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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Biblical Christianity
Message-ID: <45@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 20-Sep-84 23:03:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.45
Posted: Thu Sep 20 23:03:32 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Sep-84 03:41:38 EDT
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 35

I'm going to stick my neck out and state my personal position on 
Christianity and the Bible.  I shall be very disappointed if I don't 
receive lots of flames from both sides.

First of all, the Bible simply is not essential to being a Christian.  There
were plenty of gentile Christians before any of them knew much about the
Jewish scriptures, and the New Testament simply didn't exist until some time
after the year 60 (if that early).  The only essential christian doctrines
are these:

    (1) All men are sinners.
    (2) Christ, who was the son of God, died for our sins.
    (3) We are all reborn to eternal life in his resurrection.

That's it.

Now, we as modern Christians do in fact have a New Testament, and believe
in the inspiration and relevance of the Old.  What then shall we do with
them?  First, it is patently obvious that the scriptures are not error-free.
For one thing, the Bible has come down to us in many versions; For another,
there are many parallel passages which do not agree in ANY version; an 
example is the geneologies of Jesus which are given in Matthew and Luke.
Much of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament is quite corrupt, to the point
of gibberish.

I refuse to subscribe to the notion that their is no Godly inspiration in
the scriptures.  I must, however, submit that the writers and copyists have
added a lot of their own rubbish and lost lots of the good material.  All
the evidence suggests that the human ear hears the divine voice imperfectly
at best.

So what good is the Bible, given these caveats?  To keep this article short,
I will postpone this for a later article.

Charley  Wingate    umcp-cs!mangoe