I have tried to read the bible before, simply out of curiosity. I started at the front and tried to read it cover to cover. It got really boring, really quick so needless to say I didn’t finish it.
I may be watching to much TV, but I think I’ve heard before that there was supposed to be some kind of war in heaven, and satan got sent down to hell…or something like that. Anyway, can someone point me to that part of the bible? I have tried search engines, but admittedly I suck at using them.
The eschatological (End Times) story is in the Book of Revelation, the very last book of the Bible (unless you’re an Ethiopian Copt). The just-after-Creation story of Satan’s rebellion and war is not Scriptural but legendary. I don’t know what are original sources regarding it (I have a strange hunch it’s in the Book of Enoch, which is not Biblical), but it’s masterfully retold in Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of the few epic poems worth reading through.
Basically a powerful angel by the name of Lucifer (supposedly the most powerful and beautiful of all the angels God created) led a rebellion against God. He and a handful of others were cast into “the depths,” which Christianity has taken to mean “Hell.”
By the New Testament, Lucifer is referred to as “Satan,” which means “the accuser.”
There’s quite a bit more to it than that, but that’s a basic outline of it.
I’m no Bilblical scholar, but I think that you will find most references to the “war in heaven” in Revelations. Michael is the Archangel credited with leading the 2/3 (that’s 666% ironically) of Heaven’s Angels that remained loyal to God. Interestingly enough I think that the Koran provides more detail on this aspect of Christian theology than does the Talmud or Old Testament (since Christians normally consider themselves closer to Judaism than Islam). I know that the book of Job refers to Satan in the OT, and that he pops up in Genesis tempting Eve. However, I’m not sure where else in the OT that Satan is even mentioned.
I will start to read Paradise Lost, but I admittedly have a very hard time following all of the thys and thous type of writing. Probablly why I had such a hard time with the bible.
Re: The Book of Enoch
What is this? Can you give me some insight on how I would find this? Is it a book in print that I could pick up at B&N? I am obviously not a religious type person, but this story (or at least what I have heard in movies and TV…which is probally B.S) has interested me for quite awhile.
Sounds like you’ve got hold of a King James Vesion Bible. There are lots of other translations avaible, many of 'em in “plain English” (or at least more contemporary than KJV). Although the KJV has some beautifl poetic turns in it, I like the New International Verson (NIV) for readability.
Do you know if the bible is actually intended to be read front to back, cover to cover? Someone (I think he was a preacher) told me that I messed up because I should have started somewhere about half way through the NT. That sounded odd to me, but I figured he would know.
Enoch is a bizarre piece of work written somewhere in the last few centuries B.C. and ascribed back to the patriarch Enoch, with a mix of predictive prophecy, prophetic fulminations against sinfulness, and the usual sort of apocalyptic stuff. The only place I’ve seen it available in normal publication mode is Dover Publishing’s The Lost Books of the Bible, which I’m not sure is still in print.
It was written over the course of several millennia. Some of the authors had no particular intend with regards to their writing in relationship to the other writings. Some of them wished that you should read their work instead of the other, or as a corrective to the other. In some cases, works authored by one author are interspersed with the works of another, even on an every-other-line basis, such that verses 6 and 8 of a given passage might have been written a couple hundred years after lines 5 and 7, and the interspersing was done without the knowledge or consent of either author another 200 years or so later.
The order of the books of the Old Testament is different between the Jewish and Christian versions, and the Catholic/Orthodox version includes some books not found in the Protestant version ( http://www.cresourcei.org/canonot.html ). The order was not arranged for the purpose of dictating the order of reading, but certain sections have a chronology that is easier to follow if they are read in sequence (e.g., the gospels, then Acts, then Romans).
The Bible isn’t a book. It is an anthology of many books. Each book needs to be read and interpreted correctly. Besides, the order the books are presented in (particularly the New Testament) is just a matter of what some human editor thought was best. Christian scholarship generally doesn’t hold that any specific ordering is by the will of God.
My understanding is that the NT ordering mainly came about by editors who put what they thought were the most important books first, and the rest are in order of declining importance. These human editors weren’t considered infallible. Thus if a Christian thinks Revalations is highly important, that’s OK. And after all, if all books were seen as equally important, an editor would still have to choose some ordering. If you are compiling an anthology, some book must some first.
You can find the book of Enoch here. Be warned, though, it’s not easy reading. And I don’t remember seeing the war in heaven there, but I could have missed it. It does have some fantastic imagery. Incidentally, I first read it because I saw that it is
[quoted in Jude.]
(http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jude%201:14-15;&version=31;) That opened me up to the great big world of “what if there’s truth OUTSIDE the Bible?” :eek:
As far as biblical redaction is concerned, it’s not even a case of people writing books and then arranging them. For instance, the currently prevalent theory is that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) was written by perhaps four different people, who are called the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Priestly, and the Deuteronomist. The labels come from the names they use for the Almighty (Yahweh or Elohim), and from the purpose of what they were trying to communicate. I took a class this last semester about how some people believe that Deuteronomy is actually the oldest (except for Job) book in the Bible, and should be considered separate from the other books of the Pentateuch (making it a Tetrateuch). Well, the class did cover a bit more than just that.
