We continued our work reading from the text and discussing the bible. We discussed that the Catholic church does not believe that everything in the bible is true; the Church's position on the "accuracy" of the bible is that the bible is completely accurate in all matters relating to religious truth--which are matters we need to know for our salvation. That concept is known as "inerrancy." As to matters not critical to salvation, such as names, dates, or other historical information, the Church does not espouse that every such detail is accurate. We also discussed that we believe that the bible was | inspired
by God; he inspired and enlightened the authors to write what they did,
so the bible is the word of God. Finally, we discussed that the bible
was written in Hebrew and Greek, thus it needed to be translated to
English. The official English translation is the New American Bible.
Related to the fact that the bible was written in a language different
from our own is that it was written at a much different time in
history. Thus, we look to our priests, guided by the Holy Spirit, to
help us to interpret the bible in the context that it was written. |