and filmed, it was widely accepted in history books that the ship went down in one piece. And that was from people that were actually there. There were a few that said it broke up, but the majority said it didn't so that was accepted history.
Had the wreck never been found, it would have stayed that way in recorded history.

I guess what i'm trying to say is this: I put my trust in God, and believe HIS word. If somewhere along the line someone messed up and interpreted the Bible wrong, that will be on the interpreter's head.
I believe that Jesus was God in the flesh, and that he died for our sins, and that anyone can get salvation by accepting Him as saviour.
Faith. That's what i hang it all on. I know that is hard for some people to understand. But it's what i believe.

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That is the context in which I look at the question.. the book as we know and read, that physical thing is of man's creation.

I agree with the principle that it is neither fiction nor non-fiction as classification.

Hence why I would include the book in the physical sense in the reference category much like an encyclopedia. It is there to reference when needed.

Because we live in a world where you cannot be totally safe from debate on nearly all topics.. put the book in reference and eliminate the library from further involvement in debate over the underlying subject of belief and faith that will surely stir more emotions.

I haven't really been active for a number of years.. but I have taken time to study the history of the word of God and how the same events in history have broken down into so many different interpretations and variations of religions.

"Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" type analogy on a much grander scale.

A public venue like a library, IMO, should not partake in directing ones belief upon subject.. provide the materials to the reader to enable them to choose their path.

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