What are books?

[Jim Spencer]

Many people today worship the Bible, calling it the "Word"---as if it came directly from God. But if one studies the history of the Bible----they will see that it is a collection of different manuscripts from different historical times and countries. It was not until over 300 years after Jesus death, that an evil Roman leader, Constantine---commissioned several hundred bishops to get together to sift through the framents of material----to come up with a book. These ancient bishops, ideologically motivated, discarded many writings such as the Apocrapha, and also determined where each book was to be located in their new work. That's why Revelations ended up at the back of the book. This document, named as the Bible---was to be hand scribed for another 400 years before Guttenburg invented the printing press. Since then, there have been dozens of translations of the Bible. That's why spiritual seekers need to read books at face value and use their internal Spirit of Truth which will match their personal experience-----for them to arrive at their understanding of "truth". The more one understands "Universal Truth", the more one will be able to see truth wherever it appear and in whoever it appears.

"Some day a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. You may preach a religion about Jesus, but, perforce, you must live the religion of Jesus. In the enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ. The Apostle Paul later on transformed this new gospel into Christianity, a religion embodying his own theologic views and portraying his own personal experience with the Jesus of the Damascus road. The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of the Jesus of Galilee; Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul. Almost the whole of the New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul’s religious experience and to a portrayal of his personal religious convictions. The only notable exceptions to this statement, aside from certain parts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are the Book of Hebrews and the Epistle of James. Even Peter, in his writing, only once reverted to the personal religious life of his Master. The New Testament is a superb Christian document, but it is only meagerly Jesusonian.
   At the time of the writing of the New Testament, the authors not only most profoundly believed in the divinity of the risen Christ, but they also devotedly and sincerely believed in his immediate return to earth to consummate the heavenly kingdom. This strong faith in the Lord’s immediate return had much to do with the tendency to omit from the record those references which portrayed the purely human experiences and attributes of the Master. The whole Christian movement tended away from the human picture of Jesus of Nazareth toward the exaltation of the risen Christ, the glorified and soon-returning Lord Jesus Christ."