What is the message you get from the Bible?

Answer 1

Everyone gets a different message from The Bible, and sometimes this depends on what they are looking for. Some see inspiration from God, some even see prophecies from God.

Burton L. Mack (Who Wrote the New Testament) says one can ask any question of the Bible and get some kind of answer. If the first answer does not appear to be helpful, one can look for another answer to the same question, until the right answer appears. At first the study of a text may not seem to support a traditional Christian conviction, or the answer one hopes to find in the Bible, but with a little ingenuity, one can set up the comparison again with other emphases and make the answer come out right.

I read the Bible literally, so I get a literal message from the Bible. For me, the Book of Genesis is a compilation of ancient myths and legends. The Old Testament as a whole is a somewhat fanciful history of the Hebrew people, emphasising the importance and power of the southern kingdom of Judah, for which the Old Testament was written.

And the message I get from the New Testament is one of competing Christian sects, each labelling its Christian competitors as "false apostles", "false Christs" or even sarcastically, "super apostles". Rather than seeing Old Testament prophecies fulfilled, I see books written with the Old Testament already in mind.