Finally: the Bible is and remains a difficult book

In the last text of this website the maker feels the need to admit that the Bible is a difficult book and that it is not surprising that during the past twenty centuries people have often had a hard time with it. The maker also wants to let the readers know that while he was working on the website he often experienced doubts and that, now that the work is finished, he thinks it quite possible that he has misunderstood certain things.

The problem with the Bible is that it is not a continuous story consisting of 66 chapters which nicely follow each other. An ongoing story in which each chapter continues the narrative line of the chapter preceding it and is followed by a chapter which tells the reader how the story continues. You cannot read the Bible as one very thick book with 66 chapters. In reality the Bible is a collection of 66 books which stand alone. It is up to every individual Bible reader to find out for himself what binds the 66 books together and what the connection is between all the separate parts. None of the approximately 40 authors who, in the course of some 16 centuries, wrote one or more Bible-books started working with the intention of adding another Bible book to the ones which already existed. They all started writing because, in a given concrete situation, JHWH inspired them to do so and it is JHWH who has seen to it that each author’s work became an indispensable part of the big whole. It is obvious that the Bible-authors themselves very often did not fully understand the things that JHWH let them see and hear and told them to express in words. A good example of this can be found in the many Messianic prophecies which many authors of the Hebrew Scriptures wrote down. Much is said about these prophecies in the second chapter of this website. As we have explained in those pages the Messianic prophecies are all loose, often small, passages which in themselves do not tell the reader what they are about and which only years after the appearance and the death of the Messiah could be recognized as Messianic prophecies. No wonder that in Jesus’ lifetime absolutely nobody was able to line them all up and connect them to the Messiah who was present among them.

Also the books of the Greek Scriptures were written independently of each other. They were written in parts of the Roman Empire which were far apart: Israel, the west coast of present day Turkey (Ephesus), Babylon, Greece (Corinth) and Rome. And about 60 years went by between the appearance of the gospel by Matthew (about 40 A.D.) and the appearance of the book of Revelation by John (about 100 A.D.) This time element means, among other things, that none of the authors of the Greek Scriptures knew the book of Revelation. In short: the readers of the Greek Scriptures will have to do their own searching for the connection between the various books and they will have to construct their own narrative line.

All these things make the Bible a difficult book, but at the same time they demonstrate the great miracle behind the Bible: though written by 40 human authors who in a period of 1600 years worked independently of each, it does not contain any contradictions. All the stories and all the lessons of the very thick book harmoniously fit into the big whole and irrefutably demonstrate that the real author of the Bible remained the same during all those 1600 years: the creator of our universe: JHWH.