The Gospels In The New Testament

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The Gospels in the New Testament bring up the question, is the Bible is true or not. When reading the Gospels, we wonder what is true and what is just interpretation. Many theories cause readers to question the legitimacy of the Bible. An article, How is the Bible true? by Luke Timothy Johnson, also discusses the big question about the truth behind the Bible. The Bible is not true due to translation factors, the synoptic problem, and where readers look for truth. The New Testament was originally written in Greek. Therefore, when translators sat down to translate it into English, they had to interpret what the authors were trying to say. This leads to some changes from what the original story was, to what the translators decided it was. Also,…show more content…
People first look for truth in the Bible in the past. They think that history is truth. Johnson is saying this is incorrect. The Bible is not a history book and it isn’t full of historical facts. Johnson says, “One can have the truth about Jesus, but only at the expense of the truth of the Gospels”(Johnson, 1). This means readers can find truth by creating a picture by dissecting the Bible and comparing every little thing in it. When they do that, the New Testament doesn’t have Gospels anymore; they are something different. People also look for the truth in the future. They try to use the Bible to predict the future and when their prediction doesn’t happen, they say it is going to happen later. The problem is that the Bible wasn’t written to predict the future. Johnson’s proposal to readers is to imagine the world that the Bible tries to create. They need to put their own ideas and interpretations aside and focus on what Jesus did. Once they do t his, they then can decide whether or not the Bible is true. This idea is like education. Everyone buys into the idea that everyone needs to go to school and get an education. Believing the Bible is the same thing according to Johnson. He then asks three questions in his article: Does the Bible imagine a true world?, do we read the Bible truly?, and do we act truly as readers of the

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