The Bible: An Introduction To The Bible

For many years, I have had this ideology that all the information inscribed in the Bible is factual. It was thought provoking to see that the Bible is composed of historically accurate information and stories. The Introduction to the Bible course has given me the opportunity to explore and broaden my perspective on the Catholic bible. I am challenging myself to see the bible from a historical and scientific view, but also with a view of my faith. The information that I have gathered from the course has caused me to question faith and facts. From the first day of the course, my attention was grabbed. The lesson from my first class dealt with the significance of biblical numbers and how they are symbolic. They are seldom used for counting.

When I read the bible, I would simply breeze by these numbers and see no importance in them. After hearing the lecture on creation, the questioning and skepticism began. Like a majority of Catholics, we have been taught that the book of Genesis describes creation. For many years, I was the same until I enrolled into the Introduction to Bible Course. After carefully reading the text, we observed that Genesis is a story. We were able to make such a decision by the way it is being told. I learned that the book of Genesis is a mythological analogy and the myths that capture a larger truth. It is a story that had no evidence to support the claim, unlike the theory formulated by scientists known as Evolution and the Big Bang theory which occurred because explosion of compressed matter and energy. Remains of the earliest humans have been discovered which date back to thousands of years ago known as Homo

It was arduous to accept that Adam and Eve never existed; there was no apple, no snake and no temptation. How is it even possible for a snake to speak? I learned that when studying the bible, one must be skeptical and be analytical. Before the accounts of creation, there was the Enuma Elish. This story is a Babylonian mythical interpretation of creation. This story deals with Marduk, leader of the good Gods and Goddesses, and Tiamant, leaders of the forces of evil, and this great battle. There was a great battle where the good Gods was victorious, but the evil force was still present in the creation. The Enuma Elish was an important account because it led to the Hebrews writing their story of creation. The story of the Enuma Elish is fiction, but it is interesting to learn about creation through another culture’s point of view. While Catholicism has ten acts of creation, the Hebrew has six days of creation. Up until this point, the only accounts of creation I was aware of were through Evolution and the book of