The History of the Bible

First, a bit of biblical history: The earliest writings that made it into the New Testament (the epistles of Paul and others claiming to be Paul) were written as long ago as year 50. The first gospel written, Mark, is dated year 70. The oldest surviving copies (there are no originals left) of the 66 scrolls assembled by committee to be the official cannon of the Christian church go back only as far as the year 300.

This left plenty of time to repeatedly rewrite the originals any way copyist scribes wanted to, and they did. Regarding rewrites of the Old Testament, the time available for revisionism is huge. No copy of any Old Testament scroll is older than the second century B.C., yet Jewish scholarship says that the Torah was written between 1,446 and 1,406 B.C. That any part of the Bible resembles the original can only be taken on faith.

Nevertheless, the collection of ancient lore called "Bible" somehow persists as the most published and least read document ever to come off a printing press, making it classic literature.

Knowing that it cannot possibly be true history nor the inerrant word of God, scholars of the Bible and students of Unity look at the text for deeper meanings than appear on the surface. We go beyond the physical surface.

Meta means beyond. Physics means physical. Metaphysical interpretation of the Bible means looking deeper into the stories to find personal meaning.

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