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THE GREATEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN, AGAIN AND AGAIN.

THE GREATEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN, AGAIN AND AGAIN. The Hellenistic culture of the Jews read the Torah.  It was for the conservatives and the Sadducees. The Septuagint is the Greek version of the Torah.   The Hebrew Bible’s Greek translation is the  Septuagint because 70 or 72 Jewish scholars took part in the translation process.  Aramaic is a dialect of Hebrew.  The Essenes were the pure ones; they lived in the desert.  The Jews were divided by which version they followed.  The New Testament was written in the seventy years following the death and resurrection of Jesus.  The Christians used the Septuagint as their Old Testament.  Note:  Every translation loses and gains some of its nuances each time.  Translations make differences in meaning. At first, the new Testament writings were scattered. Later, they were codified. From 100 Ad to 300 AD, the Roman Emperors tried to kill all Christians.  The First Punic War between Carthage and the Romans was a decisive naval victory against the Carthaginians at the Aegate Islands. The win gave Rome complete control of Sicily and Corsica. The end of the First Punic War saw the beginning of the Roman expansion beyond the Italian peninsula. In one of the most decisive battles in history, a large Roman army under Valens, the Roman emperor of the East, is defeated by the Visigoths at the Battle of Adrianople in present-day Turkey. Two-thirds of the Roman army, including Emperor Valens himself, were overrun and slaughtered by the mounted barbarians. In 330 Ad, Constantine moved the capital to Constanaple (formally, Istanbul).  In 1452 (after 1,100 years), the Romans were defeated by the forces of Islam. During the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (AD 306–337), Christianity began to transition to the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Constantine ruled the Roman Empire as the sole emperor for much of his reign.  It was now the Jew’s time to be persecuted. Late in the fifth century, the Bible went from Imperial sponsorship to Royal Scripture. In the 1500s, moveable type showed up, and the wide distribution of the Bible happened.   The new testament included the gentiles twenty years after Jesus was gone.  They didn’t need to be circumcised nor follow the 613 commands of the Torah.  The New Testament writings emerged from community experiences generated from assemblies of the faithful.  Perspectives are all over the place; some are self-evident, while others are self-validating.  The poor and the oppressed are usually the core audience.  What to leave in and what to leave out is decided along the way.  Preaching a point of view is a slippery slope.    The Jews were diverse and divided.  The scattered Jews mostly spoke Greek. Gabriel allegedly shows up to Mohamed and recites a monologue, and Islam is born. The Christians used the Septuagint as their Old Testament.  In the New Testament, the Word was conveyed orally.  Then the letters of Paul were added.  The message that Jesus is the Lord/God was the overriding good news. The first Gospel is Mark (not Matthew), written around 70. Revelation is not last, but almost in the middle, registered in the 90s. In one fell swoop, Jesus had gone from an outcast, a failed messiah,  hung on a cross,  to the Son of God.  Gentiles now had salvation, also. Biblical inerrancy is an innovation of the last few centuries, becoming widespread in American Protestantism, beginning only a hundred years ago. It is affirmed primarily on “independent” Protestant churches, not part of “mainline” Protestant denominations. Catholics have never proclaimed the inerrancy or infallibility of the Bible, The books of the canon of the New Testament were written before 120 AD. For the Orthodox, the recognition of these writings as authoritative was formalized in the Second Council of Trullan of 692. Rabbinic Judaism recognizes the twenty-four books of the Masoretic Text, commonly called the Tanakh (Hebrew) or Hebrew Bible.[7] Evidence suggests that the process of canonization occurred between 200 BC and 200 AD, and a favored position is that the Torah has canonized c. 400 BC, the Prophets c. 200 BC, and the Writings c. 100 AD[8] Whereas the priestly Sadducees taught that the written Torah was the only source of revelation, the Pharisees admitted the principle of evolution in the law: humans must use their reason to interpret the Torah and apply it to contemporary problems. The Jerusalem Talmud, also known as the Palestinian Talmud or Talmud de-Eretz Yisrael (Talmud of the Land of Israel), is a Rabbinic note on the second-century Jewish oral tradition as the Mishnah.   The Talmud is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (halakha) and Jewish theology.[1][2] Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the centerpiece of Jewish cultural life. It was foundational to all Jewish thought and aspirations, serving as “the guide for the daily life” of Jews. Gnostics considered the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the supreme divinity in the form of mystical or esoteric insight. Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance but with illusion and enlightenment; Gnosticism says humans are divine souls trapped in the ordinary physical (or material) world. They say that an imperfect spirit made the world. The inferior nature is thought to be the same as the God of Abraham. Some Gnostic groups saw Jesus as sent by the supreme being to bring gnosis to the Earth. The Zealots were a political movement in 1st-century Second Temple Judaism that sought to incite the people of Judea Province to rebel against the Roman Empire and expel it from the Holy Land by force of arms during the First Jewish–Roman War (66–70). Jerusalem has been destroyed twice during its long history, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times. Egypt and Syria started aesthetic monasteries around 400 AD.  In the West, everyday life in a community mode monasteries was started up.  For a thousand years, they churned out biblical and secular manuscripts.  The monostatic life of work and prayer did the job of God.  Concurrently, the Jews were marginalized in the West.  They couldn’t own land, and they were rebuked and scorned,
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