The Bible isn't mentioned in the Bible.

@boobagins Said

That just proves Will's point even more. The fact that the doctrines can be corrected, reproof etc. If the bible is the teaching of the holy Lord which it claims,(i.e perfection), coming from the Lord directly, there is no need to correct or reproof.

@AmberB Said

While this is an interesting and original thought, I fail to see how it is proof of anything. After all, why would the authors of the books of the bible care that their works were to be grouped together later on? That they don't mention the bible in their own specific books says nothing to me more than that they were focused more on the message they themselves were trying to spread than on what would become of that message in the future generations.

@aquine Said

Do you realise that the Old Testament existed well before Christ came into the world? So that is more than half of the Holy Bible.

As for the New Testament, the following was adhered to, in order to ensure that it is all Truth.

[blah blah blah]

@buffalobill90 Said

But the Bible is considered to be a book of singular significance and primacy by the Church. It is the divinely inspired message of God, crystallised in sixty-six books.

If the Holy Bible was part of God's plan, and was meant to be seen as the 'right' collection of divinely inspired books, then surely it would have been mentioned in prophecy. It isn't mentioned anywhere in the scriptural tradition, though.

What I'm saying is that this implies the canonical texts were not chosen by the church as the authority because they bore the mark of divine inspiration or were prophesised to be the 'true' Biblical texts, they were just chosen for political reasons. Much of the Christian tradition is founded on a propaganda campaign.

Many modern Christians are quite ready to accept that the Church has never been as Jesus intended, and organised religion has gotten in the way of true spirituality. But not even the holy scripture is a solid foundation for the faith; it's just another product of ancient power-politics. Had things been any different, perhaps Christianity would be based around different texts altogether.

@AmberB Said

I understood what you were saying, but that the bible was never mentioned in the bible doesn't really support it. Why would the bible itself have been prophesized? It's the texts and the messages that they talk about that have significance, not that they later became a part of a collection.

As an example, when the book of job was being written what would the writer (or the original speaker) find more important to convey-- the message and events of the story, or that later on the story would be combined with many other stories as the words of god?

@buffalobill90 Said

If his words were truly inspired by God, while other words weren't, then perhaps somewhere among the 66 books it would be mentioned that God had only inspired these 66 books and the Church would eventually recognise these books and accordingly canonise them because they are the truth and others are not.

It's not like most of the books were authored by anyone in particular anyway; they were the oral traditions shared by many cultures, fables and mythologies which were eventually written down. Then they were hand-picked by the Church. All of these people didn't have the same idea about God, there ideas weren't coming from the same source. That's why they don't agree with each other, despite the efforts of the church to canonise and edit those scriptures which has the most consistent accounts.

@AmberB Said

But most of them actually do claim to be the truth and the words of god.

@buffalobill90 Said

Good for them. So do many of the non-canonical texts, and texts from other religious belief systems around the world. They can't all be right. But they can all be wrong.

@AmberB Said

So your theory is that if some of them are wrong, all of them must be? And it's supported by the fact that the texts don't mention the bible, or whatever collection they were later put together in?

@buffalobill90 Said

Nope. My argument is that if the 66 books of the Bible were divinely inspired and the others were not, so they were meant to be the ones that Christians took as the authority, then there would presumably be some mention of that in the Bible. Some prophecy or prediction, maybe even disclaimer in each book: "this is one of the sixt-six books of the Holy Bible" or something like that. But the authors knew nothing of it. They didn't know they would be part of some collection which would later be regarded as the highest scriptural authority by billions of people, they were just writing stories or documenting events. It was the Church's arbtitrary decisions that placed those particular texts at the highest authority, not divine inspiration.

@aquine Said



Always remember, it was written seven hundred years before Christ was born.

@AmberB Said

I understood what you were saying, but that the bible was never mentioned in the bible doesn't really support it. Why would the bible itself have been prophesized? It's the texts and the messages that they talk about that have significance, not that they later became a part of a collection.

As an example, when the book of job was being written what would the writer (or the original speaker) find more important to convey-- the message and events of the story, or that later on the story would be combined with many other stories as the words of god?

@jonnythan Said

It seems perfectly reasonable for me to expect that a complete, never-to-be-amended, absolutely-thorough Holy Book that represents THE Word of God - and all of the Word of God - would be mentioned at some point during its creation.

@AmberB Said

It wasn't created all at once though.