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79-425: In the pejorative sense, dogma refers to enforced decisions, such as those of aggressive political interests or authorities. More generally, it is applied to some strong belief that its adherents are not willing to discuss rationally. This attitude is named as a dogmatic one, or dogmatism, and is often used to refer to matters related to religion, though this pejorative sense strays far from the formal sense in which it

158-641: A combined linguistic and historiographical approach, Hendel and Joosten date the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible (the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 and the Samson story of Judges 16 and 1 Samuel) to having been composed in the premonarchial early Iron Age ( c.  1200 BCE ). The Dead Sea Scrolls , discovered in the caves of Qumran in 1947, are copies that can be dated to between 250 BCE and 100 CE. They are

237-513: A pejorative, there remain LGBT individuals who are uncomfortable with having this term applied to them. The use of the racial slur nigger (specifically the - a variant ) by African Americans is often viewed as another act of reclamation, though much like the latter in the LGBT movement, there exists a vocal subset of people with Sub-Saharan African descent that object to the use of the word under any circumstances. Bible The Bible

316-469: A place like Alexandria, Egypt. Moreover, in the early centuries of the church, some locales had better scribes than others. Modern scholars have come to recognize that the scribes in Alexandria – which was a major intellectual center in the ancient world – were particularly scrupulous, even in these early centuries, and that there, in Alexandria, a very pure form of the text of the early Christian writings

395-408: A profound influence both on Western culture and history and on cultures around the globe. The study of it through biblical criticism has indirectly impacted culture and history as well. The Bible is currently translated or is being translated into about half of the world's languages. Some view biblical texts to be morally problematic, historically inaccurate, or corrupted, although others find it

474-558: A requirement for attendance, though membership may be required for some church activities. In the narrower sense of the church's official interpretation of divine revelation, theologians distinguish between defined and non-defined dogmas, the former being those set out by authoritative bodies such as the Roman Curia for the Catholic Church, the latter being those which are universally held but have not been officially defined,

553-408: A single concept, leaping from word to word in a phenomenon known as the euphemism treadmill , for example as in the successive pejoration of the terms bog-house , privy-house , latrine , water closet , toilet , bathroom , and restroom (US English). When a term begins as pejorative and eventually is adopted in a non-pejorative sense, this is called melioration or amelioration . One example

632-507: A small number of decrees promulgated by popes exercising papal infallibility (for examples, see Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary ) are considered as being a part of the Catholic Church's sacred body of doctrine. In the Jewish commentary tradition, dogma is a principle by which the Rabbanim can try the proofs of faith about the existence of God and truth; dogma is what

711-467: A special two-column form emphasizing their internal parallelism, which was found early in the study of Hebrew poetry. "Stichs" are the lines that make up a verse "the parts of which lie parallel as to form and content". Collectively, these three books are known as Sifrei Emet (an acronym of the titles in Hebrew, איוב, משלי, תהלים yields Emet אמ"ת, which is also the Hebrew for "truth"). Hebrew cantillation

790-485: A useful historical source for certain people and events or a source of moral and ethical teachings. The Bible neither calls for nor condemns slavery outright, but there are verses that address dealing with it, and these verses have been used to support it, although the Bible has also been used to support abolitionism . Some have written that supersessionism begins in the book of Hebrews where others locate its beginnings in

869-549: A variety of disparate cultures and backgrounds. British biblical scholar John K. Riches wrote: [T]he biblical texts were produced over a period in which the living conditions of the writers – political, cultural, economic, and ecological – varied enormously. There are texts which reflect a nomadic existence, texts from people with an established monarchy and Temple cult, texts from exile, texts born out of fierce oppression by foreign rulers, courtly texts, texts from wandering charismatic preachers, texts from those who give themselves

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948-603: A variety of hypotheses regarding when and how the Torah was composed , but there is a general consensus that it took its final form during the reign of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (probably 450–350 BCE), or perhaps in the early Hellenistic period (333–164 BCE). The Hebrew names of the books are derived from the first words in the respective texts. The Torah consists of the following five books: The first eleven chapters of Genesis provide accounts of

1027-449: Is a word or grammatical form expressing a negative or disrespectful connotation, a low opinion, or a lack of respect toward someone or something. It is also used to express criticism , hostility , or disregard. Sometimes, a term is regarded as pejorative in some social or ethnic groups but not in others or may be originally pejorative but later adopt a non-pejorative sense (or vice versa ) in some or all contexts. The word pejorative

1106-649: Is a collection of religious texts or scriptures which to a certain degree are held to be sacred in Christianity , Judaism , Samaritanism , Islam , the Baháʼí Faith , and other Abrahamic religions . The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally written in Hebrew , Aramaic , and Koine Greek . The texts include instructions, stories, poetry, prophecies, and other genres. The collection of materials that are accepted as part of

1185-452: Is a term in Islam that refers to conforming to the teachings of a particular person. Classical usage of the term differs between Sunni Islam and Shia Islam . In Sunni Islam, taqlid refers to the unjustified conformity to the teachings of a person without inquiring or thinking about said teachings, rather than the justified conformity of a layperson to the teaching of mujtahid (a person who

1264-460: Is also known as the "Five Books of Moses " or the Pentateuch , meaning "five scroll-cases". Traditionally these books were considered to have been dictated to Moses by God himself. Since the 17th century, scholars have viewed the original sources as being the product of multiple anonymous authors while also allowing the possibility that Moses first assembled the separate sources. There are

1343-416: Is any deviation between two texts. Textual critic Daniel B. Wallace explains that "Each deviation counts as one variant, regardless of how many MSS [manuscripts] attest to it." Hebrew scholar Emanuel Tov says the term is not evaluative; it is a recognition that the paths of development of different texts have separated. Medieval handwritten manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were considered extremely precise:

1422-564: Is applied to religious belief. The pejorative sense is not limited to theistic attitudes alone and is often used with respect to political or philosophical dogmas. The word dogma was adopted in the 17th century from Latin : dogma , derived from the Ancient Greek : δόγμα , romanized :  dogma , lit.   'opinion, belief, judgement' from the Ancient Greek : δοκεῖ , romanized :  dokeî , lit.   'it seems that...'. The plural

1501-704: Is based on the Latin : dogmata , though dogmas may be more commonly used in English. In Pyrrhonism , "dogma" refers to assent to a proposition about a non-evident matter. The main principle of Pyrrhonism is expressed by the word acatalepsia , which connotes the ability to withhold assent from doctrines regarding the truth of things in their own nature ; against every statement its contradiction may be advanced with equal justification. Consequently, Pyrrhonists withhold assent with regard to non-evident propositions, i.e., dogmas. Pyrrhonists argue that dogmatists, such as

1580-604: Is defined by what we love". Natural law is in the Wisdom literature, the Prophets, Romans 1, Acts 17, and the book of Amos (Amos 1:3–2:5), where nations other than Israel are held accountable for their ethical decisions even though they don't know the Hebrew god. Political theorist Michael Walzer finds politics in the Hebrew Bible in covenant, law, and prophecy, which constitute an early form of almost democratic political ethics. Key elements in biblical criminal justice begin with

1659-500: Is derived from Koinē Greek : τὰ βιβλία , romanized:  ta biblia , meaning "the books" (singular βιβλίον , biblion ). The word βιβλίον itself had the literal meaning of " scroll " and came to be used as the ordinary word for "book". It is the diminutive of βύβλος byblos , "Egyptian papyrus", possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician seaport Byblos (also known as Gebal) from whence Egyptian papyrus

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1738-491: Is derived from a Late Latin past participle stem of peiorare , meaning "to make worse", from peior "worse". In historical linguistics , the process of an inoffensive word becoming pejorative is a form of semantic drift known as pejoration . An example of pejoration is the shift in meaning of the word silly from meaning that a person was happy and fortunate to meaning that they are foolish and unsophisticated. The process of pejoration can repeat itself around

1817-527: Is necessarily true for rational thinking. In Jewish Kabbalah , a dogma is an archetype of the Pardes or Torah Nistar , the secrets of Bible. In the relation between "logical thinking" and "rational Kabbalah" the " Partzuf " is the means to identify "dogma". View or position ( Sanskrit : दृष्टि , romanized :  dṛṣṭi ; Pali : diṭṭhi ) is a central idea in Buddhism that corresponds with

1896-520: Is no surprise that different localities developed different kinds of textual tradition. That is to say, the manuscripts in Rome had many of the same errors, because they were for the most part "in-house" documents, copied from one another; they were not influenced much by manuscripts being copied in Palestine; and those in Palestine took on their own characteristics, which were not the same as those found in

1975-669: Is not until the Babylonian Talmud ( c.  550 BCE ) that a listing of the contents of these three divisions of scripture are found. The Tanakh was mainly written in Biblical Hebrew , with some small portions (Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12–26, Jeremiah 10:11, Daniel 2:4–7:28) written in Biblical Aramaic , a language which had become the lingua franca for much of the Semitic world. The Torah (תּוֹרָה)

2054-546: Is qualified for independent reasoning). In Shia Islam, taqlid refers to the general conformity of non- mujtahid to the teaching of mujtahid , without a negative connotation. The discrepancy corresponds to differing views on Shia views on the Imamate and Sunni imams . Taqlid can be seen as a form of dogma, as no particular scholar can always be correct, so their rulings should not be taken uncritically. Pejorative A pejorative word, phrase, slur , or derogatory term

2133-459: Is short for biblia sacra "holy book". It gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun ( biblia , gen. bibliae ) in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe. The Bible is not a single book; it is a collection of books whose complex development is not completely understood. The oldest books began as songs and stories orally transmitted from generation to generation. Scholars of

2212-554: Is taken from the masoretic text (called the Leningrad Codex ) which dates from 1008. The Hebrew Bible can therefore sometimes be referred to as the Masoretic Text. The Hebrew Bible is also known by the name Tanakh ( Hebrew : תנ"ך ‎). This reflects the threefold division of the Hebrew scriptures, Torah ("Teaching"), Nevi'im ("Prophets") and Ketuvim ("Writings") by using the first letters of each word. It

2291-525: Is the manner of chanting ritual readings as they are written and notated in the Masoretic Text of the Bible. Psalms, Job and Proverbs form a group with a "special system" of accenting used only in these three books. The five relatively short books of Song of Songs , Book of Ruth , the Book of Lamentations , Ecclesiastes , and Book of Esther are collectively known as the Hamesh Megillot . These are

2370-492: Is the shift in meaning of the word nice from meaning a person was foolish to meaning that a person is pleasant. When performed deliberately, it is described as reclamation or reappropriation . Examples of a word that has been reclaimed by portions of the community that it targets is queer , faggot and dyke which began being re-appropriated as a positive descriptor in the early 1990s by activist groups. However, due to its history and – in some regions – continued use as

2449-528: Is thought to have occurred before 68 during Nero's reign. Early Christians transported these writings around the Empire, translating them into Old Syriac , Coptic , Ethiopic , and Latin , and other languages. Bart Ehrman explains how these multiple texts later became grouped by scholars into categories: during the early centuries of the church, Christian texts were copied in whatever location they were written or taken to. Since texts were copied locally, it

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2528-823: The Hebrew Bible : the Septuagint , the Masoretic Text , and the Samaritan Pentateuch (which contains only the first five books). They are related but do not share the same paths of development. The Septuagint, or the LXX, is a translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and some related texts, into Koine Greek, and is believed to have been carried out by approximately seventy or seventy-two scribes and elders who were Hellenic Jews , begun in Alexandria in

2607-590: The Israelites and other nations, and conflicts among Israelites, specifically, struggles between believers in "the L ORD God" ( Yahweh ) and believers in foreign gods, and the criticism of unethical and unjust behaviour of Israelite elites and rulers; in which prophets played a crucial and leading role. It ends with the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel by the Neo-Assyrian Empire , followed by

2686-618: The Mediterranean (fourth century to the founding of the Principate , 27  BCE ), the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (70 CE), and the extension of Roman rule to parts of Scotland (84 CE). The books of the Bible were initially written and copied by hand on papyrus scrolls. No originals have survived. The age of the original composition of the texts is therefore difficult to determine and heavily debated. Using

2765-670: The Nevi'im ("prophets"), was canonized in the third century BCE. A third collection called the Ketuvim ("writings"), containing psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories, was canonized sometime between the second century BCE and the second century CE. These three collections were written mostly in Biblical Hebrew , with some parts in Aramaic , which together form the Hebrew Bible or "TaNaKh" (an abbreviation of "Torah", "Nevi'im", and "Ketuvim"). There are three major historical versions of

2844-550: The Stoics , Epicureans , and Peripatetics , have failed to demonstrate that their doctrines regarding non-evident matters are true. In Christianity, a dogma is a belief communicated by divine revelation and defined by the Church, The organization's formal religious positions may be taught to new members or simply communicated to those who choose to become members. It is rare for agreement with an organization's formal positions to be

2923-411: The creation (or ordering) of the world and the history of God's early relationship with humanity. The remaining thirty-nine chapters of Genesis provide an account of God's covenant with the biblical patriarchs Abraham , Isaac and Jacob (also called Israel ) and Jacob's children, the " Children of Israel ", especially Joseph . It tells of how God commanded Abraham to leave his family and home in

3002-578: The 17th century; its oldest existing copies date to c. 1100 CE. Samaritans include only the Pentateuch (Torah) in their biblical canon. They do not recognize divine authorship or inspiration in any other book in the Jewish Tanakh. A Samaritan Book of Joshua partly based upon the Tanakh's Book of Joshua exists, but Samaritans regard it as a non-canonical secular historical chronicle. In

3081-463: The Bible "often juxtaposes contradictory ideas, without explanation or apology". The Hebrew Bible contains assumptions about the nature of knowledge, belief, truth, interpretation, understanding and cognitive processes. Ethicist Michael V. Fox writes that the primary axiom of the book of Proverbs is that "the exercise of the human mind is the necessary and sufficient condition of right and successful behavior in all reaches of life". The Bible teaches

3160-404: The Bible by a particular religious tradition or community is called a biblical canon . Believers in the Bible generally consider it to be a product of divine inspiration , but the way they understand what that means and interpret the text varies. The religious texts were compiled by different religious communities into various official collections. The earliest contained the first five books of

3239-510: The Bible, called the Torah in Hebrew and the Pentateuch (meaning five books ) in Greek. The second-oldest part was a collection of narrative histories and prophecies (the Nevi'im ). The third collection (the Ketuvim ) contains psalms, proverbs, and narrative histories. " Tanakh " is an alternate term for the Hebrew Bible composed of the first letters of those three parts of the Hebrew scriptures:

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3318-778: The Bible. A number of biblical canons have since evolved. Christian biblical canons range from the 73 books of the Catholic Church canon, and the 66-book canon of most Protestant denominations, to the 81 books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church canon, among others. Judaism has long accepted a single authoritative text, whereas Christianity has never had an official version, instead having many different manuscript traditions. All biblical texts were treated with reverence and care by those that copied them, yet there are transmission errors, called variants, in all biblical manuscripts. A variant

3397-695: The Christian church was by Saint Irenaeus in his Demonstration of Apostolic Teaching , which provides a 'manual of essentials' constituting the 'body of truth'. For Catholicism and Eastern Christianity , the dogmata are contained in the Nicene Creed and the canon laws of two, three, seven, or twenty ecumenical councils (depending on whether one is Church of the East , Oriental Orthodox , Eastern Orthodox , or Roman Catholic ). These tenets are summarized by John of Damascus in his Exact Exposition of

3476-698: The Former Prophets ( Nevi'im Rishonim נביאים ראשונים , the narrative books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) and the Latter Prophets ( Nevi'im Aharonim נביאים אחרונים , the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the Twelve Minor Prophets ). The Nevi'im tell a story of the rise of the Hebrew monarchy and its division into two kingdoms, the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah , focusing on conflicts between

3555-573: The Galilean cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem, and in Babylonia (modern Iraq). Those living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in ancient Galilee ( c.  750 –950), made scribal copies of the Hebrew Bible texts without a standard text, such as the Babylonian tradition had, to work from. The canonical pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible (called Tiberian Hebrew) that they developed, and many of

3634-548: The Hebrew Bible was produced. During the rise of Christianity in the first century CE, new scriptures were written in Koine Greek. Christians eventually called these new scriptures the "New Testament" and began referring to the Septuagint as the "Old Testament". The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work. Most early Christian copyists were not trained scribes. Many copies of

3713-546: The Hebrew Bible was written with spaces between words to aid in reading. By the eighth century CE, the Masoretes added vowel signs. Levites or scribes maintained the texts, and some texts were always treated as more authoritative than others. Scribes preserved and changed the texts by changing the script and updating archaic forms while also making corrections. These Hebrew texts were copied with great care. Considered to be scriptures ( sacred , authoritative religious texts),

3792-638: The Orthodox Faith , which is the third book of his main work, titled The Fount of Knowledge . In this book he takes a dual approach in explaining each article of the faith: one, directed at Christians, where he uses quotes from the Bible and, occasionally, from works of other Church Fathers , and the second, directed both at members of non-Christian religions and at atheists , for whom he employs Aristotelian logic and dialectics . The decisions of fourteen later councils that Catholics hold as dogmatic and

3871-529: The Septuagint as the basis of the Old Testament . The early Church continued the Jewish tradition of writing and incorporating what it saw as inspired, authoritative religious books. The gospels , Pauline epistles , and other texts quickly coalesced into the New Testament . With estimated total sales of over five billion copies, the Bible is the best-selling publication of all time. It has had

3950-576: The Torah ("Teaching"), the Nevi'im ("Prophets"), and the Ketuvim ("Writings"). The Masoretic Text is the medieval version of the Tanakh, in Hebrew and Aramaic, that is considered the authoritative text of the Hebrew Bible by modern Rabbinic Judaism . The Septuagint is a Koine Greek translation of the Tanakh from the third and second centuries BC; it largely overlaps with the Hebrew Bible. Christianity began as an outgrowth of Second Temple Judaism , using

4029-665: The Western notion of dogma. In Buddhist thought, a view is not a simple, abstract collection of propositions, but a charged interpretation of experience which intensely shapes and affects thought, sensation, and action. Having the proper mental attitude toward views is therefore considered an integral part of the Buddhist path, as sometimes correct views need to be put into practice and incorrect views abandoned, while at other times all views are seen as obstacles to enlightenment. Taqlid ( Arabic : تَقْليد , romanized :  taqlīd )

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4108-536: The airs of sophisticated Hellenistic writers. It is a time-span which encompasses the compositions of Homer , Plato , Aristotle , Thucydides , Sophocles , Caesar , Cicero , and Catullus . It is a period which sees the rise and fall of the Assyrian empire (twelfth to seventh century) and of the Persian empire (sixth to fourth century), Alexander 's campaigns (336–326), the rise of Rome and its domination of

4187-505: The belief in God as the source of justice and the judge of all, including those administering justice on earth. Carmy and Schatz say the Bible "depicts the character of God, presents an account of creation, posits a metaphysics of divine providence and divine intervention, suggests a basis for morality, discusses many features of human nature, and frequently poses the notorious conundrum of how God can allow evil." The authoritative Hebrew Bible

4266-421: The books were compiled by different religious communities into various biblical canons (official collections of scriptures). The earliest compilation, containing the first five books of the Bible and called the Torah (meaning "law", "instruction", or "teaching") or Pentateuch ("five books"), was accepted as Jewish canon by the fifth century BCE. A second collection of narrative histories and prophesies, called

4345-470: The city of Ur , eventually to settle in the land of Canaan , and how the Children of Israel later moved to Egypt. The remaining four books of the Torah tell the story of Moses , who lived hundreds of years after the patriarchs. He leads the Children of Israel from slavery in ancient Egypt to the renewal of their covenant with God at Mount Sinai and their wanderings in the desert until a new generation

4424-594: The conquest of the Kingdom of Judah by the neo-Babylonian Empire and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem . The Former Prophets are the books Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. They contain narratives that begin immediately after the death of Moses with the divine appointment of Joshua as his successor, who then leads the people of Israel into the Promised Land , and end with the release from imprisonment of

4503-542: The culture of the fourth century Roman empire. The Bible has been used to support the death penalty , patriarchy , sexual intolerance , the violence of total war , and colonialism ; it has also been used to support charity , culture, healthcare and education . The term "Bible" can refer to the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Bible, which contains both the Old and New Testaments . The English word Bible

4582-603: The early Christian church translated its canon into Vulgar Latin (the common Latin spoken by ordinary people), a translation known as the Vulgate . Since then, Catholic Christians have held ecumenical councils to standardize their biblical canon. The Council of Trent (1545–63), held by the Catholic Church in response to the Protestant Reformation , authorized the Vulgate as its official Latin translation of

4661-466: The end of the Talmudic period ( c.  300 – c.  500 CE ), but the actual date is difficult to determine. In the sixth and seventh centuries, three Jewish communities contributed systems for writing the precise letter-text, with its vocalization and accentuation known as the mas'sora (from which we derive the term "masoretic"). These early Masoretic scholars were based primarily in

4740-535: The first century BCE. Fragments of the Septuagint were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls; portions of its text are also found on existing papyrus from Egypt dating to the second and first centuries BCE and to the first century CE. The Masoretes began developing what would become the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible in Rabbinic Judaism near

4819-547: The gospels and Paul's letters were made by individual Christians over a relatively short period of time very soon after the originals were written. There is evidence in the Synoptic Gospels, in the writings of the early church fathers , from Marcion , and in the Didache that Christian documents were in circulation before the end of the first century. Paul's letters were circulated during his lifetime, and his death

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4898-599: The last king of Judah . Treating Samuel and Kings as single books, they cover: The Latter Prophets are Isaiah , Jeremiah , Ezekiel and the Twelve Minor Prophets , counted as a single book. Ketuvim (in Biblical Hebrew : כְּתוּבִים , romanized:  Kəṯūḇīm "writings") is the third and final section of the Tanakh. The Ketuvim are believed to have been written under the inspiration of Ruach HaKodesh (the Holy Spirit) but with one level less authority than that of prophecy . In Masoretic manuscripts (and some printed editions), Psalms, Proverbs and Job are presented in

4977-406: The late third century BCE and completed by 132 BCE. Probably commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus , King of Egypt, it addressed the need of the primarily Greek-speaking Jews of the Graeco-Roman diaspora. Existing complete copies of the Septuagint date from the third to the fifth centuries CE, with fragments dating back to the second century BCE. Revision of its text began as far back as

5056-526: The latest books collected and designated as authoritative in the Jewish canon even though they were not complete until the second century CE. The books of Esther , Daniel , Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles share a distinctive style that no other Hebrew literary text, biblical or extra-biblical, shares. They were not written in the normal style of Hebrew of the post-exilic period. The authors of these books must have chosen to write in their own distinctive style for unknown reasons. The following list presents

5135-452: The most authoritative documents from which to copy other texts. Even so, David Carr asserts that Hebrew texts still contain some variants. The majority of all variants are accidental, such as spelling errors, but some changes were intentional. In the Hebrew text, "memory variants" are generally accidental differences evidenced by such things as the shift in word order found in 1 Chronicles 17:24 and 2 Samuel 10:9 and 13. Variants also include

5214-431: The nature of Christ as universal redeemer being an example. The term originated in late Greek philosophy legal usage, in which it meant a decree or command, and came to be used in the same sense in early Christian theology. Protestants to differing degrees are less formal about doctrine, and often rely on denomination-specific beliefs, but seldom refer to these beliefs as dogmata. The first unofficial institution of dogma in

5293-525: The nature of authority and the sharing of power, animals, trees and nature, money and economics, work, relationships, sorrow and despair and the nature of joy, among others. Philosopher and ethicist Jaco Gericke adds: "The meaning of good and evil, the nature of right and wrong, criteria for moral discernment, valid sources of morality, the origin and acquisition of moral beliefs, the ontological status of moral norms, moral authority, cultural pluralism, [as well as] axiological and aesthetic assumptions about

5372-443: The nature of valid arguments, the nature and power of language, and its relation to reality. According to Mittleman, the Bible provides patterns of moral reasoning that focus on conduct and character. In the biblical metaphysic, humans have free will, but it is a relative and restricted freedom. Beach says that Christian voluntarism points to the will as the core of the self, and that within human nature, "the core of who we are

5451-404: The nature of value and beauty. These are all implicit in the texts." However, discerning the themes of some biblical texts can be problematic. Much of the Bible is in narrative form and in general, biblical narrative refrains from any kind of direct instruction, and in some texts the author's intent is not easy to decipher. It is left to the reader to determine good and bad, right and wrong, and

5530-414: The notes they made, therefore differed from the Babylonian. These differences were resolved into a standard text called the Masoretic text in the ninth century. The oldest complete copy still in existence is the Leningrad Codex dating to c. 1000 CE. The Samaritan Pentateuch is a version of the Torah maintained by the Samaritan community since antiquity, which was rediscovered by European scholars in

5609-407: The oldest existing copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible of any length that are not fragments. The earliest manuscripts were probably written in paleo-Hebrew , a kind of cuneiform pictograph similar to other pictographs of the same period. The exile to Babylon most likely prompted the shift to square script (Aramaic) in the fifth to third centuries BCE. From the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls,

5688-427: The path to understanding and practice is rarely straightforward. God is sometimes portrayed as having a role in the plot, but more often there is little about God's reaction to events, and no mention at all of approval or disapproval of what the characters have done or failed to do. The writer makes no comment, and the reader is left to infer what they will. Jewish philosophers Shalom Carmy and David Schatz explain that

5767-419: The seventh century, the first codex form of the Hebrew Bible was produced. The codex is the forerunner of the modern book. Popularized by early Christians, it was made by folding a single sheet of papyrus in half, forming "pages". Assembling multiples of these folded pages together created a "book" that was more easily accessible and more portable than scrolls. In 1488, the first complete printed press version of

5846-592: The substitution of lexical equivalents, semantic and grammar differences, and larger scale shifts in order, with some major revisions of the Masoretic texts that must have been intentional. Intentional changes in New Testament texts were made to improve grammar, eliminate discrepancies, harmonize parallel passages, combine and simplify multiple variant readings into one, and for theological reasons. Bruce K. Waltke observes that one variant for every ten words

5925-418: The twenty-first century are only in the beginning stages of exploring "the interface between writing, performance, memorization, and the aural dimension" of the texts. Current indications are that writing and orality were not separate so much as ancient writing was learned in a context of communal oral performance. The Bible was written and compiled by many people , who many scholars say are mostly unknown, from

6004-597: Was exported to Greece. The Greek ta biblia ("the books") was "an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books". The biblical scholar F. F. Bruce notes that John Chrysostom appears to be the first writer (in his Homilies on Matthew , delivered between 386 and 388 CE) to use the Greek phrase ta biblia ("the books") to describe both the Old and New Testaments together. Latin biblia sacra "holy books" translates Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια ( tà biblía tà hágia , "the holy books"). Medieval Latin biblia

6083-686: Was noted in the recent critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, leaving 90% of the Hebrew text without variation. The fourth edition of the United Bible Society's Greek New Testament notes variants affecting about 500 out of 6900 words, or about 7% of the text. The narratives, laws, wisdom sayings, parables, and unique genres of the Bible provide opportunity for discussion on most topics of concern to human beings: The role of women, sex, children, marriage, neighbours, friends,

6162-594: Was preserved, decade after decade, by dedicated and relatively skilled Christian scribes. These differing histories produced what modern scholars refer to as recognizable "text types". The four most commonly recognized are Alexandrian , Western , Caesarean , and Byzantine . The list of books included in the Catholic Bible was established as canon by the Council of Rome in 382, followed by those of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397. Between 385 and 405 CE,

6241-412: Was ready to enter the land of Canaan. The Torah ends with the death of Moses. The commandments in the Torah provide the basis for Jewish religious law . Tradition states that there are 613 commandments ( taryag mitzvot ). Nevi'im ( Hebrew : נְבִיאִים , romanized :  Nəḇī'īm , "Prophets") is the second main division of the Tanakh, between the Torah and Ketuvim. It contains two sub-groups,

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