Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The School of Prayer, ( part 1)

It’s not an “argument” for my view. It’s simply a different apologetic. It’s the same apologetic held by the first followers of Jesus, those literally closest to Him when He was here on the earth. And it has zero to do with my grandfather. My grandfather was a staunch Church of Christ member, and his theology and beliefs were very different from mine.

When Paul and others left Judea and began telling Gentiles about Jesus, they became enamored with the life and the message of Jesus. And when they became enamored with this one particular Jew, they became enamored with the sacred text of the Jews. Before Jesus came along, this was not the case.

The Old Testament didn’t become the first part of the Christian Bible, first. What we consider to be the Old Testament in Christianity today is actually the Hebrew Bible, what they called the Law and the Prophets. Early Jesus followers took the Hebrew Bible and found patterns in the laws, narratives, and psalms of the Hebrew Bible that acted as allegories and metaphors that pointed to the Messiah, who they recognized and believed to be Jesus.

And they moved to adopt the Hebrew Scripture as part of their own. And the stage was set for the later inclusion of the Jewish Scripture with the New Testament documents to create ‘the Bible’ as we know it today. The Bible itself exists as we know it today because of the resurrection of Jesus. Had Jesus not risen from the dead, the New Testament documents would have never been written, and ‘the Bible’ as we know it would not even exist.

The ancient Hebrew text would exist by itself.

None of this has anything to do with the Azusa Street Revival, or the Anabaptists, or the Charismatic Movement, or the Restoration Movement.